Ismael Obregon

Gauge speaker – Ismael Obregon

Language is one of the most important ways of communication. The more language you know, the more people you can communicate with around the world. Designers dealing with visual language. Through images we can communicate with anyone maybe not verbally but through visual language.

In his presentation, he presented two pieces of motion graphic work he has done. I personally would like to learn more about print works and the design progress involved. He didn't expanded a lot on the design process which I'm more interested in knowing and undertanding specially from a person in the field like him. The rest of time he left it for Q&A.

One of the suggestion he gave to designers who want start a studio is to learn the rules of business. That is learn how to operate a business and maintain it. To start a business is much easy than keep it running and alive. Ismael said that everyone who came to his studio is very creative and if not he will make them become creative. I think this is a brilliant perspective.

Ismael explained his aspects about clients. In his opinion, clients always know what they need and designer should listen to them and understand what they need. clients are always right. I can not agree with this idea because I think clients do know what they want, but they do not know how to communicate with visual language. I agree that as a designer we should listen to the clients and understand their needs more. But also we should decide how to use the language we know to communicate with the clients and meet their needs.

Narratives of Space and Time

It is difficult to design a chart combined both space and time. Because it requires a more complicated combination of different kinds of information.

Typography matters. The redesigned New York to New Haven train schedule on page 105 has same information and is as the same size as the previous schedule, but is much more readable, because it uses a different typeface.

I think the graphical bus schedule on page 109 tells more information than the bus schedules we usually have. It shows both the departure time(not accurate) and frequency of the bus, and the typographical schedules we usually have show the accurate departure time but can not show the frequency directly.

But the schedule on p109 seems like deal with a bus which only has 3 stops, and normally a bus has more than 10 stops. A graphical bus schedule like this will be difficult to indicate the arrival time at each bus stop.

To have a photograph route map might be good for this bus schedule, but it is missing a lot detail information, like the name of roads, which will confuse the passengers who are not familiar with this area.