Author: Zijun

This week, I visited the Gordon Parks virtual exhibition, the Atmosphere of Crime. The Atmosphere of Crime is a book that was published in 1957 by Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks and a reporter, Robert Wallace traveled around in the US using his angle of perspective to capture crimes and trying to discover what is crime.

The first piece of artwork that impressed me the most is “Crime Suspect with Gun.” In this photo, there is a silhouette of a person holding a gun walking toward the camera against the light source. The reason I am so impressed by this piece is because of the unknown situation of this photo. At first glance, I was thinking this might be a man holding a gun and he might hurt someone. However, I realized this is a stereotype. It might be a woman holding a gun and trying to protect her kids. Instead of showing the criminals in a clear way, he chose to only show the silhouette, and this approach really impressed me because we never know who is the criminal by just looking at their color, outfit and action. 

The second piece that I would like to talk about is the “Drug Search.” In this photo, we can see that there is a black man wearing a suit and a hat with his hands raised, and he was frisked by someone. In this piece, Parks still didn’t capture the whole face of the person, however, we can clearly see the skin color of the man. We knew the police were searching for drugs from this man by reading the title of the photo. Even though we knew the police were searching for drugs, we don’t know the result of the searching. In fact, we do not even know why he was frisked. We don’t know if the police have evidence or if the police were judging his skin color.

The third piece that interested me the most is “Raiding Detectives.” Unlike the two photos that I discussed above, this photo is clear enough to see the main characters. By reading the title, we know that these two men are detectives. We can see there were two detectives in suits in a lobby of a building, and they were trying to break the door, one of them holding something in his hand, likely a gun. I am assuming there might be a crime scene behind the door. The interesting thing is they don’t look nervous, one of them was smiling while kicking the door. 

The virtual trip to Gordon Parks exhibition is a meaningful experience to me. Although there are populations still facing these issues, more and more people accept the diversity in race and culture. I believe the Gordon Parks’ contribution is meaningful and the works he done helped us to make a big step to stop stereotype and discrimination.

The app that I chose to test today is Adobe XD. Adobe XD is a vector based user experience design tool developed by Adobe Inc. As the semester is coming to the end, we are required to build wireframes, and we also started exploring prototyping in my web design and ux/ui class. Adobe XD and Figma are the most famous tools for prototyping web and mobile projects. Since I’ve been using Adobe applications for most of my academic projects, I chose to use Adobe XD to explore the prototyping process.

Once I open Adobe XD, I will need to choose a file size. The sizes XD provided are the most common devices’ screen size, and I can also customize the size of my project. In the design panel, the navigation is neat and the functions are similar to other adobe applications which makes adobe users adapt to the XD quickly. The repeat grid feature is one of the most convenient features in this application, it allows users to create repeated items and users have the ability to adjust the distance between each item. This feature is best for creating a gallery or list in a website or mobile application. Once the designer finished one page of the website/application, the designer can switch to the artboard tool and create another artboard next to the previous one then the designer can start work on the next page of the project. Once the designer finishes with the design or wireframe of the project, he/she can switch to the prototype panel. In the prototype panel, XD allows users to create interaction between the artboards. For instance, if the designer created a sign up interface, he/she could click the button that he/she created, there will be a blue frame and an arrow around the button, he/she will have to drag the arrow to the design that is followed by the sign up button. Now, the designer can view this action by clicking the play button on the top-right corner. Here is a demo that I created for my ui/ux project.

Today I attended the Adobe Max networking event. This event is basically introducing what’s new about the Adobe applications. We all had struggled in different levels of difficulty because of the pandemic. Most of us have to stay home to keep safe from the virus. We had a hard time adapting to this whole virtual thing, including virtual learning, meeting and even virtual dating. Now, Adobe is developing their web platform to encourage more and more users to express their ideas and thoughts. For example, now we can access Adobe Acrobat on a web browser without installing the application on our device. Another exciting update is that users can comment on the file and chat in the file live which means the user does not need to export the file and send it to the team or client to get feedback. This is really a good feature because once this feature becomes popular, it will be more convenient for the creative team to communicate and collaborate. Another major change I noticed is the adobe library, which is a feature that I also use a lot. This feature allows users to put artwork into the library and once the artwork is uploaded into the library, the user can use this artwork in any adobe application without going through the old process. 

It’s very exciting to see so many new features in adobe applications. I could see they are trying to develop a better collaboration experience for creative workers. The step that they are making is really opening up more possibilities in the industry.

The topic for this week is really interesting to me. The first time that I learned about citation was in high school English class. At that time, I was only 15 years old and I just immigrated here. I didn’t know why I had to cite the article and images but I did it because I want to pass the class. Now, I had a couple years of experience studying in the design field and I started to get why we need to cite the artist/author. After reading the articles, I am more convinced that crediting the author/artist is necessary.

In the past, when I used images online no matter if they are from free stock images or google, I will just use them. Especially a lot of free stock images that do not require attribution. Now, I am very careful when looking for images. I always check if they require attribution before I download the images. Sometimes I will also save the attribution quote in case my instructor wants me to cite the image. Before I cite the articles and images, I always search for the best way to cite them, and I will also use a citation generator to create the citation. 

In the case of McCurry, I think it is his freedom to edit his artwork as long as the photograph is not used for journalism articles. Nowaday, even people who do not study design know the basics of editing photos because they want to show the beauty of the world. A lot of social influencers used photoshop or instagram filters before they post the image. If the photos are for journalism purposes, then I think the photojournalist should not add things or subtract things in the images in order to make sure everybody can see the truth.

In the Hope Poster Study case, I think the photographer should be credited because even though the Hope Poster is an appropriation art, the ordinary piece is still an Obama photo that was taken by the photographer. Even though the artist has his own unique style, this famous piece was still built from the original photograph.

After reading the articles from this week’s assignment, I think it’s important to follow design ethics because as a designer, I should express my ideas and thoughts in an appropriate way. During the design process, I should be careful about collecting resources and respect other’s works.

This week’s reading “Design Business and Ethics” by AIGA is very informative. This reading covered a lot of issues, principles and practices to adapt as a professional designer.

At my internship at Faculty Commons, I was told in the beginning of the training program that we should not use outside sources that we don’t have licensed to use. When we create deliverables for the project, we always make sure that we have the correct logo. For instance, I was assigned to create two flyers recently, and I needed to place three different logos at the bottom.  One of the logos was too dark which did not work well with the background. The other two logos have both black and white versions, However, I knew that I could not change the color of the logo because it is illegal. At first, I contacted my team and my client, I was informed that they have a red color logo which might work well with the background. Once I placed the red logo in the flyer, I realized the red logo was too strong compared to the other two. Meanwhile, my supervisor suggested adding a white color bar at the bottom as a container for the logos. This idea worked well and the clients were very happy with the solution.