For the love of Type and Design

Or how I got into design from gaming.

I wrote this piece in hindsight and in one go, so forgive me if ever I have been vague in some places. Don’t hesitate to point them out! And thanks for reading. Also posted on my blog. Image from PureStrategic (used it since it’s just awesome :D)

I have a confession.

I’m a late bloomer.

To be specific: I am a late bloomer when it comes to design and type.

To be honest, I never knew that I had a passion for both design and type from since the beginning of my sentient life, but somehow it kept on tugging me and egging me for the past few years, ever since I got into my past job in game design. I was so focused on both metric and feedback that I didn’t realize it. And for the duration of my stay in that company, little by little I learned design interaction without me knowing it– until an article on the net I read pointed it out to me.

Game Design can also be UX

In my year in designing and planning out systems for people to send out gifts and to rack up that revenge board (in a certain facebook game), the zen of UX was implanted in me. I studied hard enough for me to understand where to position buttons. What’s the most comfortable amount of text to read on. And by working with a fellow writer, I learned that the way you select your words in a 140-character text can be the difference between acquisition and churn. I learned all that, and applied it to my job. And then the career switch happened: from a Game Designer I became a Quality Specialist for an Australian design studio.

The first few months of working in the studio was pretty much the same for all QA: test the site’s functionality, and then report to them for any problems you may encounter. This went on for some time, and then a new question was suddenly asked from me by one of the project managers: was there anything you found irritating in the template while using it? Was there anything you find illegible? These were kind of unexpected since it was the first time that this was asked from me. And so, after giving it some thought, I went through the template again and took note of whatever I found. I compiled it all in a single email and sent it their way.

At first, I didn’t know whether it helped them or not; there wasn’t anything specific that the managers told me, except that it helped them. I was a little skeptical at first whether if my feedback really was that insightful or not– until another request came in for the next project.

The things I learned from designing interfaces for games got useful in my tests for these new websites, for which I noticed that they started going through the trend of being true web apps and becoming responsive & device-agnostic. More so was the need for streamlining experiences for the user when they do interact with the application; most of them are your average user, who do not spend as much time on the internet and websites as I do. My experiences in tracking these problems in game design got me into looking for the same problems and flaws that can potentially churn the average user. And over the course of 2-3 years doing this, I have begun feeling that I have developed some kind of a “design sense” that instantly tells me that there’s something wrong with this experience or there’s something frustrating in what I am doing whenever I come across new systems. And sometimes, if not most of the time, I get it right.

Type is your Type.

I’ve never bothered with typography before. I usually delegate this decision of selecting typefaces to my word processor, or even decide on the default of things. The ever-so-ubiquitous Arial, Calibri, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman– and, yes– Monotype Corsiva has always been on my side of document processing and reports generating for so many years now. BUT you see, as I became acclimated and introduced more and more into beautiful and elegant design by our studio designers did I finally open the door to a realm where crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s is not enough: the way you cross it and the way you dot it can deliver more than just the content of the message that it’s written for. The way a letter is shaped, the thickness of the baseline, the serifs (or even the way it is not drawn) can change the mood from being refined to taste to somethinginformal. This, in combination to your spacing, to your typesetting, and to the message your text delivers, can either give the best impact or become totally ignored by your reader. And you, as the designer (or me, as the QA guy) have control over that. That kind of end-user response for reading type itself is what you have control over. And that, I believe, is what makes typography wonderful.

And now, towards the future

Now that I’ve come to this realization, I will try my hand into making more and designing more– as I’ve said above I’ve developed this kind of sixth sense for design when I was bombarded with a lot of designs up until now. There’s no way for me to develop more on design but by actually doing it.

And so, from here on, I will begin drawing a single line.

And from that line, a shape.

And from that shape, an object.

And from that object, a design.