"Hold the elevator!"

Go to a conference on human factors or human-computer interaction, and I bet you'll find that the most common elevator topic is the design of the button panel in the conference hotel's elevators.

This post has been moved to Done Bright! The Luminanze Blog

What I learned about art shows two days later

If the art is good, people like it anyhow. Even if the differently colored mats make the show as a whole less coherent.

After church this morning, several people raved about my work and asked me how I did the digital manipulation. (All of my images but one are manipulated in some way, using a combination of Photoshop filters and layers, with transparency and blending mode set to get the look I wanted.) One woman ordered a larger print of one of my images.

This does not invalidate what I learned on Friday, of course... but it helps to put it into perspective.

Here's the notice about the show. (The image in the lower right is mine.)

What I learned about art shows today

Went to the church at lunchtime today to hang some photographs. The church is about to start a remodeling project, in preparation for which the Fine Arts Committee did not schedule any of our usual juried Art Shows. However, we found out late last fall that delays in starting the construction would have the Fellowship Room available through the summer — and the room looked so bare with no art — so we decided that Fine Arts Committee members ourselves would provide the art for the next few months.

During the past two months, pieces by the four painters on the Committee have hung in the Fellowship Room. From today through mid-June, pieces by the three photographers will hang there.

The other two photographers have shows. I have a mixture of pieces. Each of my pieces works alone, but I have discovered that they don't form a cohesive whole. It's partly print size and partly mat color (too much variation in each). The Committee chair was there to help us hang the work, and she made some suggestions that I will take to heart and keep in mind for future efforts. (She's great, and I could tell she was disappointed at the lack of cohesion, because she likes many of my pieces for themselves.)

Next time.

Introducing Design Musings

Design constitutes a big part of my life. My professional life focuses on the design of things (mainly web sites and software applications) for effective, efficient, and satisfying use by people. My paraprofessional life involves photography and digital imaging. My personal life involves architecture — my significant other is an architect who has designed an addition to my house and is in the process of building it, and as he is always (always!) talking about architecture and what makes a building good, I have learned a lot about it since we've been together. So I thought I'd build a little place where I can express thoughts and ideas as they occur to me — some random, some not-so — about all of these design-related topics. And maybe foster some interesting conversations.