July 2015 – Sarah Dimento

When Details Matter

July 30, 2015July 31, 2015 Sarah Dimento 2 Comments

Last week I talked about how excessive detail can bury the purpose or meaning of a work, and also waste your and your audience’s time. But there’s a time and a place for heavy detail work, and becoming a better artist is learning to recognize when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. If you do it right, you awe people when they realize how much care you put into the project. There are also times when people will only notice on a subliminal level, praising work for its realism even when they can’t put their finger on exactly how it achieves it.

About not showing your homework when it comes to world building – people don’t appreciate a massive info dump in the middle of a narrative, but that doesn’t mean don’t do your homework at all. You can end up with a hundred thousand words of notes, especially if you’re working on a large series, that never make it into the story directly, but influence its outcome behind the scenes. The key to managing the amount of work you put into your “story bible,” verses how much actual narrative you get on the page, is learning to recognize when your bible mechanics matter.

Sense is More Important Than Accuracy

July 24, 2015September 25, 2015 Sarah Dimento 2 Comments

Accuracy is overrated when it comes to portraying something in a way that makes sense to most people. Outside a research paper or an architectural drawing, you’re more often looking for verisimilitude. Verisimilitude captures the essence, or appearance, of a thing. Today that means distilling it down to pertinent details rather than describing every boat in the harbor and their moorings (during the frickin climax, Dickens, wth). I’ve run across the distillation principle again and again in different contexts, so I have plenty of examples:

So What Makes Great Design?

July 16, 2015October 2, 2015 Sarah Dimento 8 Comments

Last week I tackled the question, “What makes good design?” to spell out the rules of basic competency. But knowing all the rules and putting them into practice doesn’t necessarily make someone a great designer. Mastering the art requires a more – that “more” requires intuition and the ability to recognize what’s needed on a project by project basis. This is where things get tricky and require tons of practice. Here’s the more difficult rules I’ve discovered. Also, many of them work for every art, including writing.

Your imagery has to communicate as much as the type.

Sometimes the imagery is the type, if you’re doing funky things like making letters morph into horses, but when you do make sure people can see the horses. I know from experience how working on a design can give you tunnel vision, making you imagine you’re communicating a whole lot more than you actually are. You can spend hours arranging a bunch of swoopy lines into the shape of a cowboy, only to have the first person you show cock their head, decide they have the right-side-up image upside down, and turn it over saying, “Is it supposed to be an elephant?”

This also goes into what I was saying about symbolism a few weeks ago. People, designers and clients alike, can get way too caught up in the significance of their chosen imagery when it doesn’t communicate squat to anyone outside their circle. You can’t think like a Freemason when you’re trying to bring people in, not exclude them.

What Makes Good Design?

July 10, 2015June 3, 2016 Sarah Dimento 6 Comments

The simple answer to this question is: whatever looks good and does the job. But that’s hard to quantify, so let’s break it down. Here are the basic rules to making yours designs not look like crap:

The information is readable.

Believe me, I’ve seen people screw up this basic requirement. Back in art college, I and a couple other students were tasked with making a poster for our art show, and I actually got into an argument with them over some stupid font they thought looked cool, but was totally illegible. They wanted to use it for where the show took place, when it was, and all the other important information people needed to know to go see the fucking thing.

To make extra-sure what you’ve done is readable, take a step back and look at it from a few feet away. Then look at it again sized down to a thumbnail. Is the most essential information still readable at a distance or tiny?

How to Murder an Earworm

July 2, 2015June 3, 2016 Sarah Dimento 2 Comments

So I’ve managed to stick to my vow to write for an hour minimum every day, but all I’ve written is crap and I haven’t been able to edit it because I’ve been sick the whole damned week and my brain is fuzzy and no does grammar good. So without further ado, here’s a load of crap:

Don’t you hate being earwormed by a song you hate? My hatred for certain songs comes close to being full on misphonia. I mean, I get seriously enraged. It’s not healthy. I’m not going mention any songs in particular, because that would be like telling someone, “By the way, here’s my anti-Kryptonite, the thing that will turn me into the Incredible Hulk. Feel free to fuck with me for a laugh.” (By the way, the blog post will be extra sweary. This is unfiltered shit you’re getting here.) I’m exactly like this bear, and yes I even love Gary Numan so much that playing We Have a Technical is the secret sauce to chilling me out from an angry high.