Monday, May 9, 2011

A Different Type of Design




This is actually the first type of "design" I was interested in. I'd grown up playing SimCity, and was always proud when my cities flourished and turned into self-sufficient entities. And with news of high-speed rail service spreading across the country, I thought this topic should be explored a bit.

Urban design actually shares a lot of characteristics with graphic design. Think about it: a page layout has to flow; all parts need to work with each other to ensure a viewer gets from point A to point B. Similarly, a city, a neighborhood, or a block needs to work in the same way. A citizen needs to get to point B from point A on efficient roads, walkways, or public transit. This is really what design does, as it's been mentioned before: getting a person from point A to point B. It may be in an advertisement or it may be on a street grid. I suggest checking out the urban design link for more information on the topic.

http://www.urbandesign.org/

10 comments:

  1. story of my capstone project- thanks for the link chris!

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  2. Urban design and graphic design deal with frameworks and build connections, which I feel are important. Of course there is much more than that, and I totally agree with what you mentioned in your post.

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  3. I took a new urbanism course last year and it was really interesting to see the correlations to graphic design.

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  4. i love urban design. Ive taken a couple urban planning courses and im in another one right now because my goal is to use graphic design as a bridge into urban planning.

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  5. The idea of urban design is a something that people don't really think about it, but the idea of designing an actual city would be amazing. I would love to design a city but I can't even begin to imagine all the other factors that you would have to take in to make it run properly.

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  6. Urban design is a very fascinating field, and its results can be very beautiful... but urban design websites tend to have very drab layouts that don't do the field visual justice.

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  7. I always think about how towns and cities are planned out and why certain things are one way while others are differnt. Very Interesting.

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  8. Very intrucate visual! Definately not an easy design task. My eye is very attracted to the aerial view..which I don't see very much in dealing with graphics.

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  9. I think that this concept is very interesting. What are the classes under that you guys have taken? I'd be interested in taking a look at them. I hope that you are successful in your goals!

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  10. It would be interesting to compare the layouts of a very old city with a newer city, for example Paris compared to Los Angeles, and see if there is much different between the two grid structures.

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