Week 8 Pt. 1 Outside-of-Class: Article Readings

More Bang for the Buck

Increasing productivity in non-profit sector.  Sometimes must increase costs to increase productivity to decrease cost per outcome.  Examples of JumpStart, Teach for America, & YearUp showed they increased their productivity by investing in best practices, investing in staff & critical activities, managing costs aggressively, & measuring progress.  While all three measured costs & tracked outcomes, they did not go the step further to measure cost per outcome.  Some reasons for this were cited as limited funds & lack of pressure in the nonprofit sector to track productivity.


Disability Etiquette

Provides a guide to interacting with those with disabilities.  I thought this was a great little read of how to interact with people with disabilities without being so accommodating it's disrespectful.  I face this a lot in my job as a sales associate at a local secondhand store & think this will be quite helpful to treating all individuals with optimal respect and making sure my workplace is ADA-compliant.

AIGA Event: Aaron Draplin

On Thursday, October 2nd, AIGA Central PA hosted designer Aaron Draplin at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.  Draplin is most known for his colorful and brilliantly simplistic logo designs.  

via Boardistan.com

Draplin's presentation was a humorous, tongue-in-cheek account of his ascent to design success.  While poking fun at himself, he told a pretty inspiring story of humble beginnings to design master.  Like the old artifacts of design Draplin is inspired by, a few of the gems I pulled from his awesome were...

• Sketch, sketch, sketch!
• Do iterations—let the design evolve within the Illustrator file
• Scavenge for old artifacts of design
• Say yes more than you say no—Make changes; remember who pays the paycheck
• Make good work for good people

All these points I plan to put into action in my own design education/career, & some I've already adopted.  Sketching A LOT definitely produces greater concepts and designs.  I've seen this firsthand when I made it a point in my Visual Communications class to sketch tons of different ideas instead of focusing on trite variations.  I found my designs were better thought out & easier to develop further.  This was followed pretty naturally by doing iterations in digital form.  

I collect a lot of design things, especially vintage designerly things I find at Goodwill, so I was happy to see Draplin does the same thing & uses his findings to inspire his work.

The last two I took as challenges for the future, either while in the workplace or while freelancing.