It took me about a week to get through the  The Vignelli Canon, but I must say that i was certainly worth it! I had two favorite sections. The one that discussed typography and the one that discussed book bindings. I found the first one very satisfying, because I am very into calligraphy and I really love LaTeX. For those not in the know, LaTeX is a typesetting package used to type up most math/science papers. The results look really good. I even have a plugin for this blog so I can type in LaTeX, for example:

Wow that does look pretty.. Anyway I think I really enjoyed the part on book binding, because I really like nice notebooks.

The next portion of the booklet I that I really connected with was on Intellectual Elegance, as a hopeful mathematician, everything I do is in pursuit of creating art. Not in the usual sense, but in the sense of mathematical beauty. I especially I liked “Again, it is not a design style,  but the deepest meaning and the essence  of Design.”

As was mentioned, the booklet did feel somewhat out dated. Especially portion on choosing the right sized paper. I suppose in some instances this section is still very important, however for what we are doing in DS106, it seems to be of little importance at all, seeing as we can change the size of our media at will.

The main thing I got out of reading the booklet was a greater appreciation for what design is. I had never sat down and asked myself the simple question “what is design?” before, and even if I did I would have been hard-pressed to form a coherent response. Now after having read this informative piece I would confidently be able to enumerate the core principals behind what design is. After having read the piece is seems to be the question really isn’t “what is design?” it is “what isn’t design”. Much in the way white space can be used to express complicated expressions in art pieces, only certain characteristics fail to embody good design. In that way design seems to be very fluid.

Looking forward on my creative path, I want to take to try to implement three main things away from this article, and these of course are the three main principals of design:

1. Semantics – “Meaning in design / Backstory”
2. Syntax  – “Relationships and Details”
3. Pragmatism – “Meaningful”

I don’t want these ideas to dominate how I approach design from now on, however I do want to keep them in the back of my mind. It seems as if these concepts should help me to approach my future endeavors into design with a more analytic mindset, which is something I think we can all benefit from.