Waiting…

My dissertation has been send yesterday to the printer. I wanting to get it back so I can bound together the cover and the pages as I want to sew it together! So this is not my last post on this blog, I will had picture of the finish bounding and development  of it.

Last year project

This project was made during my second year. I was really inspired by true blood title sequence to make this video. I think this project can be related to my dissertation in an aesthetic way.

My favourite title sequence

True Blood is my favourite show and I also love the title sequence. It is so creepy, it also was a big inspiration for one of my second year project and of course for this one too.

Big inspiration

During all the time I was designing my dissertation, I was watching the new tv show American Horror Story. This serie is really creepy and weird it was a great inspiration for my design. The title sequence is great! It was by Kyle Cooper who also made the title sequence for seven.

An another article about consumer behavior

Group Influences

Humans are inherently social animals, and individuals greatly influence each other.

A useful framework of analysis of group influence on the individual is the so called reference group—the term comes about because an individual uses a relevant group as a standard of reference against which oneself is compared. Reference groups come in several different forms.

• The aspirational reference group refers to those others against whom one would like to compare oneself. For example, many firms use athletes as spokespeople, and these represent what many people would ideally like to be.
• Associative reference groups include people who more realistically represent the individuals’ current equals or near-equals—e.g., coworkers, neighbors, or members of churches, clubs, and organizations. Paco Underhill, a former anthropologist turned retail consultant and author of the book Why We Buy has performed research suggesting that among many teenagers, the process of clothes buying is a two stage process. In the first stage, the teenagers go on a “reconnaissance” mission with their friends to find out what is available and what is “cool.” This is often a lengthy process. In the later phase, parents—who will need to pay for the purchases—are brought. This stage is typically much briefer.
• Finally, the dissociative reference group includes people that the individual would not like to be like. For example, the store literally named The Gap came about because many younger people wanted to actively dissociate from parents and other older and “uncool” people. The Quality Paperback Book Club specifically suggests in its advertising that its members are “a breed apart” from conventional readers of popular books.

Reference groups come with various degrees of influence. Primary reference groups come with a great deal of influence—e.g., members of a fraternity/sorority. Secondary reference groups tend to have somewhat less influence—e.g., members of a boating club that one encounters only during week-ends are likely to have their influence limited to consumption during that time period.

Another typology divides reference groups into the informational kind (influence is based almost entirely on members’ knowledge), normative (members influence what is perceived to be “right,” “proper,” “responsible,” or “cool”), or identification. The difference between the latter two categories involves the individual’s motivation for compliance. In case of the normative reference group, the individual tends to comply largely for utilitarian reasons—dressing according to company standards is likely to help your career, but there is no real motivation to dress that way outside the job. In contrast, people comply with identification groups’ standards for the sake of belonging—for example, a member of a religious group may wear a symbol even outside the house of worship because the religion is a part of the person’s identity.

Lars Perner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Marketing
Department of Marketing
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0443, USA
(213) 740-7127

why do designers use Mac article

Here an interesting article I found for my research of my 1st chapter:

Article by Simon Meek | Published on 24 October 2009

History

First, a bit of personal history. When I was gainfully employed in my first web design job, I exclusively used Windows (NT, for the older people amongst us), and by and large, it was a pretty painless experience. I was still using a Mac at home, and now, in my current freelance incarnation, I’m still using a Mac in preference to a Windows machine.

These days, when I walk into a design studio, they’re also all mostly using Macs. Sure there are a few Windows boxes lying around, and in my sphere of web design, these are usually used for testing. These studios, if pushed, could happily use Windows to turn out websites. But they don’t. Why not? Are they just the ignorant remains of the old print design studios, where everyone really did use Macs exclusively? Back in the day, after all, if you wanted to do desktop publishing, there was only one choice – a Mac running PageMaker. I think that’s certainly part of the puzzle, but there must be more to it than that.

The Brand

Designers like to think they’re cool.

We can be vain and somewhat shallow, and we like to think that the choices we make regarding tools and products reflect our heightened awareness of the way things should work. After all, designers are employed to make things easier to use.

Apple are quintessentially cool, so at that level it makes some sense that the Apple brand is the platform of choice. Let’s face it, Windows is not cool. Designers think of Windows as being the platform that the accounts people use. Sad but true.

It just works (for me)

In my experience, it’s clear that Apple is a design-led company. It’s true that the hardware is lovely, and designers like nice things, but it’s deeper than that. From both a hardware and software perspective, Apple products are really well thought through, and designers really like this attention to detail. Using Apple gear is inspiring in its own right, and this gives designers a constant benchmark of quality and ease-of-use to work to.

Ben Huson, from London-based web design firm Camber, sums it up:

“Designers like design. Duh!”

In contrast, Microsoft feels like a technology-led company. Here’s an example as to how that relates to the end-user experience.

Setting up a Wi-Fi connection on my dad’s Vista laptop was an exercise in insane user interface design. It had essentially “forgotten” the home network, so I had to set it up again. In the “Connect to a Network” dialog I could see the network I wanted to connect to, but the “Connect” button was greyed out. After much to-ing and fro-ing about how to get to the settings for the network, I discovered I had to right-click on the network, and choose “Properties”. Only then could I give it the password it so craved. Then I had to Okay that, highlight the network in the original dialog and click “Connect”.

Conversely, on the Mac, you click on the Wi-Fi (Airport) icon in the top menu, select the network you want, it asks you for the password. Type it in and press Okay. That’s it. No dialog boxes, no hidden settings you have to dig for, nothing.

We can take from this admittedly arbitrary example that Macs are focused on the user, where Windows seems to take the view that so long as something is possible in the end, that’s just fine. That’s not how designers’ minds work. They want things to be simple, and user focused.

Further, designers don’t care about computers. For them, it’s all about the idea, and getting it out of their heads and onto the screen. Anything that gets in the way of that is a pointless annoyance. They don’t want to tinker with settings — it’s just not relevant to them. This may be a failing in the mindset, but I think it helps explain the continuing use of Macs in the creative industries.

Here’s Charlie Piggins of Internet Work Ltd to ram that point home:

“I want to be greeted by the warm fuzzy goodness of a shiny apple and know that all the ugliness of the startup is happening out of sight. Macs hide the ugly truth.”

Software

Traditionally, Windows users laugh at the lack of software available on the Mac. However, these days, whilst there’s not the breadth there is on Windows, the software that does exist tends to be of a very high quality. Mac software tends to focus on one thing and do it very well. So, on a daily basis, for web design, I use:

• Panic’s Coda
• MacRabbit’s CSSEdit
• Bare Bones’ TextWrangler

All these apps are excellent — simple to use, well thought out, and elegant. They’re also Mac-only. These apps feel like part of your Mac in a way that Dreamweaver never will. Homegrown Mac software, designed and built by the Mac community, has a polish that most Windows apps don’t possess.

Of course, the big guns run very happily on the Mac. The Adobe Creative Suite is nearly entirely cross-platform (although on the Mac it feels alien, clunky and slow), and Microsoft Office works on the Mac just fine.

So why do designers use Macs?

What can we take from all this? We can either assume that designers are cool-hunting, arrogant technophobes, and are so emotionally stunted as to be made whole only by a shiny new MacBook, or it just may be the case that designers really do have a heightened sense of what makes for a good computing experience.

I know which answer I prefer, but what do you think? Post your response below!

Chapter 3 the power of creation

Details about the chapter 3:

I want to write about the power to play god and the creative mind.

Chapter 3 the power of creation

– the created world

– Playing God

– Inside the crazy mind

I dont like my 2nd chapter anymore..

I am very late on the writing of my dissertation!! Yesterday I finished correcting my first chapter + the writing. Today I am suppose to write chapter 2 but the subject of the globalisation doesnt inspire me. I am going to take a risk and change he subject of this chapter. I dont think the globalisation is relevant of my subject. I thought a lot of : the power of creation. Designers got the power to bring to life ideas and brand persona, I want to write about this sensation to be in power to create.

 

So I am also changing the order of my chapter:

Introduction                                                                                      need to be write

Chapter 1 no change :  The monster reflects the creator         done

Chapter 2:   Bring to life the beast                                                need to be finish

Chapter 3: The power of creation                                                  need to be write

conclusion                                                                                           need to be write

 

My plan for today is : to finish write the 2nd chapter and start the 3rd

My plan for tomorrow is : to finish Chapter 3

My plan for Wednesday is:  to write introduction and conclusion

Design Research

Bellow find my visual research inspiration for my future layout design. I was looking at scientific look, a crazy laboratory of creation feel for my design.

Festival de la Guitarra de Còrdoba 2010 by Catherine McIntyre.