math for art majors
Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 3:56AM 
Cheryl and Co. package design (click for full image)
OK - who thought up this HTML stuff anyway? You can bet it wasn’t the art folks! It had to be some geeky brainy guy who said “Look! We can make stuff pretty by just typing in some letters and symbols - such as: > } div # { /> href: ” } COOL!” (Or - in my own words - *&#$!(@!#&). Or maybe it was a bar bet. That was fine, until all of sudden, us right brain designers were expected not only to understand it, but to create websites with it.
Ad for ECS Billing and Consulting (click for full image)
Maybe I speak for myself, but when I look at this stuff, it is TOTALLY greek to me. My brain has a terrible time visualizing how a series of numbers, symbols and letters could ever create something pretty. Granted - my math background is limited. Since I knew I would be an art major in college, I didn’t take all that calculus, trigonometry, etc. that my peers took in high school. I had a hard enough time with ninth grade algebra! I don’t think in numbers, I think in pictures. It gives my spouse (the financial guy) quite a laugh when I can’t remember if the population of a city is 4 million, or 400 million. It is just the difference of a couple zeros, right? So he coined the term “Math for Art Majors”.
Reader Comments (1)
well, html reminds me of my days of typesetting; CSS is a bit like style sheets in layout programs, but now it's hard to get by without knowledge of Flash, PHP, Javascript and others that enter the realm of pure eyes-glazed-over coding. I think designers should learn as much as they can without their brains exploding - the more you know, the easier to design sites that work. But we all need to have a network of people who can help us with some of the more geeky parts (shopping carts, databases, etc.). I like to think anyone can learn anything, given enough time, but some things may require a learning curve that is not practical in terms of financial return.
Oh, by the way, the link to LinkIn goes to a group I'm not part of, but doesn't show which group it's in. Can you clarify?