This Sabbatical week is from a past YouTube episode (#75) on the importance of history in the scope of your design research.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Brandi: 00:01 Hey guys, I’m Brandi Sea and you’re listening to episode 1 0 2 of design speaks. This week is a sabbatical episode. I am likely somewhere in the middle of the United States somewhere between, I don’t know, Nashville and Chicago. I would guess by the time that you hear this on my crazy road trip with my family this week’s sabbatical episode is from my youtube video number 75 called study history.

Brandi: 00:32 Hey everyone, I’m Brandi Sea. Welcome design tip Tuesdays. Today’s tip number 75 study history. So something that is really, really important to know as a graphic designer is not only art history, not only design history but specifically just history. World history, US history. Um, you have to know what the cultural influences are for different time periods in order to one, know where the typefaces and the shapes and the designs that you’re doing came from. But also you need to know what’s appropriate for your designs based on what’s happened in history.

Brandi: 01:22 There’s a lot of things that affect certain color schemes. If you, if you use the wrong typeface with something that you’re wanting to look art deco and say, use a typeface that was created in the 80s it’s not going to look right, but if you don’t know what was happening in the 80s and design and in culture and around the world, you might just go, oh, this font, you know, it looks like it could work. I think it’s cool, but it’s going to look off and people, even non-designers aren’t going to know why it looks off. It’s just going to look off. You have to learn design history because there’s movements of design that have happened throughout time that coincide with art history and world history. There’s certain areas that look really specific and when you want to go for that, you need to be able to know what you’re researching, know what to look after. There’s lots of books out there that you can find the show era’s and design and fashion and all these things and they all relate to each other. I recently assigned some students of mine to research some really awesome graphic designers and explain how their philosophies came from the era that they were living in. How we design now is a byproduct of the things that are happening around us that’s going to be history to someone else in 30 years. And it’s going to be really important for them to know to learn about what we’re doing. So I encourage you to, if you’ve never had any formal design or art education, there’s youtube videos out there. There’s lots of bloggers, there’s a website called design is history, and it’s talks specifically about design and history and those artists and designers and how they relate. And it’s really fun to learn once you understand it. So I hope to see you guys around next time.

Brandi: 03:18 Michelle and I will be back next week with a full episode until then, check out our Patreon and share this podcast with a friend.