The course

Few weeks ago I started a hack design course. It looked like a startup-ish thing, but I thought that I would give it a chance... Yep, I'm a bit sceptical to the startup rave.

Course is relly nice. It gives a lot of insight for real beginners and is pretty easy to follow. The main material is a bunch of articles every week (however from time to time there is a video or interactive game/site).

There are some of my reflections about the design as a whole and the course.

Helvetica and world of typefaces

Typefaces are fun. There are many of them and some of them are really bad. Actually I wonder if it would be a good idea to have a website with a worst typefaces I could find. Like a font of the week, but instead of the best one, the worst one. It would be a real challenge to comic sans. You know what? I really liked comic sans when I was a kid, it looked relaxed and friendly, not so oficial and boring as Arial or Times New Roman in times when I used Microsoft Word.

Now I cannot see comic sans and not think that the design is broken. I also start to recognize the most popular and trendy fonts nowadays. Letters have more shape now, whatever it means. I started to think about it. There are so many possibilities to make something look somehow :). Inspiring.

I watched a documentary about helvetica. It's pretty brainwashing, but I liked it, however I don't like small a in helvetica. It isn't perfect, really. It's the worst letter in a set.

Design as a whole

However really important nowadays, design will always be pretty superficial to me. It has just not enough complexity and layers as I would want it to have, to make it interesting for me. It's an art thing. Art things are important and very hard to master, but they really aren't my field.

I would do some web design as a kind of relax activity, but making it a way of making a living for me would be a real disaster. However I don't really know why.