Trpquo’s unreasonably big project’s webpage

Trpimir Jeronim Ježić is a experienced graphic and web designer, currently employed as an assistent teacher and research associate at the Faculty of Graphic Arts at University of Zagreb, based in the Department for Computer Graphics and Multimedia Systems; side-working as an freelance designer/developer; hobbying as an hard-rock musician, GAS sufferer, big philosophical questions and engineering enthusiast, civil sector supporter and a loving dog owner.

The reason for this site’s existence is my great interest in the multidisciplinary field of non-existent General Graphic Design Theory and possibilities of it’s implementation in shaping technical approaces and technological solutions to everyday challenges in visual communication.

General Graphic Design Theory

G^2DT is the theory that would combine theories, findings and consensuses from a broad arrangement of fields such as:

• general layout and composition principles arrived from grapgis/UX/type design and art practices and music theory
• cognitive, bihevioral, gestalt, perceptual, clinical and social psychologies and psychology of art
• cognitive sciences, neurosciences, ergonomics and emotional physiology
• philosophy of mind, ontology, episemology, aesthetics, teleology and discourse between rationalist and empiric approaches
• cultural studies, culturology, sociology of culture, communicology
• linguistics, filology, archeology, antropology and art history and criticism
• logic, argumentation and rethoric
• statistical analysis, linear, discrete and analytical algebra, calculus and classical physics
• general computer sciences, algorythmics, signal processing, computer vision, neural networks and machine learning
• etc.

in an attempt to find some basic rules that govern our visual communications:

• physics of our (human) peceptual worlds
• map of the possible communication strategies in it
• semantic mechanics on which all information transfer must be based
• descriptions of mechanisms that each stylistic approach has choosen to take accompanied with justifications for it
• connections of nodes in each stylistic mechanism to the basic perceptual physics artifacts in the percieved world.

on which the technical and technological advancements in visual communications could be realistically and practically based.

Project description

First step of the project is going to be a path to discovery of a specter of programmer’s approaches and algorithms that have allready been published for different graphical and CS challenges, and through creating basic single-function apps with the appropriate GUI designs, try to grasp them, systemise them and, as a programming noob, try to comprehend OOP and functional approaches to building graphical apps.

Some of the proto-apps will definetively be:

(please ignore the silly working names)

• Patternrenrettap : pattern making app
• Gent Li - interactive generative art creator
• Piclid : vector based geometry drawing and fitting tool
• ThoughtFlattener - tool for data visualisation and designing interactive infographics
• !MS Paint : pixel based drawing tool
• SpaceBooth : pixel-graphic’s filter and CV playground
• Black Art/Lava: variable fonts editor (probably done in Python because of fonttools)
• Simple TextBox : text layout and editing tool based on common text-box mechanisms
• BookBinder - multipage layout tool
• Agora - questioneer creator app for filling the database on psycho-physical and UX issues on which the final app’s design guidance tools and UI could be made dependant on

These proto-apps will be accompanied with as detailed documentation as reasonably possible, describing the thought process, design pattern framework, reasoning behind algorithms, approaches to GUI-s with listings of relevant design principles and bibliographical references entangled with each step of development. Documentation will be spread across comments in the working files, formated in readeble text on each sub-projects wiki pages and a summary of accomplishements and pending problems on each repository’s web page.

End goal is integrating all sub-project applications into one practical and design oriented graphic editor: Graphic design software that can help understanding of design choices and fascilitate the design process, not just be an inavoidable obstacle to fight with, in thougtfull creation of the visual communication stuffs.

more coming soon…