Aesthetic

Today, I spoke with fellow teammates about our community service experience at Eastern High School, here in Washington, DC. The presentations by small groups in our Introduction to Health Care class were not unlike a scientific poster session, with judges and other interested individuals going from room to room to view and hear about our digital posters. Our group had a great presentation with simple, elegant visuals and a well thought-out message.

Needless to say, an email/word-of-mouth whisper campaign of sorts started the day before by unnamed individuals from my group, and by today, it had reached fever pitch. I received compliment after compliment about our poster, and people were frankly amazed that we pulled off our visuals the way we did given the tools as our disposal (and the requirements that we stick to these tools). My secret weapon? I shall reveal it in a moment, after providing a little back story.

When the team was deciding who would be in charge of the presentation, I immediately stuck my hand up, as I enjoy creating a tightly-honed, on-message, aesthetically-pleasing—not all that far from the ideals of a Steve Jobs MacWorld keynote—presentations. It was a no-brainer. But, when I discovered the awful, solution in search of a problem, WYSIWYG Poster Tool, I discovered that our soon-to-be “posters” were really going to consist of a web page: a web page designed not around HTML or CSS but around colored boxes with primary colors and thick borders—the anti-design.

I realize the intentions of the creators of this tool were to provide an easy-to-use, simple, consistent interface to create online content that could be printed out to a large-format poster. Witness this example (warning, PDF). Still, even these posters lack that design oomph that really puts the final touches on the most important aspect of any presentation: the content. At least these types of media creations, which are strewn throughout the halls of the medical school, do not strive to implement design in any real manner, for the results might have been even more disastrous.

After looking at last-year’s Eastern High School presentation (preview shown above), the chaffing of the output against my design sense was overwhelming. My perfectionism wanted to dive in and hand-write a CSS-based, semantically-correct, Web 2.0-worthy, XHTML template to drive our poster, but that would have been way over the top (in terms of time and buzzwords). So what was my solution (and my weapon of choice)? Images.

The tool provides a mechanism to upload images and display them in the online poster, so I completely bypassed the tool’s craptastic layout and opted for Keynote slides saved as JPEGs, cropped and formatted to be compatible for a white-background, print-like, linear format. I opted to use KeynotePro.com’s Tokyo RPG template with nice typography and layout as a base. Combining awesome layout with photos snapped during community service and a few stock photos from the ubiquitous iStockPhoto gallery, our resulting poster turned out fantastic. We have a winner.

This sort of flexibility (on my part) in routing around the ever-present “un-design” all around us (eg, the non-design of Google) really struck me as logical and necessary, but my classmates ascribed it to something more. I’ll let you decide.