Dionne Wong - Week 9 - Judging a Book by Its Cover
My older sister is a graphic designer. When she makes a poster, flyer, or logo, she makes decisions about the color, size, font, and placement of symbols and words for different purposes. A lot of times, she makes things look more visually appealing based on her intended audience.
She manipulates the way people perceive things through her art, prompting impressions that greatly affect the decisions people make, like gravitating towards a company or purchasing a product.
In an ideal world, we would be able to judge things based on their true value to our lives rather than appearances and impressions. We would be able to read handwritten essays without making assumptions based on the author’s handwriting, learn from presentations on Google Slides based on the information they teach us instead of focusing on the bright neon color of the backgrounds, and pay attention to the headlines on newspapers that have topics that interest us more, not the ones that have bigger, bolder titles.
But whether we like it or not, the way things look affects the way we feel towards things, sometimes even being the root cause of our behavior. After all, our attitudes towards performing a task are one of the most important factors in completing the task successfully. The power of graphic design cannot be underestimated. It is a tool of communication in the language of visual biases—a language that can be scary because of how subconsciously we listen to it.
Fortunately, there is a way to overcome these biases and make choices that align more closely with our goals: by simply being aware of them. In the same way that people must try to push past assumptions and avoid jumping to conclusions in order to understand each other, we can make wiser decisions by catching ourselves when our thinking processes are influenced by what we see. At the end of the day, a lot of our biases are just naturally induced opinions, but taking the next step and thinking about why they exist?
You’d be surprised at how much you can learn about yourself.
8 Benefits of Becoming a Graphic Designer. Free Logo Creator, d4l6e04z43qjx.cloudfront.net/images/benefits-graphic-designer.png
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Hello Dionne! I really liked the topic of your Blog, as it was really creative and also gives a deeper insight into the important things that we were taught when we were younger, which is to never judge a book by its cover. Individuals tend to be judgemental to a majority of things, such as friends and family, activities and sports, a certain shape of a certain object, or as you can see, just about anything in life. Now, why is that? I feel like you perfectly addressed the root cause of this huge issue, and I agree with the statement that being in acknowledgement of an issue, especially of being judgemental, is the first major step of overcoming the problem and moving in the right direction of redemption. If one can self-reflect and consciously think about how they perceive a certain matter at any given time, then the chances of them taking in information with a neutral bias significantly increases as well.
ReplyDeleteHi Dionne! I think it is really cool that your sister works in graphic design. I enjoyed the way you wrote your blog and your topic because I do not think we focus on art enough. I also liked how you mentioned google slides and presentations because I believe that really affects how we digest our information in our classes. For google slides you really need to pay attention to light, especially with the text. I appreciate my history teacher from last year dearly because he would always highlight the parts that we, the class, needed to write down, in bright red, making it easy to see. However, sometimes they were hard to see because he would choose a red for the background, making the highlights useless. I do not think these biases are completely wrong to have, however we should not base someone or something solely on these presumptions.
ReplyDeleteHi Dionne! I found your blog post really thought-provoking. The idea that visual design can influence perceptions and decisions so heavily is something we often overlook, even though it impacts our daily lives. I liked how you connected it to examples like Google Slides and handwritten essays, as it makes the concept relatable and easy to understand. Your point about being aware of these biases to make better decisions really resonated with me. It’s a reminder to question our initial impressions and focus on substanceinstead of just appearances. Thanks for sharing such and great job!
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