Science and design are fields that command attention, respect and understanding. I have a deep love for science, it was a hard decision to stray away from physical therapy in pursuit of graphic design and animation. These fields are often seen as separate and unable to ever be combined. The rigid definitive answers of science with designs changing evolving nature are hard pictures working together. Often designers are led to the arts as a defiance response to traditional learning. In my educational journey, I have found a field that shows how human nature and science can explain design. Before going to college everyone told me to have a career in physical therapy, to pursue the science route. I deeply considered this choice before deciding to get my bachelor of science in design - communication design with a minor in marketing and animation. By doing so I have combined my love of science and design. Communication design focuses on how people receive and understand designs and visual effects. How slight differences in design to natural visual stimuli affect the way we perceive the design and its effect on our emotions. To understand good design and why it is successful is to understand human science. Often an undervalued skill in the marketing and entertainment industry. The ability to communicate through design is something that can make or break a product, marketing efforts and entire animations. Communication design focuses on being able to understand why humans enjoy the way things look, styles and ratios that are pleasing to the eye. This is based on science, research and artists that have created new styles over the thousands of years. We have always relied on art to communicate; cave art, hieroglyphics, the Renaissance, to today's emojis. Many artworks would not have been created without knowing science; Da Vinci and many others dissected bodies to better understand human anatomy in the name of art. Scientific research is the backbone of art and design. Without it, people's proportions, structure and muscles would not be as accurate and easy to replicate. Simple design in everyday life is often disregarded as an art but someone had to design it, and go through stages of what looked the best, and what communicated the most. Science resulted in finding out what people liked, cartoon styles and what they did not like; the uncanny valley effect. Without research and understanding the way these designs affect people's emotions, modern design would fail to communicate properly. People must respect and understand both fields of work and how they intertwine.

My entire life Taylor Swift has been playing in the background. Her music is a part of my favorite memories of growing up and becoming an adult. As a little girl, my sister and I would listen to her debut and Fearless on a small CD player and dance around the kitchen. We sang and jumped around in the summer heat like nothing else mattered. Growing up in the country it was easy to relate to her songs and feel at home listening to her songs. Later Red played on the bus as I sang and made lifelong friends bonding with her songs. Singing about breakups and embracing friends was the highlight of middle school. Red and 1989 played in shared headphones over and over again on the 8th-grade trip to DC. Hours and hours of humming along and resting heads on shoulders to fall asleep with Taylor Swift playing in the background. During early high school, I lost touch with my connection to Taylor Swift and thought that I was too old for her music. Then Reputation came out at the perfect time. I was struggling with a lot during this time, finding myself and coming to terms with being gay in the deep country of Ohio. Reputation gave me confidence in daily life, feeling as dark and powerful as I was feeling. It seemed like whenever I thought I was alone or struggling her music was right there at the perfect time to help me. Lane, my best friend, was also a diehard swiftie and we felt so close with Taylor Swift almost like we knew her and she knew us. That connection brought us together more than ever during high school By 2019 I was feeling calmer with my emotions learning how to be a young adult, and reminding myself how to be a kind grateful person. The Lover album again seemed to read my mind and reflect my ever-changing emotions. Like many others, the pandemic destroyed my social life, activities, and my freshman college experience. I often watched Tik-toks and followed trends online to pass the time. Trends often romanticized the country, bread making, cottage core and daily life. I was doing all of the trends to romanticize my quarantine and pass the time. During this time Taylor Swift released folklore and evermore, seeming to complete the COVID-19 pandemic life by listening to stories in her songs. As she was gaining her rights to her music, there was no way I could not support that. Her music had gotten me through tough, breakable moments in life and was there for the highs and lows. The Eras tour was the perfect accumulation of her albums and a reflection of my life. Lane, her siblings and I got tickets and drove 6 hours to see her and had the most perfect trip listening to her the whole way. During the concert, I dressed for her debut album to respect the first album I ever loved and reflect on memories of my sister and me. Each change of the album in the concert was a timeline of my life being sung right back to me. Words can not explain how grateful I am to experience her tour and her music throughout every moment of my life. As I continue my schooling, graduating in 2026, I know her music will be playing in the background.

Creating a visually pleasing website combined with the functional design creates an eye-catching rememberable website. The layout of the site must be easy to read, move across and find what you need. When people are unable to find what they need quickly, they often leave and go to the next site. Keeping people attention online is hard and best done through simple subtle design choices. Keeping to a simple grid structure that allows asymmetrical balance on the page without strong tension to keep people interested. To properly market items to people they need to be seen on the site without being too forceful and ruining the user experience. A great example of this is flycolumbus.com, home to CMH airport. Simple organization and calming blue and white colors keep people interested without overstimulation. People are able to find what they need easily and click to find out more information using a strong hierarchal structure. On the current daily flights, the organization of the information is presented without taking up the whole page, allowing the white space to guide the eye into the information. Starting on the left is the most important information and as you move through the flight you get into more details until you end with where you need to go next. The columns are clear, simple, and implied to easily differentiate the text without clouding up the page with lines. The row lines are smaller, thin, and kept in with a color change of the background. Great design doesn’t end with colors and graphs but the choice of font. Typography plays a large role in websites and without it can make the information look out of place. The font flycolumbus.com uses is ApexNew Book. Originally created by Chester Jenkins, originally designed with Rick Valicenti at Village Type design LLC for personal free usage. Sans serif allows for a casual look for basic text. There is one design choice that I do not agree with, the logos of the airlines and names are not the same font size and consistent throughout. On the positive side of the website, it does not bombard with ads or clickbait but allows for marketing to show through while clicking through the airport’s generic information. Searching for where you’ll be heading and where to stay allows people to search out the ads they place and click on them with their own free will. While the website is not extremely well done the simplicity keeps people in. The airport remains the largest passenger terminal in Central Ohio and the second busiest in the state.