The Shape of Design
I alluded to a design theory about two years ago. Rather than allowing it to collect more cerebral dust as my take on what’s important to design becomes aged with each passing day, I thought I’d share parts of it now.
In truth, it’s more of a construct than a theory, and it’s not at [...]
Visual Affect in 50 milliseconds
Over at A List Apart, Patrick Lynch nicely summarizes the essence of one of my favorite books by Don Norman, Emotional Design and applies it to neuro-activity within our brain.
In psychology, emotional reactions to stimuli are called affective responses. Affective responses happen very fast, and are governed in an automatic, unconscious way by the lower [...]
Google and the Iceberg Principle of Design
A lot has already been said about Douglas Bowman’s decision to leave Google. From what I understand, he was the company’s first visual designer. I don’t know the man, but I think we can take his perspective, at least, at face value.
In his goodbye post, he offers a glimpse of the design culture [...]
Thinking Outside the Bottle
Somebody recently shared with me an article from Fast Company magazine about a winery that’s replaced their traditional glass bottles with more forward-thinking recyclable carton packages. The resultant environmental affect claims to produce a carbon footprint ten times smaller than traditional glass bottles once the savings for weight, shipping, and disposal are all tallied [...]
The Impossible Dream
The powerful and moving story of Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke reminds me why I tend to be so personally interested in the mechanics of the human brain, sometimes taking great lengths to apply that interest into my own discipline.
In 1983 my grandfather suffered a debilitating stroke which rendered the left side of his entire body [...]
