Change is inevitable and yet it appears to happen by accident. Our ability to affect change is limited by our capacity to imagine and our will to act. So what is the best way to affect change?

The Individual’s Time

Longing for the Past

We long for the past and fear the future. This is a primal reaction to the linear nature of time and our limited influence of it. The past is unchanging, certain and free from the compulsion to act. Our inability to influence the past is a sanctuary from accountability. …

Making something simple is hard. Anyone that’s tried it is nodding their heads right now. If you throw in client agendas, multiple opinions, user expectations, feasibility, and a sprinkling of compatibility issues it becomes Mission Impossible (the first one).

This is something I do for a living. And for fun.

What is it?

Designing an elegant solution is the best part about my job. It can be applied to any project, even the ones that at first seem mundane.

An elegant solution is anything that leverages opportunities not previously considered for a new or existing problem. …

Genesis

DNA is seen as the defining point that life began. It was the result of an increasing complex environment, creating the right conditions for it to evolve. Contrary to some belief, it was produced by a chain of events. DNA actually had a precursor called RNA. RNA is still a part of the process of cell replication today, but was formed prior to DNA and contributed to its existence.

That made me consider something I’ve always felt subconsciously: that nothing simply sparks into existence.

This blog is going to skip over a lot of important things in order to make an abstract concept more simple. I’ve talked about a lot of them in my other posts so feel free to browse around first.

The Scope of Appeal

The vast majority of design is about making decisions. Big or small, a designer makes upwards of a hundred tiny decisions a day, and they make them on behalf of someone else.

I once debated with someone (an art professor no less) about the opportunity cost of appeal. He argued; “why don’t they make a book cover that just appeals to…

The term visual literacy refers to our ability to interpret and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. It is an extention of literacy which describes our ability to interpret letters (characters) into language and meaning. Visual literacy in conjunction with the semiotic model:

I’ve never liked the thought of things in life being predetermined. Probably because my predetermined future wouldn’t be all that amazing. I believe the nature versus nurture argument to be over. We are born as tabula rasa (blank slate) and are the sum of our perceptions and experiences. So how have “you” changed in the last 1000 years?

Is There a Real You?

Your sense of self defines who you are. But how much of you really exists and is there a way to, ideologically, “sum up” a person.

The best explanation I have heard so far is by philosopher Julian Baggini. He describes a…

I used to teach Design at a university in Western Australia. A common question I was asked from students was; “how to do I come up with an original idea?” To which, in a post-post modern society, the obvious answer is, there’s no such thing.

In my opinion the desire to be original is simply another way of saying I want to be different. True originality is unattainable. Something at first may seem original, but is actually a culmination of little ideas that have been curated and refined.

I used students as an example because initially it seems like the…

Graphic Design is a bastardized culmination of many visual, linguistic, and in some cases auditory disciplines. Genre, in the way most people understand it, relates to music. Songs that exists within the same genre share similar signifiers (tempo, instruments, melodies, etc). But genre also plays a big role in design.

The best way to understand genre, is to understand how our brain works.

Complicated to Simple

Our brains have a limited capacity. From an early age we begin to make sense of our world through similarly and difference (this shape is a square it fits in the square hole, but the circle doesn’t)…