In Search of Inspiration. Part 1. Synesthesia
I often encountered creative difficulties at designers during my teaching activities. Both beginners and experienced guys did not know where to look for an idea. Yes, there is a well-known methodology of moodboards, when the designer explores Dribbble and Behance for some interesting solutions and pictures. They choose the colors or some elements, mix different shots with each other. A lot of designers simply blindly copy someone else’s design, adjusting their project for it. This is bad. It’s bad because the content should dictate the design, and not vice versa. The bad thing is that the design is perfectly suitable for one product, but it will be completely useless for another.
Yes, I’ve also resorted to the method of moodboards, but more I prefer to take ideas from my head, product and experience.
I’ve decided to launch a small series of articles on the topic of seeking inspiration, where I will describe my methods and solutions. I’ll tell you what exactly helps me to create a design, in addition to content and professional experience. And I hope that one of you will like it and you will start creating a design without Dribbbles and Behance))
In this article I will tell you about the synesthesia. A beautiful world full of wonders and magic.
Syneshtesia
So, what is it? Perhaps many of you have already heard about this, perhaps many will hear it for the first time. And maybe someone will be surprised to find out that he is a synesthete :)
As we all know, a human can see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Synesthesia is the pathology of the brain, in which the irritation of one sense organ leads to an involuntary response in another sense organ. For example, a synesthetes can not only see a tomato, but also hear a tomato.
And no, this is not a mental disorder, it is quite a natural specificity of the organism that some of us have. As far as I know there are about 10–11 studied forms of synesthesia and a lot of unexplored at the moment.
By the way, this incredible video perfectly reveals the theme of synaesthesia in real life. Someone sees music, someone smells colors, someone sounds food, etc. It’s amazing
This theme is very interesting and extensive and if you are interested you can read various scientific articles about it. I’m going to talk about synesthesia as an inspiration.
Music
Let’s start with the most beautiful thing — with music. It happens quite often that after hearing a song during some important period of our life, we begin to connect them with each other in the future. Listening to this song again, we return to those memories.
There are such types of synesthesia, in which a person can not only hear the sound, but also see it or feel it. It manifests itself in different ways. Someone sees colors, someone sees geometric figures, someone feels the aroma of music or its touch. And this applies not only to music, but also to sounds, to human speech, passing cars, howling winds, wings of birds, etc. A kind of perpetual equalizer around))
It has no connection with memories. It’s a unique. But it happens that a synesthetes do not see the color of the music, but feel it. They do not see that this melody is yellow, but they know that this melody is yellow.
I listen to music of different styles, each of them has its own emotions, colors, forms. Quite often it happens that it is the music in the headphones during the work dictates to me the color scheme of the project, which I further simply adjust to the emotions of the users and the idea of the product for which the design is created.
I drew a few simple pictures to visualize what I’m talking about.
For example, this is one of my favorite melody Ludovico Einaudi — Nuvole Bianche. Every time when I listen it music, I see the delicate pink and blue colors around me. They sway like the waves of the sea quietly and soothingly.
This is Dirty Vegas — Walk into the Sun. A great positive song, coloring the world in warm colors and sharp forms, falling from the top down.
The third example. Tom Day — Our World. The incredibly beautiful melody of a talented Australian musician. I really love his music, filled with golden light and love of the world. When I hear it, different geometric forms arise in front of me, which rotate around each other, dive into each other, disintegrate.
Similarly, it looks in real life, in the middle of streets, offices and houses. For example, the picture below shows how I see Tom Day in nature. Light forms, running all over the horizon above the beautiful stone peaks. Oh.. This is incredible!
Even if you are not synesthete and have creative difficulties, just put on headphones, turn on your favorite track, close your eyes and try to feel it, immerse yourself in it. You will be surprised how simple sounds are able to draw pictures and design.
Dates
Other types of synesthesia are when a human sees numbers or dates in lines or graphs. This is what helps him to easily remember various events in life and easily remember the birthdays of friends, the anniversary of weddings and the date in his own life.
For example, that’s how I see time. A sine wave in which the upper points are winter, the lower points are summer. Different periods of life have their own colors. Thanks to this graphic in my head, I can at any moment quickly scroll it back and say that, for example, April 8, 2013 was yellow and what was happening that day.
There is a very close concept to synesthesia — ideasthesia. Its difference is that the “associations” that arise in our minds are not accidental, but are dependent on some habits, experiences, etc. It’s a quite convenient thing, with which you can perfectly program and train the brain to memorize various facts.
Thanks to ideasthesia, a person can draw graphics in his head and, for example, mark the dates of travel in green. In the future it will not be so difficult to remember in which year and month were the trips to Madagascar or to Argentina.
How will this help the design? In many ways. For example, show the user some progress over a period of time. Of course, it is not always possible to make it simple and understandable, because you have to leave clues. But we can fit some data more compactly, you can show on the screen not 3 months or a year, but several years. In the case of demonstration of sports activity statistics, you can tag colors when there was progress, and when there was a decline. When training was frequent, and when rare. When the weight was stable, and when it grew sharply / fell, etc.
Numbers
It is possible that this is the most common type of synesthesia, in which people associate numbers and letters with colors. As a result, we paint the rainbow in not only the math processes but also the names of friends or of companies. This feature allows synesthetes to perform mathematical operations very quickly, find multipliers of numbers and so on.
As a rule, the colors of the letters and numbers at the synesthetes are different. In the picture below, there is an example of a numerical sequence in which the numbers from 0 to 9 have their own unique colors, and the further colors are colored by the color of their multiplier.
Exception: prime numbers have their own color and that’s why we can easy to identify them.
Mathematical calculations:
This skill can be perfectly used in developing educational games for kids. We can tell them the colors of the type numbers, and in the future they will associate more complex numbers in colors, due to which it is faster to conduct mathematical operations with them.
To the last, I want to show you one of my favorite video Nigel Stanford- Сymatics, the creators of which were inspired by synesthesia. Yeah! The music is amazing too)))
That’s all. I hope that my article was interesting for you and you will wait for the next part of the “In Search of Inspiration”. ;)
