Pixels. Vectors. Magic

“Design is, like, super valuable!” argued the designer

In this issue

Experimental: Piano Genie
Resources: Grabient
Typeface: Sofia
Illustrator: Denise Holmes
Tools: Get Waves
Job Opportunity: Designer, TeachersPayTeachers
Thoughts: Horror Vacui

This newsletter was originally sent on 08/19/2019.
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Piano Genie — Experimental

Ok, here’s another dope app that will keep you playing for hours. With Piano Genie, you can pretend you’re a music genius using machine learning! Just by typing eight keys at random, you’ll create beautiful music with a full 88-key piano in real-time, and you’ll fill your screen with a rainbow of colors.

For further inspiration, see Piano Genie being controlled with fruit and veggies by Monica Dinculescu.

Grabient — Resources

A simple web tool to create, discover, and tweak CSS gradients. You can add multiple colors, change the direction, and add prefixes in your code. Made by Eddie Lobanovskiy, founder and creative director at Unfold.

Sofia — Typeface

Sofia is a geometric sans-serif typeface with a humanist touch available in Adobe Fonts. It comes in eight weights with matching italics. You can use it on desktop, logos, or web. Also, come on, Sofia is a pretty dope name for a typeface.

Denise Holmes — Illustrator

If you want to add cute illustrations of ice cream, flowers, jumping pigs, and curious puppies to your Instagram feed, then you should follow Denise 🐶

Get Waves — Tools

From the makers of Blobmaker, comes Waves. This tool lets you generate SVG waves with different parameters and download them. In case you’re feeling too lazy to just put together a couple of bezier curves on your design tool, lol.

Senior Product Designer, TeachersPayTeachers — Opportunity

Teachers Pay Teachers is looking for a senior designer for a remote-friendly contract job. If you believe in their mission to connect and empower teachers, consider applying.

Horror Vacui — Thoughts

Horror Vacui is Latin for fear of empty space. It’s a term coined to criticize the cluttered art of the Victorian era. Artists from those times showed a need to fill up the canvas with people, buildings, action, animals, plants. Having more, meant affluence, so they crammed every tiny area with details.

I think that this impulse to fill up space stems from anxiety we get, not knowing what to do with available space. We have a coloring book, and we have to fill it. We hoard items and stuff them on the wall. Just so the place doesn’t look as empty, or maybe to instill a sense of security, in case we might need those things. The same happens when our boss or client asks us not to waste all that space on our design — to turn the logo larger and make it pop!

Over time, we have learned that there’s a value in nothing, in whitespace. Reduced visual distraction with minimal design tries to tell us that less is better. Uncluttered spaces can elicit a sense of luxury, elegance, calmness, and confidence. It’s an advertising tactic for high-end brands. Ads present us with fewer choices, and we tend to assume that things are more sophisticated and will be more expensive.

Still, there can be merit in using Horror Vacui in certain instances. If you want to advertise affordable deals, employing Horror Vacui might work in your favor. We relate a high-density design with lots of options with cheap bargains and discounts. Flyers from liquidation stores or Black Friday posters are prime examples of this.

There’s a new appreciation for Horror Vacui. Nostalgia for some of the aesthetics of web design in the ’90s. This trend has brought us stuff like flashy gifs, textured seafoam pattern backgrounds, 3D gradient text, and other beautiful clutter — an appreciation for art that deviates from the minimalist look.

As designers, whitespace is one of the many tools we can apply to deliver a message. How we use it can help us define the tone of our stories and create a user experience.

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background. — Jan Tschichold

Hola, I’m Pablo Stanley, a designer who also writes comics. Every week I send this newsletter in an email. I share a list of design-related gems, including inspiring work, cool typefaces, people to follow, articles to read, tools to try, and job opportunities. If you give me your email address, I’ll spam you every Monday with this stuff.