Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Blogging or Practicing?

As a designer, my job is communication.  I am fluent in visual communication because that is what I do — all the time.  Someone comes to me and asks me to take their napkin sketch (or less!) and turn it into a professional piece of communication and I can do that fluently.  However, when someone asks me to  write for them … like copy writing a brochure or website I freeze up.  Even finding the words for my own site, describing what I do is, like pulling teeth.  So I think I need to begin this journey of a creative design business blog with the perspective of practicing getting my verbal descriptions down on “paper” and learning to be more fluent.

What is Design?

Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornament is not in itself bad, only when it’s camouflage on insipid form.) Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modeled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly.

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