I deal with the Hue, Saturation and Brightness (HSB) colour system on a daily basis as a creative professional, forever trying to achieve the perfect balance of these elements in order to tell a story and communicate a message. I was quite surprised when I discovered then that humanity seems driven by a similar but much more powerful set of component parts – Cue, Saturation and Blindness. These three elements work together and bring about emotion and change as well as a lasting impact upon how we live our lives.
Design is bigger business than ever before. As businesses try to to get a grasp of the digital revolution, designers have found a gap in the market where design is no longer needed. Selling the idea of design and other simple, everyday concepts is a lot less effort and a lot more profitable, provided you’re a wordsmith and have the personality and the pie charts to back it up.
If reading is exercise for the brain then my brain is morbidly obese. The birth of a new year helps a lot of people focus on losing those few extra pounds that showed up in the mirror over the Christmas break. My problem hasn’t been the physical but the mental. I haven’t been looking at the world with the same set of eyes over the last 3 or 4 months and my ability to articulate my thoughts has been akin to an obese person trying to climb a flight of stairs.
Like designer jeans, job titles in the online industry will change style, come in and out of fashion and in a few years, look ridiculous at your next job interview. My advice? Leave the hipster designer labels at the front door and focus on what you do best. Solve problems that improve the quality of life and do it with the help of like-minded people.
Are we sacrificing our sense of ‘touch’ and ‘feel’ for convenience and portability or will touch just take on a different meaning now? Are we about to witness a revolution in making our multi-touch devices more tactile? The quilted back of the Kobo, the plethora of leather, wood and felt cases for all our current mobile devices, make it obvious to me that I’m not alone in wanting a more comforting digital experience. It’s clear that humans find comfort in tactile experiences, what interests me going forward in my professional life is how we’re going to address this need if our content is trapped within the confines of the 2D, gloss-coated LCD.
Is it the cigarettes that are cool or is it whether you smoke Marlborough or Winfield? The value of branding to companies is nothing new but it seems that the Australian government has finally caught on and they’ve decided that it’s time cigarette companies went green. No, I’m not talking about a Carbon tax, I’m talking about ‘olive green’. It’s the new recommended brand colour for every tabacco company’s packaging in Australia and, if the government gets it’s way, it’s about to become law.
In a previous post, Creativity is not a personality trait but a moment in time, I discussed the Ted talk given by Ms Elizabeth Gilbert about the concept of a ‘genius’. It raised some very big questions in me about my own creative process and how and why I have these ‘moments of genius’ where an idea seems as though it’s presented itself on a silver platter with all the trimmings. I’ve started to track when and where I get hit by these lightning bolts; I’m not that surprised about the results: My best ideas don’t happen at work.
Regardless of what we like to believe, a designer (or creative as some of us like to be known) isn’t creative all of the time. No one person has creative idea after creative idea; it’s impossible. But perhaps ‘creative-types’ are more receptive to the moments of creativity that are presented to them than those who shrug off their lack of creative thinking with lines like, “Don’t look at me for ideas, I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” Is it creativity that needs to be learned? Or rather, do we just need to learn when to recognise moments of creativity and how to grab hold of them?
The online digital interactive experience pie is a big one and in the last few years I’ve noticed a slight shift in whose eating at the dinner table. User experience designers seemed to have pulled up a chair, grabbed a knife and fork and started to feast but is their company in sharing the meal really worth the time and effort of the cooks and the clients who are preparing the pie?
Head in to any poker-machine room in Australia and you’ll find the same thing; Wall to wall backlit poker-machines with bright, shiny happy faces and animals strewn across them. The glow they cast lights up faces of human-beings of the opposite countenance; a depressed, zombie-like state has possessed every player. How is it possible that such a juxtaposition of graphic design and human feeling can exist so close to one another; side-by-side, across the nation? Are we the problem? Or is it the graphic design that needs to be addressed?