Thoughts on Digital Life

In my previous blog-post I explained I am blogging all through the summer about Visual (Web)Design. This is part 2, where we'll focus on typography. Typography According to Wikipedia typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. I feel typography is not often valued correctly. Typograpy is one of the key aspects to Visual Design. It helps in setting an emotion, when done well it helps in brand recognition. Looking at webdesign there are more things to take into consideration. Emotion Typography sets an emotion. Often people frown when I say this, but showing one particular font helps explain my message. Yes, I am using Comic Sans in this blog post! Which of the two words above looks more important? When you're using Comic Sans for the word 'help' I wonder how many people see the urgency of your request. When using the Impact font (especially in all-caps) it looks mo...

This summer I want to bring you a set of blog posts about Visual Webdesign. Recently I started noticing basic design knowledge is lost in the digital world. In the responsive era many webdesigns have become... well... kinda boring. Its all colored boxes. Many sites look quite similar. The only difference between the wireframes and the design is color. And I think Visual Webdesigners can do better. We've become lazy. This series is intended to stop designers for a single moment to realize we can do better. Visual Design is so impressive and so valuable to every project - that you need to get the basics right. Visual Webdesign I think there are 5 elements to visual webdesign: color, typography, shapes, pictures and motion. I want to dive into these elements one by one. My aim is to put a blog online weekly for the next 5 weeks - diving into one of the elements every week. This week we'll start with Color. Color There are many aspects to color. Did you kn...

Last Friday I got to visit the 2nd edition of Dsgnday in Amsterdam - many thanks to my employer Insiders for allowing me and 2 colleagues to visit Dsgnday. In this blog-post I would like to recap what I have seen and how I have experienced the talks. Simon Collison - The Designer's Guide to Being Essential The first speaker of the day was Simon Collison. Simon was very smart in combining his life story with his message. Simon explained how his life was modular and how he forgot some modules of his past and refound them over the past years. He continued that robots know it all. All the modules in webdesign can be designed by robots. So what makes a human webdesigner better than the machines? The answer to the question would be empathy. Simon quoted from an article by Travis Gertz. I've read it and I think its a must read. The part about AirBnb is very sadly so true. Its the most asked question of 2015 for me: can we have something like AirBnb? Great article , be sure ...