Thoughts on Digital Life

Part 4 of my summer blogs on visual design: pictures. Pictures to me are photographs, but also infographics, video and such. Because photography is the biggest thing related to pictures, my focus will mainly be the photography. Emotion A photograph captures emotion. Many of the pictures we know well capture an emotion. During my research the picture below appeared to be the most famous photo. I always thought it would be the lunchtime on a skyscraper (Charles C. Ebbets, 1932) or the napalm attack (Nick Ut, 1972) - but it appears to be this picture of an Afghan girl by Steve McCurry taken in 1985. Before you read below the image, picture an emotion with this photo and then read on to find out if it was captured as you felt it was. This is Sharbat Gula, 13 years old at the time of the picture. Her parents had died in the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan and she was living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Doesn't matter if you got it right or not - you can most certainly...

This is the third part of my summer blogs on Visual (Web)Design. After looking at colors and fonts we're diving into shapes. What are shapes? When I'm talking about shapes I'm actually talking about a lot of things. Most notably I try to look at the branding. A visual guideline for a brand often has some characteristics. When I look at Apple for instance, the design is clean and simple. The logo itself doesn't have a sharp corner on it. So I would define Apple as a soft, subtle, clear brand. If you were to add sharp corners in an Apple design it would look a bit odd. The image above shows a hard shape and a soft shape. I generally look for these type of constants in a brand. If a brand is soft, the buttons will be rounded, I'll use lighter colors and such. If a brand is made up of sharp corners, I will adjust my design to match. Logo's Another part of shapes is the logo. A logo is usually a shape and some text. The stronger the shape of the logo...

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...