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...

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...

First of all I'd like to apologize for the delay in posting. I've been pretty busy (freelance) and I was doubting this blog for a while. It played a part in me losing my job, so I was a bit reluctant to post again... So my apologies, excuse me and let's give it another go. TV shows for kids Something struck me over the past weeks, something I noticed in TV shows my kids were watching. When I grew up there was Teddy Ruxpin, Fraggle Rock, Gummi Bears, Mask, Dungeons & Dragons and He-Man. There were more, take a look at some of the intro's here . Quite nostalgic to me, pretty dated when my kids look at them. I've seen a lot of more recent shows together with my daughter and my son. They watch shows like Dora, Diego, Bubble Guppies, Blaze and the Monster Machines, Paw Patrol, Ni Hao Kai Lan. All of these more recent shows have something in common. Something the old shows I enjoyed didn't have. Character interaction Dora, Diego, Kai Lan and all...

Lately I've been reading more and more about H2H, Human 2 Human communication. And the more I read about it, the more I feel there's a simple truth in it. B2B, B2C, ... A lot of companies are promoting a proposition of a B2B, B2C or even C2C leader. They claim a position in one or both of these markets. Thats actually pretty smart. I believe that choices are a good thing. You need to make choices and follow through. This article isn't going to tell you any of these choices are a bad thing. This article is trying to tell you that I think the differences between B2B and B2C aren't that big as they are all floating towards H2H. User centered These days we're often working with persona's, user journeys and user testing. Everyone is shouting we need to include real users in our working ways. Good call. Ten years ago we imagined what people wanted to see or experience. These days we include users to understand what they need, want or expect. We have really e...