Sometimes I look around and I hate what the web has become.

Years and years ago when I first came to the web, back in the mid nineties, my favorite website was called “Wisteria”. It was a whimsical, beautiful, personal website that explored mythology, fairytales, kitchen magic (homemade cosmetics and organic cleaning supplies, etc.) gardening, and […]

It’s funny how quickly priorities can change.
I’ve been a writer my entire life. When I was a little girl, my mother used to send me and my brother to our grandmother’s house outside of Cleveland for the summer. It was a much anticipated trip, as going away to grandma’s was like going away to another […]

We could lay the same complaint against written letters: before the standardization of typography and letterforms, people might have made determinations about the author based on his penmanship rather than the character of his text; they might assume prejudices against him because of what region his letters identified him as being from. They might allow their visual impressions of a page to sway how they felt about the content.

Of course, that’s the purpose of design. The difference is that a designer’s manipulation of a reader’s emotions is intentional.

I recognize that the relationship between objects and culture is reflexive: culture determines how we make and use things, and the things in turn change our culture. Even so, its seems remarkable to me that anyone place the craftsmen beneath the rulers—the policymakers, the kings, the legislators—since the “people of brass and iron” are the people that take our internal dreams and project them into external space.

At the heart of user experience lies a word I rarely hear bandied about in professional circles: love. It’s an unfortunate omission since, as Mick Malisic of frog design fame points out, “Design really is about loving something.”

The heart of storytelling used to lie with imagination. But today, we see so much that our imagination is not touched in the same way, removing our personal interpretation and a sense of intimacy from many of our shared experiences.

A blinking OPEN sign is just as bad as an article written in “stop motion” writing. Design should make my life easier. I should be able to get my donuts and read an article thanks to design, not despite it.