Articulating the benefits of good design, a beginning

From a recent A List Apart article by Patrick Lynch:

Another body of web user experience research shows that website users are powerfully influenced by aesthetics, and that positive perceptions of order, beauty, novelty, and creativity increase the user’s confidence in a site’s trustworthiness and usability. Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.


(emphaisis mine)

Check it

Your stop-motion animation of the day.

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Excerpt from the forward:

A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travelers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is fre to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.

"We need a twitter account!"

I am both skeptical and optimistic about using the internet for pr. Most of the time I think it's probably just a bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon without really thinking about how it really creates value for the organization or their publics.

This is a rare exception.

Good PR is about lying.

Or is it?

Anti-design

This is not your normal take on design.

But it's well worth considering.

Test your knowledge

Graphic Designers and cheese aficionados... go!