Visual Prototyping

27/06/2020

Your universe of ideas - in other words, what you love to do- doesn’t directly interface with the needs and the universe of others - your audience. Interfacing the two universes means learning and loving things you wouldn’t care to learn (eg bureaucracy or marketing!) while deepening on things you deeply care about. Acknowledging the fact that there is a path, sometimes long, sometimes short, from your head to the heads and hearts of others was an important realization for me. That is sometimes called “Positioning” in business and it’s a lifelong journey. How do you imagine the space between you and The Others?

21/06/2020

Bad ideas are good ideas are bad ideas are good? Good ideas are bad ideas. Bad ideas are good. :D
Please go ahead and write your own bad poem, make a bad drawing, try your own experimental recipe, sing badly and loudly. Letting go of your “perfectionism”, you actually serving yourself in two ways:
1. You have fun! Creativity with perfectionism is a struggle.
2. You might actually end up with something good and unexpected.
In the next post, I might summarize what I learnt about Artificial Intelligence and diversity.

11/06/2020

Discipline without Play is useless. It is so in Art; in Design and in biological evolution. And AI confirms it.
A few days ago, I asked a question on Linkedin that I expected no one to pick up :D. I read a post on being a result of the executive-attention network (which refers to the process of learning and achieving mastery) and the imagination network (which is a phase of exploration and play) and I thought that all systems I knew about, seem to benefit from randomness. For example, in social media, when the system only makes recommendations based on user's previous choices, it runs into the danger of overfitting (and this creates information silos where we all see what we like but we end up not understanding others!). So I was loudly wondering if there is a model to describe how much randomness we need in a system. Then a friend linked this article that explains the "steppingstone" principle. It turns out that in a simple navigation task, if we reward robots for novelty, we'll produced more frequently a solution to the problem compared to rewarding them for performance. Yet, there are caveats. It's an exciting read with so many implications.
And it reminded me of "Why bad ideas are a good idea" of Alan Dix. Good ideas can take you only to their local maxima (which might be good enough!). Bad ideas extent your solution space.

By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.

31/05/2020

This is a teaser from my talk on Visual Absurdity at the Webinale conference in Berlin, on Dec. 10. In a nutshell, Absurdism is there to question our beliefs and ideals and break the conformity we lock ourselves into. I am looking forward to discuss this topic again! And before that, I still have to watch some theatre plays and study a couple of visual absurdists! If any questions arise while browsing through the slides, don’t hesitate to hit me up.
And by the way, generic or not, I think you will enjoy the Humaaans visual library (just google it, good for illustration prototyping) by and his latest with free illustrations which came out recently. 💝
@ Vienna, Austria

25/05/2020

On December 10th, I will give a talk on Visual Absurdity and how it can push the limits of UX at the webinale conference in Berlin and I am already super excited🥰:

The last ten years, we have more or less achieved a visual standardisation of the web, which made our communication and interactions more predictable and thus, more effective. This is visible in the buttons, the copy of the buttons, the header formats, the illustrations, the links and the layouts. A...

20/05/2020

I dived into the hard-to-read book of Wassily Kandinsky and I saw that the master had a similar quest as I do: he wanted to systematize art and break it down to its core elements⚫️♥️. I don’t recommend you reading this book, maybe the translation was bad, but was not an easy read. But I definitely recommend the book of Molly Bang, how pictures work. In my slides, I do not have the space to give the answers to the questions I ask. If you want to, try to answer them below. I’ll join!😀I love these discussions..💕🧑🏻‍🎨🖼



@ Vienna, Austria

17/05/2020

Hello! Here's a link to many free great art books from the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection. You can also download them as epub and other formats :)

As a vital part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s mission as an educational institution, the Guggenheim Museum’s Publications Department publishes books and catalogues to document its exhibitions and collections.

12/05/2020

Everything elicits emotion. Visuals elicit emotion. Understanding visuals, working on a path to become a better ~~~ (fill in : designer, communicator, painter, speaker, illustrator, etc) means understanding and directing the feelings generated by the visuals you use/create/share. I give my students this exercise and it’s fun to see how they go from perceiving visuals in the positive/negative spectrum to seeing a whole new range of emotions, cultural references and personalities

@ Vienna, Austria

06/05/2020

The last days I have been working on , a User Interface Design tool and I run into a color problem! There are some colors, like eg. burgundy red that I rarely use on my own. So when I have a client project with these colours I use .co. Just a great desktop app, where you put in the hex codes you want and it gives you the matching palettes -exciting, no? 😃(obviously not sponsored, just a fan!)

03/05/2020

Recently I wrote a nostalgic post on LinkedIn about how I miss the good ol’ buttons that keep disappearing from our devices. The problem when I have an idea is that I usually feel obliged to work on it. And it always takes so long! Here are only the illustration versions I did, not how much I massaged the text. 😂 Have you ever thought that the creative process should be more efficient? I did but I am trying to let go of that thought.

01/05/2020

If you are out there, walking the path from self-expression to solving problems of people unknown to you, then you are a designer. You will need to design a “mold” that is unique to your business, from your suppliers to your craft to your users and back, destroy it and start over, again and again. Eventually it will work. If not Henry Ford has got your back: there is always an industry to apply your skills to. Inspired by “The service startup” book by .
Cover: painting by Moholy-Nagy, artist and Bauhaus professor.