Embracing Asymmetrical Design An Article by Ben Nadel www.bennadel.com Humans love symmetry. We find symmetry to be very attractive. Our brains may even be hard-wired through evolution to process symmetrical data more efficiently. So, it's no surprise that, as designers, we try to build symmetry into our product interfaces and layouts. It makes them feel very pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, data is not symmetrical…Once you release a product into "the real world", and users start to enter "real world data" into it, you immediately see that asymmetrical data, shoe-horned into a symmetrical design, can start to look terrible. To fix this, we need to lean into an asymmetric reality. We need to embrace the fact that data is asymmetric and we need to design user interfaces that can expand and contract to work with the asymmetry, not against it. To borrow from Bruce Lee, we need to build user interfaces that act more like water: “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” — Bruce Lee The pernicious issue with pangramsChanging Our Development Mindset datainterfaces
Joiners A Photograph by David Hockney www.hockney.com Show image 0 Show image 1 In the early 1980’s, English painter David Hockney began creating intricate photo collages that he called “joiners”. His earlier collages consisted of grid-like compositions made up of polaroid photographs. He then switched to photo lab processed 35mm photographs and created collages that took on a shape of their own, creating abstract representations of the scenes he had photographed. The varied exposures of the individual photographs that make up each collage give each work a fluidity and movement that otherwise might not be found. Start drawing, then put the box around it