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
Levels of Scale Scale refers to how we perceive the size of an element or space relative to other forms around it. All things – a tea cup, a building, language, entire eco-systems – consist of smaller components. It is the relationship of the smaller elements which determines the character and degree of life of the whole. Objects which contain a high degree of life tend to contain a beautiful range of scales within, which exist at a series of well-marked intervals and have clearly recognizable jumps between them. To have good levels of scale, it is extremely important that the jumps between different scales of centers not be too great or too small. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order The scale of resolution determines what is seen