Was Design Thinking Designed Not to Work? An Article by Debbie Levitt rbefored.com Design thinking sells a fantasy. It sells you the fantasy that with some guidelines, templates, and sticky notes, you can do what IDEO does just like how they do it. …if it were true that design thinking lets you do what the best designers do, IDEO could put themselves out of business. If they were really selling you the absolute guide on how they solve problems, innovate, and design, you wouldn’t need IDEO. Their idea to save their business from a slump hypothetically cannibalizes their business…Unless they knew that it wouldn’t. On Design Thinking designux
Text for Proofing Fonts An Article by Jonathan Hoefler www.typography.com The pernicious issue with pangrams
The pernicious issue with pangrams The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform. Embracing Asymmetrical Design typographylanguagedesign