Oliver Reichenstein
Learning to See
An Article by Oliver ReichensteinWeb Design is 95% Typography
An Article by Oliver Reichenstein95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
Putting Thought Into Things
An Essay by Oliver ReichensteinBuilding structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.
Narcissus and Goldmund
Duality
All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person – no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.
Fear of death
He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.
Pain and joy
In the light of the torch, as he stared with great curiosity into the face of the screaming woman, lying there in pain, he was struck by something unexpected: the lines in the screaming woman’s distorted face were little different than those he had seen in other women’s faces during the moment of love’s ecstasy. True, the expression of great pain was more violent and disfiguring than the expression of ultimate passion – but essentially it was not different, it was the same slightly grinning contraction, the same sudden glow and extinction.
Miraculously, without understanding why, he was surprised by the realization that pain and joy could resemble each other so closely.
Suddenly the letter has a tail
I believe that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I’ll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer’s sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered.
All that is beautiful and lovely
You are so handsome and you look so happy. But deep inside your eyes there is no gaiety, there is only sorrow, as though your eyes knew that happiness did not exist and that all that is beautiful and lovely does not stay with us long.