I was designing a logo the other day. The process involved writing a small computer program, while putting a number of variables into it to control things like line thickness, spacing, proportions between the various elements, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Once I did that, tuning the parameters involved a mix of two kinds of thinking: (1) What looks good to me, and (2) what message am I trying to tell to others? In this case, I was going for a particular balance between formal and casual, homespun and elegant, harmonious and striking.<\/p>\n
At the end of such a process, there is, traditionally, a single result, which everyone will see. But now that I’ve been working on sharable virtual realities, I’m wondering whether a single result is too limiting.<\/p>\n
Maybe a logo — or any other designed object — should ideally look different to everyone, morphing itself somewhat in response to the tastes of each beholder. After all, the communication of any design — or any message for that matter — is an interaction between two participants: The sender of the message and the receiver of that message.<\/p>\n
If my intention is to convey to you a message with a certain degree of warmth or sophistication, of casual friendliness or lighthearted seduction, why shouldn’t the system that conveys my message take your tastes and preferences into account?<\/p>\n
Perhaps, in a virtualized world where we can each see our own custom view of the objects around us, there should be at least two stages of design: (1) The decisions made by the object’s creator, expressing an aesthetic intention, and (2) the decisions made by a software agent tuned to each observer, which renders that designed object in a way best suited to that observer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was designing a logo the other day. The process involved writing a small computer program, while putting a number of variables into it to control things like line thickness, spacing, proportions between the various elements, and so forth. Once I did that, tuning the parameters involved a mix of two kinds of thinking: (1) … Continue reading “Postmodern design for the coming virtual age”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15605"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15606,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15605\/revisions\/15606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}