Sources / Additional Reading
The Rules of Everything (Pt. 1) - How Simple Ratios Dictate Your Preferences
The Rules of Everything (Pt. 2) - How Society Sets Your Preferences
Key Takeaways
- SIMPLE RATIOS: Dominate most of our preferences in color, form, layout, & music.
- ASK WHY: The root cause of why something is happening is usually most important.
- STAY OBJECTIVE: Try to avoid doing things because they “look cool.” Have a reason.
- EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED: You can’t design in a vacuum. Previous design and societal cues drive most decisions.
Lecture Outline
- Most design thinking needs to take place “Inside The Box”, not “Outside The Box”
- What the box is just varies
- All design carries tons of visual baggage with it from hundreds of years of previous designs
- What we like in the creative realms is quantifiable
- Premise 1: Sound = Color
- Isaac Newton - Opticks: A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light
- Light and Sound can be compared via wavelength
- Premise 2: Our Brains Crave Simple Patterns
- Lack of input and Too Much input impede the brain
- Pareidolia & Latent Inhibition are how your brains copes with the overwhelming amount of info
- In music, simple time signatures and repetition are what we prefer
- 3/4 = Waltz
- 4/4 = Most popular music
- 5/4 = Halloween Theme
- The band Tool frequently uses strange time signatures
- Premise 3: Polyrhythms are Everything
- A polyrhythm is when two different rhythms going on at the same time eventually line up to become a single rhythm.
- 2/3 Feels Good
- 8/15 Feels Bad
- Polyrhythms = Polypitch
- Chordal relationships can be expressed as Polyrhythms
- 4:5:6 = Major Chord
- Premise 4: Common Polyrhythms are Superparticular
- 4:5:6 in Light is Primary Colors
- 4:5:6:7 in Light is Secondary Colors
- Humans tend to discover and invent colors in this order as well
- CD/DVD = Red laser
- Blu-ray = Blue laser
- 3:2 in color = Orange vs. Blue. Common movie poster
- 4:3 in form = Nike Logo
- 2:3 in Logo = Mastercard
- Most Successful things contain Superparticular ratios
- Rule of Thirds
- Amino Acids, the building blocks
- Most common elements in the Universe: Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon
- Conclusion: That which feels good can be quantified. Simple superparticular ratios
- What does this matter?
- Design is an emergent property of smaller decisions
- Simply picking good Line, Color, Shape, Texture, and Scale don’t produce good design, they produce visually coherent items
- Visually Coherent ≠ Good Design
- Design decisions can’t be made in a vacuum. You need to involve everything else that’s ever happened
- Simple Ratios, Expectations, and Societal Cues usually have a bigger influence on Good Design
- When someone says “something feels off” about a design, it’s usually one of those 3 things.
- Good design is Descriptive, not Prescriptive
- What DID happen, not what SHOULD happen
- Observational instead of Suggestive
- This is why all soda logos feel the same, and all Cereal logos with few exceptions have dozes of strokes and drop shadows
- The Universe seems to require these simple ratios to organize information.