I want to learn design

..

This page is really an open problem. Or an interesting problem. Perhaps “interesting problem” is a better category than “open problem.”

Things I want to be able to

• Pick colors that work nice together
• Balance colors on a page so that it’s not too heavy or too light
• Space elements on a page properly
• Set font sizes in a way that looks okay
• Easily make something with Figma and get it on play.teod.eu
• Explore different HTML stuff here on play.teod.eu
• Play with CSS variations on a single play.teod.eu page

What is design?

Copied over from my notes on The Beginning of Infinity:

My definition of design, influenced by David Deutsch and Rich Hickey and Zach Tellman:

Design is the art of tastefully narrowing the distance between elegant, ergonomic, general tools and effective application in specific context. (left is unnamed, right is Utility is Contextual) (see also The Beginning of Infinity, which heavily influenced this statement) (I think left might be aesthetics & beauty. or elegance.)

So what?

• There are different kinds of design.
• I focus heavily on Attention design on this site.
• In Capability, feature and assembly, I approach how to design modules.
• In OGGPOW: A non-coercive strategic framework, I approach how to design companies.
  • Hmm, I think designers might prefer OGGPOW a lot to stuff like scrum.
  • OGGPOW is built to enable creativity, Scrum is built to control people. (dark agile, well, certain variants of scrum.)
• I’ve got a hunch that software engineering is better viewed as a sub dicipline of design than as science or engineering.
• Or more strongly, that there are three major educational directions: science (describing nature), humanities (describing humans) and design (creating reality).
• I’ve always been interested in workflow design.

But!

I don’t have the ground rules in place. I don’t know basics in typography. I don’t know color theory. When I just put things around, it looks bad. I want to fix that.

A list of my half-baked design efforts

• Shades of Deep Green - I want a calm wallpaper
• Scicloj libraries and tools - How to find the good Clojure data science stuff is a design challenge
  • Perhaps the problem is that not enough designers learn Clojure?
  • Perhaps I can ask some designers for help with Scicloj?

Hmm, I want “teodor designs stuff” discoverable from the index by means of page metadata.