Connecting Dots
Posted by rick jamison on November 9th, 2009
Some dots were never meant to be connected. But doing exactly that — taking a bunch of “dots” from one field of interest and applying them to another — is often a door opener to valuable new insights and ideas.
More often than not, a simple shift in context is all it takes to realize the benefits.
I did a Google search over the weekend, for example, on “Bauhaus Design Principles” to refresh how I’ve been thinking about the layout of PowerPoint slides. One of the search results was a paper titled Photoshop Album 2.0: Ten Design Principles from Outside the Software Industry by Johnnie Manzari. Reading through the principles, I let my mind wander to other topics where these ideas might also apply — and apparently found the experience rewarding enough to blog about it.
Here are the principles:
- Success or failure is in the interpretation of the problem
- Make the most from the least
- Use symbols and relationships to unlock beauty and elegance
- Cut the noise
- Prevent graphic style from overtaking the presentation of data
- Make the difficult accessible
- Avoid long lines of horizontal text
- Be disciplined about the use of typefaces
- Use ornament cautiously and deliberately
- Fundamentally, be concerned with how, and not with what
From writing code to developing presentations to setting up a new blog or finding an interesting topic to tweet on, it’s interesting to notice how nuances can shift — or even take on new meaning — in relation to different contextual settings.
Clicking on another link in my search results, up came a quote from Harry S Truman: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” And so it goes when combining Web surfing with an open mind.
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