Thinking Design

User journeys. Focus groups. Prototyping. Validation. Research. Research. Research. And oh, the glorious data. These practices dominate the process of nearly all modern digital experience projects. The Golden Age of XD is upon us and branded methodologies like Design Thinking are celebrated by both agencies and clients alike. So where does the visual designer fit within this new world order of users, research and validation? What is our role throughout the process and how do we best leverage our unique talents?

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Foreword to Bracket, Volume 4

“It can be earned, spent, given, stolen, wasted, saved or lost. It can be used to build cities or fund wars. Conventional wisdom holds that it can’t buy happiness, and rumor has it that it may be the root of all that is evil. One thing for certain is that money, in all its facets, continues to be the predominant medium of exchange—the most accepted way to trade one thing for another.”

Launch Bracket

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Bracket is conceived as a publication that features everything in between — ideas, voices and processes that are overlooked and under-appreciated. Each issue, we survey 16 individuals on a selected topic through a questionnaire, a single blank A4 sheet containing 10 - 15 questions on the subject. Their handwritten answers are published, unedited and uncensored.

Brackets are commonly used as a parentheses in writing to add supplementary information — containing materials that are seen to be dispensable without destroying or altering the meaning of a sentence. The publication covers topics that in modern day, have become seemingly dispensable.

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A Brief History of Emil Ruder

“To know where we’re going, we’ve got to understand where we’ve been. Lucky for you and me, we find ourselves in the midst of a historical design revival. Both students and veteran creatives alike appear to be making concerted efforts to blow the dust off our collective roots and discover how our craft came to be. Look around and you’ll notice an explosion of historically influenced design, typography and illustration. My own infatuation is with the International Typographic Style that emerged from Switzerland in the 1950’s.”

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Thinking for a Living is thought-provoking design content. The Think­ing for a Liv­ing Net­work is built on friend­ship, pas­sion and a ded­i­ca­tion to the craft of design. The Net­work is an alliance of like-minded indi­vid­u­als who are exper­i­ment­ing with pub­lish­ing and edu­ca­tion through a series of topic spe­cific sites, con­fer­ences, work­shops and pub­li­ca­tions. The Net­work includes Think­ing for a Liv­ing, The Grid Sys­tem, AisleOne, Design Facts, The Design Man­i­festo, More Sub­stance, and Thought & The­ory and is orga­nized by Shane Bzdok, Anto­nio Caru­sone, Frank Chimero, Ian Coyle, J. Ellis and Duane King.