Poetry is in the details
“You’ll come to learn a great
deal if you study
the insignificant in depth.”
These lines of Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996), a Greek poet awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, summarize our passion for the small things that always make the difference.
Content and style
“Style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style.”
This quote of Jean Luc Godard revisits the old form & content couple and expresses accurately how important this fact is in design.
Color is an idea
“La couleur est une idée.”
In the Western world the color red has represented many things: fire, fertility, blood, sacrifice, passion, privilege, lust and revolution. Black has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, fascism and fashion. Once ugly and barbaric, blue has triumphed in the modern era becoming the European symbol. Green has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed and poison. The historician Michel Pastoreaux had studied the complex semiology of the colors throughout the ages. His work reveals how color perception, far from being a biological matter, depends on changing ideas.
Listening to tell
“If I am a story teller is because I listen.”
What John Berger says about literature represents our everyday attitude facing a new project. This simple statement is the key of any successful work: good design comes only after listening and understanding.
Through the Language Glass
Can we see something for which we have no word?
The peculiar use of color in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and other classical texts leaded to tell that Ancient Greeks had not developed a color sense. Even if this was not the case, it is surprising that none of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. The Linguist Guy Deutscher explains that color words emerged in all languages in a predictable order (black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue), but may have curious differences. His book “Through the Language Glass” reviews examples, from Russian blues to Eskimo whites, on how speakers of different languages may perceive colors differently. It also describes some surprising psicholinguistic experiments on how language affects perception. The influence our mother tongue has on the way we see, Deutscher claims, is not negligible, nor trivial.
Neuroscience & vision
“In the theory of visual processes, the underlying task is to reliably derive properties of the world.”
How do we derive properties from visual data? We are constantly associating images to properties, concepts and values. What has science to tell about this complex process? David Marr (1945-1980) was a pioneer neuroscientist that integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His book Vision was influential in many fields, including Noam Chomsky’s theories on language.
Remarks on colour
Can normal vision be described?
“When we’re asked “what do the words ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘black’, ‘white’ mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours, but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!” What Wittgenstein points out can be frequently proved when talking about design.
Poetry is in the details
“You’ll come to learn a great
deal if you study
the insignificant in depth.”
These lines of Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996), a Greek poet awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, summarize our passion for the small things that always make the difference.
Content and style
“Style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style.”
This quote of Jean Luc Godard revisits the old form & content couple and expresses accurately how important this fact is in design.
Color is an idea
“La couleur est une idée.”
In the Western world the color red has represented many things: fire, fertility, blood, sacrifice, passion, privilege, lust and revolution. Black has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, fascism and fashion. Once ugly and barbaric, blue has triumphed in the modern era becoming the European symbol. Green has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed and poison. The historician Michel Pastoreaux had studied the complex semiology of the colors throughout the ages. His work reveals how color perception, far from being a biological matter, depends on changing ideas.
Listening to tell
“If I am a story teller is because I listen.”
What John Berger says about literature represents our everyday attitude facing a new project. This simple statement is the key of any successful work: good design comes only after listening and understanding.
Through the Language Glass
Can we see something for which we have no word?
The peculiar use of color in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and other classical texts leaded to tell that Ancient Greeks had not developed a color sense. Even if this was not the case, it is surprising that none of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. The Linguist Guy Deutscher explains that color words emerged in all languages in a predictable order (black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue), but may have curious differences. His book “Through the Language Glass” reviews examples, from Russian blues to Eskimo whites, on how speakers of different languages may perceive colors differently. It also describes some surprising psicholinguistic experiments on how language affects perception. The influence our mother tongue has on the way we see, Deutscher claims, is not negligible, nor trivial.
Neuroscience & vision
“In the theory of visual processes, the underlying task is to reliably derive properties of the world.”
How do we derive properties from visual data? We are constantly associating images to properties, concepts and values. What has science to tell about this complex process? David Marr (1945-1980) was a pioneer neuroscientist that integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His book Vision was influential in many fields, including Noam Chomsky’s theories on language.
Remarks on colour
Can normal vision be described?
“When we’re asked “what do the words ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘black’, ‘white’ mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours, but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!” What Wittgenstein points out can be frequently proved when talking about design.