lucasdidthis

Tuesday, February 27th 2024

estimated reading time:

about three minutes

Design ethos

An idealistic approach to the discipline

When I decided to put together a personal not-really-a-portfolio portfolio website about a year ago, I developed it around a verbalization of what I called my design ethos. This sort of mission statement was not only to capture a more focused idea of what I want my work to be about for myself but also to grant potential clients, employers and collaborators a deeper understanding of my thinking, my values and how I plan to approach design projects in the future. When teaming up I want those core principles fundamentally to be agreed upon. That’s why I considered sharing this ethos as important as showing off past projects brought to life over the last decade practising my craft.

While my attitude towards style directions and design philosophies shifts, preferences and focus points change and my abilities naturally evolve and expand, the design ethos is meant to outline the very fundamentals to strive for. That being said, it’s also meant to be a living document –just like this blog, so there can never be a complete or definite version.

Very recently I’ve started to work on a new version of the initially mentioned website (the previous version is still online at lucasrees.com) again, so for that I updated my design ethos as well. This is the most current attempt:

I believe design is best approached with a ‘don’t-know-mind’ and in a playful yet meticulous manner. First, we need to learn as much as possible about context and the flow of things, to then develop an individual approach and finally design from inside to outside. The crucial part of the design process is to ask honest questions, listen carefully and be empathetic to the culture we create for. We might be hired by companies and organizations, but we work for those affected by our craft, we are meant to find solutions to their problems. We design for people.

After all, design is not just “what it looks like”, or even “how it works”, ultimately design is about the meaning it produces, it’s about what it enables. Design is a steady search for value. That’s why we should spend our time on meaningful and ethical projects to begin with.

Being a designer first and foremost is being a problem solver, our mission is to identify challenges and develop meaningful solutions which are robust and consistent, yet innovative. Design draws from and feeds back into the world around us, so we have to go through life with our eyes wide open, we need to study everything around us. Good design has to borrow and spin off from multiple places and cultures. Therefore, I am convinced that being a good designer requires a childish sense of wonder, sensitivity and a wide range of interests and perspectives, even –and in particular– beyond the actual field of work.

As designers, we should embrace the unknown and be willing to experiment with strange ideas and bold concepts. We have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. We need to acknowledge circumstances as they are, but our work has to be future-positive always pushing beyond boundaries. To design is to shape the future, so we have to be visionaries. Design is a bet on the future.

Good design is intuitive, accessible and empowering. To achieve that, the go-to approach has to be simplicity and clarity, but we can’t shy away from idiosyncratic aesthetics, playful storytelling and even vast beauty, if appropriate, either. Design needs balance, it has to speak to your head and your heart. Form follows feeling, just as form follows function.

I furthermore believe in doing good work without rushing, crafting with intention and that the best ‘stuff’ usually is built by happy people. To be able to deliver holistic and sustainable solutions we need to craft with care, curiosity and passion.

Happiness, as far as I’m concerned, comes from crafting varying ‘things’ consistently well while learning something new along the way as often as possible. Design is a skill supposed to surpass platforms. That’s why I like to collaborate interdisciplinary and do projects that cross-scale in media. Overall, I like to think of myself as not specialised in anything, but specialised in everything.

— last revisited on February 27th, 2024

Wednesday, January 03rd 2024

Small Seasons

A short introduction to Sekki

Back in ancient China and Japan, when agriculture was the backbone of society and the focal point of everyday life for the vast majority of the population, farmers broke down the year in twenty-four Sekki. In contrast to our four clunky seasons, those so-called “small seasons” (節気) were not pinned down to stiff calendar dates, but based on environmental phenomena and the rhythm of nature instead. In consequence, each Sekki is linked to a specific climatic shift or a recurring transformation in the fauna and flora, lasts for about two weeks and is described at times completely prosaic, at times with almost poetic language to visualize the characterising changes.

Even though living on a different continent means that nature follows a different flow over here and therefore not every Sekki can be carried over seamlessly, I like to tap into this special kind of calendar once in a while. Moreover, the small seasons of course aren’t as crucial to me as they used to be for the Asian farmers back in the day, but instead act as a friendly reminder to rekindle a deeper connection with nature and, in general, practice mindfulness more often.

With the new year setting in, it feels timely to propose the concept in itself and point to ‘A Guide to Understanding Small Seasons’ by Ross Zurowski in particular once again. To help you get started, the Canadian designer and developer set up a short and simplistic website a few years ago and even provided some handy tools to add Sekki to your own Google or iCal calendar.

Friday, November 10th 2023

estimated reading time:

something like three minutes

As of now

Earlier this year I sent my personal blog on a hiatus before pulling the plug completely a couple of weeks later. Now that I’m bringing it back, here’s a bit of context.

Summer has become the season I like to pause and reflect on my personal and professional life a little. It’s a worn-out cliche, yet time flies –in particular as a parent– so it’s a smart move to have a specific timeframe every year to take a genuine look at the path embarked upon and, if necessary and possible, take action to adjust the direction life is heading towards. Not to sound too spiritual, but periodically meditating about the recent past, the present and the near future has proven to be a quite healthy ritual, especially in the age of overstimulation.

And since the blog was always meant to be closely linked to and infused by my personal life, it was only consequential to review its status as well then.

Persistence of vision

One thing was for sure right away, though; My core belief in the value of decentralized networks, self-hosted websites and independent online spaces for aimless experimentation and personal expression is as strong as ever.

Besides the infinite social media maelstrom¹ and the continuously growing commercialization of the web², we will soon have to deal with an avalanche of AI-generated content³ as well. The corners of the internet cultivated by individuals are important for its vitality and may even become critical to the very survival of a humane online ecosystem. Otherwise, we might get irreversibly trapped in the walled gardens of social media platforms with our content at the mercy of obscure algorithms buried between all sorts of synthetic output.

Speaking of content, lucasdidthis.com is still going to be an incoherent array of context-dependent personal chunks (think Tumblr) on top of a very subjective collage of creative work personally or even culturally significant as well as stuff I work on myself. I still envision a collision of different ideas, perspectives and industries, but as of now, I’m going to tighten the very loosely curated stream of consciousness a bit.

To put it short, the topics as such won’t differ much, but the treatment, structure and emphasis of the content are about to change a little.

Form and function

Alongside the editorial shift, I’m introducing a visual update to reiterate those ambitions. Given the intent and the operating principle of the website are left untouched, I kept the layout pretty simple. The new design is first and foremost an evolution of the previous one, with only subtle adjustments in sizing, spacing and colouring. After all, I’m not willing to ditch the raw look and feel completely, so the text size is still a bit too big for conventional websites and the lines run still a tad too wide in contrast to the established rules of typography.

I did replace the font⁴ and improved the text composition noticeably, though, resulting in a less “brutal”⁵ and more sophisticated overall appearance.

I am aware that at the time of its publication (late 2023) some of the basic components of the blog aren’t working properly yet. Basically, the whole website is in a vague in-between space right now with me bouncing back and forth between conceptual thoughts, the underlying code and the visual output.

Matters of reconstruction

If you’ve visited the blog before (first of all thank you, appreciated), you might also notice the absence of the “old” blog posts. That’s less of a deliberate choice and more of a side effect of the most profound, yet least obvious change; I’ve ditched WordPress and built lucasdidthis.com from scratch once again using Kirby CMS this time.

This means that the underlying code is organized considerably differently now and beyond that, I’m moving from a database-driven to a file-based content management system. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to incorporate the existing articles into the new system automatically and without considerable hustle as a result. I might revisit some articles and publish revisioned versions or archive selected ones within the new system instead, but for now, they are gone.

The former version of lucasdidthis.com was never truly finished⁶, but now it’s set back even further since I’ve started off from absolute zero again.

I really enjoy working on the construction of the interface in conjunction with the content in the open, though, and it might be the most instinctive way to handle the web’s grain⁷ to be honest. Ultimately, the limited functionality shouldn’t get in your way too much, so you’re invited to already tag along, while I iron out the remaining rough edges.

That’s all for now. Welcome back, I hope you’ll find something you can appreciate. If you’d like to reach out, please feel free to do so. See you around.

ps.: You look great today.

footnotes

—

The web is fucked, but there might be some hope that The Age of Social Media Is Ending
An interesting (and extensive) essay about the role of technology in capitalism called “Surveillance Capitalism I: How digital platforms watch, track & control you”: https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/surveillance-capitalism-i-how-digital
In the paper “Facing Reality? Law Enforcement And The Challenge of Deepfakes” Europol estimates that 90% of the online content might be generated by Artificial Intelligence by the time of 2026: https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications-events/publications/facing-reality-law-enforcement-and-challenge-of-deepfakes
If you’re interested, there are some useful “Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design” by David Bryant Copeland
The former version of lucasdidthis.com was set in Inter, an amazing font by Rasmus Andersson, the new version is built with a beautiful font called Satoshi by the Indian Type Foundry instead. I’m still experimenting with the additional serif font, at least for now it’s Lora by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin for Cyreal
When it comes to finishing this website, I side with Arshile Gorky: »I don’t like that word finished. When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting —I just stop working on it for a while.«
“The web’s grain” is a concept described in an essay of the same name by the amazing Frank Chimero: https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain