Design is not just for Designers

I came across a very interesting article on how art generally and design specifically helps in one’s daily life. This goes for people who don’t deal with art on a daily basis too.

A few pointers caught my attention. Enumerating them as follows:

1. Any package, brouchure or website which had some design thoughts on it never comes across as a ‘designed accident’. Even if the content inside does not interest you, the overall design stimulates your brain.

2. Learn to doodle, draw or paint. Learn how to talk when you are producing this art. Helps a lot in whiteboard presentations.

3. Learn to take good photos. Understand what makes one photo better than another one.

4. Watch TED videos related to design and creativity.

5. Take walks alone in the nature or or in your neighbourhood when traffic is not at its peak. Helps not to have your phone with you when you do this.

6. Take walks alone with your phone along (better in the airline mode) and record your thoughts on the way. Put it up online either in your blog or as a “not for public” entry. This could be a seperate blog or a tumblr account.

After all there is design in everything we do. Do we not design strategies or financial projections?

What happens in the social media scene

Something cool I did when I got some time.

I know there are spelling errors – came to know of it later. I was a little too enthu I guess!

forgive and forget

Period in pictures (source: BBC)

Some cool pictures

Vodka and Christmas – drink and rejoice

Winters in India – need for fuel

Power Play – size matters

destruction at gaza

it is DIY 2009

2009 is a major DIY year. Division of labour is getting old fashioned. I will be blogging and cooking both. I will make good stuff. I will .. I will… I will bloody hell change the scene.

How? DIY!

2009 is not a material year

2009 might just become a materialistically simpler year in a long long time. I am feeling it. Feeling it

Powerpoint presentations are much cooler with just text boxes

Home and have to help out your old parents. It is one way of expressing gratitude – blah blah emo emo emo blah blah  

I did trip on Presentation Zen for a long while. Help asked in the form of a Powerpoint presentation was jumped into. I was waiting for such an opportunity to tune up the things I have wanted to try out for – and this time for real. This powerpoint would be seen by people! and not on Slideshare!

This time the machine did not have Office 2007. All experimentation was on Office 2003.

1. No smart graphics. All actions to be done in the “primitive” way.

2. All slides were done on white background and blank layout

3. The entire powerpoint presentation was done using Textboxes only. No bullets, no crazy fonts.

4. Five words in one slide corresponded to five different text boxes. Placed with absoultely no symmetry and certain words with higher fonts. This looks absolutely neat and cool.

The end result – the old people absolutely loved the presentation. Done in absolutely minimal time too. Previous experiences with the backgrounds, word art and layouts were compeltely eliminated. 

Inference: Minimal is completely cool. I was scared that my parents would be asking for the usual – “make it look more powerpoint like” and it never happened also. 

Extrapolated inference: Its not about more features and buttons – its about the absolutely necessary ones. Zen!

Simple definitions – 4 – Information

1. Information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

2. Information Age is a term that has been used to refer to the present era. The name alludes to the global economy’s shift in focus away from the production of physical goods (as exemplified by the industrial age) and towards the manipulation of information.

3. Information Technology is the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.

4. Communication is the process of attempting to suggest information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium.

5. Media (Singular: Medium) are the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data.

6. Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience

7. An audience is a group of people who encounter a work of art, literature, theatre, music or academics in any medium.

8. Commercial advertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television ads, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human directional, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses or airplanes (“logojets”), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles, the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts.

9. Electronic media are media that utilize electronics or electromechanical energy for the end user (audience) to access the content

10. In media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience.

Wikipedia rocks!

Simple defintions -3 (Business)

1. A business (also called firm or an enterprise) is a legally recognized organizational entity designed to provide goods and/or services to consumers.

2. Consumers refers to individuals or households that use goods and services generated within the economy.

3. A good in economics is any object, service or right that increases utility, directly or indirectly, not to be confused with the adjective “good” as used in a moral or ethical sense.

4. A service is the diametrically opposed non-material counterpiece of a physical good.

5. Trade is the willing exchange of goods, services, or both. Trade is also called commerce.

6. Utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of various goods and services.

7. An industry (from Latin industrius, “diligent, industrious”) is the manufacturing of a good or service within a category

8. Markets may be any of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy.

9. Business-to-consumer (B2C, sometimes also called Business-to-Customer) describes activities of businesses serving end consumers with products and/or services.

10. Business-to-business (B2B) is a term commonly used to describe commerce transactions between businesses.

All lifted from wikipedia!

Simple definitions – Part 2 – Religion

1. A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.

2. Hinduism is a religious tradition that originated in the Indian subcontinent.

3. Islam is a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion originating with the teachings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure.

4. Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament.

5. Judaism (from the Greek Ioudaïsmos, derived from the Hebrew יהודה, Yehudah, “Judah”; in Hebrew: יַהֲדוּת, Yahedut, the distinctive characteristics of the Judean eáqnov) is the religion of the Jews.

6. A ritual is a set of actions, often thought to have symbolic value, the performance of which is usually prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community by religious or political laws because of the perceived efficacy of those actions

7. Practice or practise (verb form in British English) is the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it, as in the phrase “practice makes perfect”.

8. Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

9. God is the principal or sole deity in religions and other belief systems that worship one deity. The singular, capitalized God of monotheistic religions is commonly contrasted with the gods of polytheistic religions.

10. Worship usually refers to specific acts of religious devotion, typically directed to one or more deities.

All thanks to Wikipedia!

Simple definitions to get sorted

1. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). 

2. Life is a state that distinguishes organisms from non-living objects, such as non-life, and dead organisms.

3. Career is a term defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an individual’s “course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)”.

4. Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection.

5. Money is anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts.

6. A job is a role served by a person or thing, usually involving productive work.

7. India, officially the Republic of India is a country in South Asia.

8. Wealth derives from the old English word “weal”, which means “well-being.”

9. Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects.

10. Music is an art form in which the medium is sound organized in time.

These are first sentences from wikipedia. Telling you to cut the crap and start off with the basics