“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

— Confucius

Whole Selves & Whole Stories over signs & designs.

Designers like signs. Icons. Fonts. But normal people—sorry, we designers are not normal!—prefer to see things they can relate to, things like themselves. The Design Masterclass says you should tell Whole Stories about Whole Selves. And we show you how. Intrigued? Good. Because that's all we're gonna say about it here! 

Faces are built for recognition

"Look! There's Darren! I'd know that ARM anywhere."

You're thinking, "Naah." Arms are really not that unique. But faces are. Faces have a much richer palette of variability than any other part of the body, because they're meant to be distinctive. Look at someone's face and you can not only recognize who they are, but you might also learn exactly how they're feeling at the moment.

The Design Masterclass teaches the art of NAMING the people, places and things in your work. We also show you how to FACE them—that is, to build for them a FACE that is well beyond a thumbnail headshot. A well-made FACE for an entity is made of entity attributes that allow your patrons to distinguish that purchase order, that invoice, that product item from all the others of its kind. Building a good FACE isn't easy. But you'll get the idea quick enough!

Little Things Roll Up

A tiny snowball will roll up into a big one, but only if it's warm enough for the snow to pack. It's the same in design. For all the little elements in your work to roll up into a meaningful whole, there has to be a certain warmth and cohesion among the elements of your design.

One way to help things roll up is to have elements scaled at each order of magnitude, so that small things are part of medium-sized things, which then in turn roll up into big things.

This is really easy to say. But it can be quite a subtle thing to do. It's part—and not a small part—of what you will learn in The Design Masterclass.