Jazz Graphic Design - Newsletter - 2024-04-20

tags:: #output/email on/design

Subject:
Jazz is difficult—so don't make your graphic design jazz

Content:
I heard this beautiful quote the other day:

Engineers are just mathematically inclined artists.

I'd say there's actually a lot of math in art.

And just like art becomes intuition, math does too.

When I studied engineering, our math classes brought me through this experience over and over:

That experience gave me one of my fundamental beliefs:

Pretty much everything is true.

When you "disagree" with someone—they're not wrong...you just miss some of the nuance to understand the context in which it's true.

Just like math theorems start from a set of fundamental assumptions.
Then they build other assumptions on those first ones.
Then they take those together to tell you something new.

In our exams, we'd be presented with new theorems to prove.

It sounds impossible—because to prove these theorems you'd have to do some "random magic tricks." Random shit like "oh, lets raise the exponential to this value and see what happens" or "if we integrate it between 0 and 1 we see that those terms cancel out." Like...how do you come up with this???

Turns out that learning these proofs gives you some intuition. And somehow the mind learns to come up with new ideas to solve the new problems.

It's like you suddenly see shapes that weren't there before, like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

INSERT IMAGE

Graphic design works the same way.

Everyone can sort of "feel" a good design vs. a bad design. But a designer can tell you why. They see the shapes.

Same way my photography experience can have me look at a photo and know: it would have looked 10x better if you just stepped to the side half a meter.

But even though it can feel like "feeling" or "intuition," I think there's a lot of maths hidden behind it.

Just like music: if you'd listen to a song where the rhythm changes every two seconds, you'll be confused as hell.

Yes, they do it in jazz. But it's still quite constrained, and it's far from an easy genre to listen to.

The big artists have a little "cheat card" in their minds:

I have the same thing when I'm designing a webpage.

And I think great designers are just good at remembering their little "cheat card."

See...rhythm is not just a musical thing. It's a visual thing too.

If you're reading a webpage and the "speed" changes all the time, you'll get confused and irritated.

"Marcel, what do you mean 'speed'? It's doesn't move!"

Yes it does. It changes in the reader's mind as they're discovering the website. So the rhythm is in:

And here's where all the "easy" tools are working against you.

They just give you a text field with "what's the distance between these?"

INSERT IMAGE

This can work, but only if you're very diligent with what you're going to fill in.

I always have a "distance scale:" a set of values I allow myself to fill in here. You want it to be geometric, so there are bigger "gaps" as distances get bigger. Something like: 8px, 16px, 24px, 32px, 64px, 128px,...

Then when you pay a lot of attention to only use these—you'll find it's a lot easier to design something that "feels right."

Same goes for colors—it helps to have a limited set of colors, and some shades, in your toolbox. Then just stick to those.

This is just one example of why I feel that engineering, art and mathematics are so close.

Everything is the same thing.

I hope this letter helped you create some new connections.

And I'll see you another day.

Thanks for reading, {$name}.

Keep crushing it. With love.
Marcel