Welcome to the Doubleshot newsletter! As you may have noticed, I’ve moved toward a “whenever it’s ready” model of sending the newsletter. I only want to send you all emails when I have something cool and cogent to share, so I’m publishing them somewhat sporadically.
That said, I’m grateful that you’re here and—as always—appreciate your feedback and ideas :)
Now, let’s get started.
📚 Read This: “Geometric Circles Are Born Diamonds” by Troy Leinster
Troy Leinster of Leinster Type (and one of my teachers at the Cooper Union’s Type@Cooper program) recently published a blog post about the inherently funky nature of geometry on digital displays, called Beware: geometric circles are born diamonds.
As I’ve written before, type design is a practice that really helped free me from a reliance on objective mathematics in design. It made me see all the “fixed” logos people post on social media (especially attempts to cram Google’s “super G” logo into a perfect circle) in a new, dimmer light. And Troy’s post demonstrates exactly why.
Prompted by Pentagram’s brand work for the Guggenheim (shown below), Troy unpacks graphic design’s reliance on optical illusion—perfect circles don’t exist in reality, and especially not on digital displays—and shows through a series of examples how you can successfully create a convincing-looking circle on screen, all while showing that, maybe, the new Guggenheim logo is a “fixed” version that could benefit from unfixing.
Check out Troy’s post here, and sign up for his newsletter where I saw the post first!
🙋 Q&A: UX Research & Strategy Seminar Japan by Members Co.
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to give a talk at the UX Research & Strategy Seminar hosted by Members Co. in Japan (I was in Zürich, delivering the talk remotely). It was a great experience, and well over 200 folks joined as I went through an updated and expanded version of a session I started working on last year: The Real Promise of AI in Design: Beyond Productivity and Towards Intersubjectivity.
Afterward, we had some time for Q&A. The participants submitted some really great questions, and I wanted to share a few of them (along with my answers) with the Doubleshot audience.
