Digital Under Current
A collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organized by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.
Design Isn’t What You See — It’s What Your Mind Builds
Gestalt psychology reveals the true nature of design: it doesn’t exist solely in shapes, colors, or layouts—it exists in how our minds organize and interpret them. Visual elements alone are static measurements, but once they interact with our psychological perception, they become dynamic forces that influence balance, meaning, and emotion. Design, then, isn’t a collection of parts; it’s a lived experience created between what’s on the page and how we perceive it. In other words, visual communication isn’t seen—it’s constructed in the mind.
The final result is the artist's true statement
Visual art is shaped by both the artist and the viewer. While the final work stands as the artist’s true statement, its interpretation depends on the audience, who filters it through personal experience and subjective judgment. Despite these differences, artist and viewer share a universal foundation: the human visual system. Our shared sensory and neurological processes form a common language through which all art is seen, understood, and experienced.
The act of seeing involves a response to light
Our ability to see begins with light, and the most essential element of any visual experience is tone—the presence or absence of light. While light reveals all other visual elements such as color, shape, line, direction, and texture, tone serves as their foundation. In painting, tone organizes these elements and allows the artist to choose which ones to emphasize. Though painting can be described through its basic components, its true potential lies in the infinite ways artists manipulate tone and technique to express meaning. Through selective emphasis and creative decisions, artists transform light into interpretation, giving form to both what is seen and felt.
Perception and visual communication
Visual communication begins with two interdependent actions: creating a visual message and perceiving it. Designers, artists, and photographers intentionally arrange colors, shapes, textures, tones, and proportions to convey ideas. This composition becomes the maker’s message. But communication isn’t complete until someone sees it.
Perception—the act of absorbing visual information through the eyes—is a universal human process. Because we share similar perceptual mechanisms, we also share the ability to interpret visual meaning. This shared perception allows images, objects, and spaces to communicate across cultures.
Between broad visual impressions and specific messages lies a functional layer of meaning found in everyday designed objects. Houses, clothing, architecture, tools, and even handmade crafts reflect the values and identities of the people who made and used them. Studying what a culture builds reveals who they are.
Visual communication, then, is not only about what we create, but how we collectively see—and what our creations say about us.
Composition
Composition is the essential foundation of visual communication. It argues that while written language follows fixed syntactical rules, the visual world offers no absolute system for organizing its elements. Instead, composition becomes a deliberate act of arranging visual parts to produce meaning, emotion, and clarity. Because choices in composition strongly shape how viewers interpret a message, visual communicators must understand how perception works and how structural decisions influence a viewer’s response. Though there may be no rigid rules, research in perception and visual literacy offers reliable guidelines—helping designers approach composition intelligently and intentionally to create work that conveys a shared, purposeful message.
First Principle Thinking
First principle thinking is a method for tackling complex problems by stripping them down to their most essential elements. It asks: what is the fundamental proposition—the assumption that exists on its own, independent of everything else? By identifying these irreducible truths, we can avoid relying on inherited assumptions, conventional wisdom, or surface-level reasoning. From this foundation, new solutions and insights emerge, built from the ground up rather than pieced together from existing ideas.
Design Beyond Defaults: Why Typography Demands Deeper Knowledge
In an era where electronic page design gives us more typographic freedom than ever, designers also carry a greater responsibility. With limitless options for manipulating type, it becomes essential to understand the cultural and formal evolution of typography itself. Without that foundation, it’s easy to fall into the traps of trendy aesthetics, clichéd software presets, or the mindless acceptance of default settings. This post explores why typographic literacy is no longer optional—and how thoughtful, informed choices elevate communication far beyond what tools alone can offer.
Designing the Unseen: Implied Motion and the Dimensional Challenges of Visual Art
Although we live our entire lives in a dimensional, ever-moving world, most of our visual thinking still defaults to flat marks on a static page or screen. Yet movement—arguably one of the most dominant forces in human experience—is rarely depicted directly in visual art. Instead, artists rely on implication: textures that feel real through detail, depth suggested by perspective and shadow, and motion hinted at through composition and our own lived memory of how things move.
Before film, all visual representation existed in this frozen state, one step removed from reality. Even cinema, celebrated for capturing motion, relies on an illusion—individual still frames stitched together by our eyes through persistence of vision. This blog explores how deeply our perception shapes what we believe we see, and how the challenge of conveying dimension and movement reveals the surprising limits of static visual media.