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This is a space to celebrate beauty - not just the beauty of form, but also those patterns of essential wholeness that go beyond the visible.
Wholeness dissolves the illusion that life and work are separate. So, while this is a "professional" blog in that I design online communications for a living and often write about design, communications & technology, it's also about everything else I see (in the world and in myself) when looking through a beauty-lens.
I was reading something in Chris Brogan's blog the other day on blog design, a solid informative post about basing each design decision on its congruence with your blog's intended use. At last count this piece had drawn 61(!) comments from his readers, many of them appreciative of Brogan's suggestion to use a thinner header to take full advantage of valuable page "real estate".
I wrote a long comment myself, in part promoting the idea of a more expansive banner, because sometimes an image is as valuable (if not more so) as anything else you could say. This fact may not be immediately apparent in the largely left-brain logic of the marketplace, but it is no less true. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind
One of the great things about a blog is how easy it is to change it, and I tend to be continually tweaking and fine-tuning my "look and feel" and sidebar content. This new banner, for example, is a radical departure from what I've done here in the past.
Even though it intuitively felt right, I must admit at first I was nervous about using black in the beauty dialogue color scheme, since I usually have a more literal focus on light. Then I saw these lines from Anam Cara
"We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness ... All creativity awakens at this pivotal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm."
The power of visual language is undeniable, perhaps because it speaks not only to our conscious, logical brain, but also to our unconscious, poetic intuition and imagination. Like Pink, I believe that gaining intuitive fluency is one of the most important skills you can develop, as a designer and as a human being.
But what do you think? What are some of the design decisions you have made and why did you make them? Where does your own balance lie between logic and intuition?
One of the reason I choose to use TypePad is their obvious care for beauty - from the viewpoint of a designer it is very easy to make a beautiful blog with this software, and from a user's standpoint, the interface has a refreshing clarity and ease.
I've just spend two days creating my new Squidoo lens.
In case you have no idea what that is, it's a genius idea created by marketing guru Seth Godin - a site where people can create pages giving their 'lens' on a subject they have particular expertise in. These pages are often quite useful resource guides on a wide variety of topics, and mine is a BRILLIANT guide to bringing beauty to the internet through online design. It has some great documents, links, photos, videos and a list of excellent books along with some helpful "tips" to get you started.
The trouble is that the Squidoo system is set up so that a person can't even begin promoting their lens until it gets a certain number of 'hits' and a decent rating. So if you have even a tiny touch of geekiness in you - or if you just have a warm heart and want to support me - please sign in to Squidoo (it's free and exceptionally easy) and rate my lens: www.squidoo.com/beautyandtechnology
If you're even geekier and/or really love me a lot it would be very helpful if you digg my lens (and/or my blog!) or bookmark it on stumbledupon, del.icio.us, and/or technorati.
Bless you, my friends!
Thirteen Grandmothers from indigenous communities in the Americas, Nepal, Tibet, Africa, and Japan came on stage to open the Bioneers conference this morning, each one sharing a blessing in her own language - for the earth, its creatures and all of humanity, including the 13,000 individuals gathered here in San Rafael or viewing the program by satellite feed.
The Mill Valley Art Festival had many beautiful things on display this year - artisan crafts, photographs, artwork of all kinds - but one that has stuck with me long after the booths were struck was this piece of jewelry by rebecca bashara:
The simplicity, originality and functionality of the design attracted me, but even more delightful was the fact that all her jewelry features river stones. That's right; river stones.
It takes a special kind of artist to shower so much love and attention on what to the uninitiated would be simply ordinary rocks, but she is that kind and I love her work.
If you know me or have read this blog for any length of time, you know that bringing sacred space into the online sphere has been one of my strongest dreams and passions ever since I entered this field. In my work I am always seeking to create environments of peace and beauty where silence is welcome and hearts connect, where we are aware of all our relations within the natural and spirit worlds and can enter deeply into our essential nature as Humans and relate together in the sure knowledge that we are one interconnected spirit and body.
I’ve been integrating color and images and movement into user interfaces, cultivating the practice of kindness and respect in conversational forums, and generally evolving these sensory-based language(s) as my ground-of-being online. I have been blessed with many successes, large and small, in beginning to realize my dream, but the other night my ability to imagine what is truly possible took a quantum leap.
My friend and playmate in this realm FireHawk Hulin (aka DragonWolf Goheen) invited me to join him in Second Life to explore something he and the ever-amazing David Sibbet (aka Sunseed Bardeen) had been working on with the exquisite Michelle Paradis (aka SingingHeart Amat) … something truly unique in my experience, and totally magical.
I was just at a conference (actually, it was an 'unconference') in Mountain View for online community professionals. The design was Open Space Technology, which means the sessions were collaboratively designed 'on the fly' by the people who were there. That was a gas, and made it easier to connect with the other participants, including wise, experienced, 'famous' (ok, it's all relative) online community pioneers like Howard Rheingold, Cliff Figallo and Gail Ann Williams (all from the original WELL, Gail now at Salon).
Right now I’m on the train to Dresden, thinking about language. I’m on my way to Dresden to experience what’s going on at the newly-formed World Café Europe’s first pan-European gathering, and I’m thinking about language because part of my role there will be to help convey this experience to others, and I am dreaming about ways to do that most effectively.
I received an email this morning from an extraordinary artist I'd written to a year or so ago when her work was exhibited in one of my favorite magazines (Orion). Her name is Suzanne Stryk, and apparently some random comment of mine inspired her to create a website - a 'gallery without walls' to share her art with the world.
I'm very pleased to have had anything at all to do with something this beautiful (read her artist's statement for a story of a perfect love affair between a woman, her art & nature), and am struck by how even a casual comment can yield such a powerful result. Let this be a lesson to us all not to hold back our compliments when we see something wonderful!
Her work is really glorious - here's a taste, as an invitation to visit her site for more:
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