We see what we call “reality” only through the range available to us.
Animals can perceive other wavelength ranges that we cannot. Some fish can sense electric fields. Every living being sees the world at its own resolution, through its own filter.
Because, as humans, we enjoy communicating and assigning meaning,
we think through images, symbols, graphs and curves that we have previously recorded and come to know in our minds.
A significant part of what we call thinking is made up of seeing. The fact that we cannot imagine a new color is not due to a lack of imagination, but because our perception has limits.
If the aim of a painting is to convey an emotion, we usually do it through light. Because, in truth, we do not have much else at our disposal.
Every brushstroke placed on the canvas serves the direction of the painting’s light, as well as the color, intensity and softness of that light.
And all of these are also actions directed toward the message you decided in advance that you wanted the finished painting to convey.
With the right light coming from the right direction, anything can be made to resemble anything else.
If painting means convincing a surface that it is something that is not actually there,
then, if you also produce graphics for screens—graphic design, photography, 3D, website interfaces, UI and so on—painting is like a hack.
Many people repeat, almost by rote, that art and design are separate. This can roughly be summarized as: “because their audiences are different.”
Carrying out a design task as if you were making art is not a problem. In fact, that is exactly how it should be done.
When you make paintings and open an exhibition, however, the people who come are generally people who are willing to like what they see and who already like you.
When doing design work, you are trying to understand someone who is dealing with a business’s real-world pain, and then show them something “tasteful” on top of it. But the person evaluating it is not there to see something beautiful or to like it. They only wanted to be understood.
If you could not make them like it, the problem is not their lack of taste. It is that you did not ask the right questions to understand them.
That is why we begin not by producing images, but by asking questions.
The onboarding questions at portal.ycswu.co are not there just to make you fill out a form; they are there to understand what you see, what hurts and what you want to change. Then we build the image.
