Storytelling helps designers and marketers create imagery, emotional resonance and a more complete understanding of events or systems through a natural interaction between themselves and an audience. Storytelling is an important skill in learning and sharing information and biologically hard wired into all of us as a uniquely human trait. Storytelling is the original method through which we have always passed information to one another and is a rich and satisfying way to share knowledge. Read more »

How smart are our eyes?

In his Theory of Colours, published just over 200 years ago, Goethe describes colour as having ‘a strange duplicity’ and wrote about colour as something other than constant and fixed. Although his theory has been superseded, his ideas on colour perception as a product of the interplay of light and dark are still relevant today. Goethe is also partly responsible for the colour circle that is standard now and the idea of complementary colours. Read more »

The circle of life

All products progress through a sequence of four stages of life, from introduction (birth) through to growth, maturity and finally decline and death. Firstly the product is envisioned and developed; after launching (if lucky) popularity will grow, although ultimately sales will plateau and finally decline.  Each stage has specific implications and priorities for designers and marketers, as the demands will evolve and change over time. The classic work on product diffusion models is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers, which follows on from and builds on the original Bass model of product diffusion which continues to be the basis of most new product forecasting. Read more »

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain

Mnemonic devices help us remember information by reorganising it to be simpler and more meaningful (often creating iconic representations through letters and images). Mnemonic devices use images and words in very specific ways to create a mental shortcut from less familiar information to more familiar memories which are already embedded in the brain. As with icons, such devices are most powerful when the images are vivid, peculiar or exaggerated in some way or the words and letters are very familiar and closely related to any images. They are particularly useful for remembering names of new things, large amounts of information (through chunking), and sequences of events (ie procedures). Examples of mnemonic devices are: Read more »