Living by Design

By Aaron on July 8, 2014 in Design

Stop to smell the flowers – life by design

Design is in everything, anything can be designed. Life is by design, as well, you can design your own life. To live without design, should be a crime because all it takes is imagination to create a designer lifestyle. Just ask yourself if you’re happy, in all aspects of your life? If there’s some aspect that sucks then redesign it, or plan to eliminate it. Get a new game on, if the old one bores you and I don’t mean on TV.

My opinion is that television is the biggest waste of time that most people have in their lives, although movies and documentaries can be enriching, the majority of programmed television content makes you worse, not better. Self-improvement is a personal choice that can, and should be, designed into everyone’s lives. From babies to seniors, we can all make the world a better place by improving ourselves – just step away from that remote control.

Here’s my suggestion for redesigning your life and increase your happiness factor. It’s’ called “Radical Time Management”, also I recommend designing yourself an electronic journal using Evernote. In Evernote (or MS One Note) make 12 notebooks, one for each month, then each morning of your life you create a new note, in the appropriate notebook (i.e. July/ Tues July 8). During the day you’ll need to update the journal so you can detail how you spend your time. Then before you retire for the evening, sit down and give the day a good review, make some comments and give yourself a score between zero and one hundred. Now you have the tools for designing your life to increase the time spent, doing the things that make you the most happy.

Happy times, by design.

As for my designer lifestyle?

I often wonder; am I happy because I tell myself I’m happy, or am I happy sincerely? The answer – it doesn’t matter why I’m happy, whether it’s perceived or real is not important. What matters; is that good things happen often, by design.

I’m lucky to love website design, it presents a variety of concepts from style to function. Like learning how to blend eye-catching appeal with user friendliness. There’s allot of psychology involved in commercial graphic design. Assuming the topic content is popular and extensive enough, the web designers mission is be bring the subject and information to life on the web, in a coherent and stimulating way. Often-times the website project has design specifications (i.e. colors, logo and theme etc…), in which case the designer would look to enhance, improve or streamline the layout and/or user interface.

Sometimes the logo needs an overhaul, or maybe the website header could be improved? Design never ends.

Silicon Palms is about 16 years old and the site has been re-designed about a dozen times. Even the logo has never stopped changing. Although in it’s most recent design we discovered a Google font called “Pacifico” to be what we had always wanted, since it has the “retro” flair like a Palms Springs Hotel from the 20’s, just needed a bevel and emboss. Next we added a color theme from the Adobe Khuler called “beach on sunset”, then 2 palm tree icons over a transparent background and voila the new logo was born. Simple, elegant and functional.