A Sense of Design
After I announced muxventures last Friday, my dad emailed me to tell me he was excited for me and that he liked the name. Then he emailed later and asked me:
By the way, did you design home page of “muxventures”? It’s a nice design with simple and clean look and highlighted “x”.
I told him that I did design it and that I got my design sense from him. It meant a lot to me that he told me he liked it. You see, my dad is an architect and was a professor of interior design at Florida State University for over 30 years, so he knows a thing or two about design.
But it made me think, I don’t remember having any formal instruction from my dad about design. It was all around the house when I was growing up and I watched my dad at the drafting table every day. He would show me what it meant to draw in perspective, I’d see all of the models that his students built for their final projects, and I’d go with him to visit construction sites of buildings that he had designed.
And somehow all of that influenced my sense of design, but I can’t really place how that happened. Maybe what I learned was more to pay attention to it and to notice it more than anything else. I distinctly remember doing a final presentation for the project I had worked on at this summer science program when I was in high school and when my dad saw the poster I had made, the first thing he noticed was how I wrote out the title. I had done what I thought was a cool 3D effect with the letters, where I drew it once in black, then I drew it slightly offset with different colors a couple times. He did not think it looked good and thought I should have done something simpler and cleaner. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was something I have not forgotten after all of these years. I imagine small events like these added up to form my sense of design, but again I don’t remember it being anything formal.
It’s sort of like the story of Steve Jobs and his dad building the fence in the backyard, learning about craftsmanship and how the importance of quality extends to even the parts you don’t see. These events, which seem inconsequential at the time, go on to form long lasting values that influence the bigger decisions of your life. It makes me more aware of how I interact with my sons and I wonder what parts of their childhood they will remember many decades later that will influence key decisions in their life.
