As designers, we’re often faced with the challenge of finding a unifying theme or structure for our work. To say it poetically, the theme is waft on which we weave our art.

More frankly, it’s a crutch. A design project involves hundreds if not thousands of decisions. Space, color, scale, typography, heirarchy, tone. All of these decisions can be absolutely overwhelming.

Until you find a theme. The theme turns all of those decisions into just one simple question: Does this fit? It lets us use our brain in that lateral, complex, quantum way. We can immediately test any decision against that “feeling” of fit. It provides a compass, a grounding, a center from which everything can radiate.

In all of my experience, whenever I’ve been stuck or someone I’m working with is stuck, the missing ingredient is theme.

All of the upfront work in planning and consumer research and input briefs and brands statements are all about one thing: providing that theme.

Beauty is skin deep, much like branding. If your brand is not founded on solid research and strategy it’ll fail you quicker than you can say cheapasslogo.com. You could probably head to your local beauty parlor and get a logo while having your nails done, but trust me, the shine will wear off after a few days especially when you see Trevor’s Trailers Company down the road has the same cheapasslogo.

So as I always say, ‘Buy cheap, buy twice’. Buy originality and experience, buy a story that has intelligence founded on solid research, it’ll serve you longer and pay for itself, why wouldn’t you want to shine?

Just today I had the good fortune to discover Matthew Milliner and his blog, millinerd.com. He’s a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton. He’s also a graduate of Princeton’s Theological Seminary. Don’t let the visual aesthetic of his blog lead to you the conclusion that it is without beauty. A tendentious antipathy to Christianity would perhaps make it difficult to get at the beauty there, so, y’know, YMMV.

His recent post, The Largest Show on Earth, is what brought me to him. I’ve been trying to reconstruct how I found it but, sadly, I cannot. It’s a simple and clever little post about Bauhaus and MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibit. Part of what struck me about the post was a quote from Michael J. Lewis (whom I assume to be THIS Dr. Lewis).

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I recently discovered hoodiepeople.com, which, I know, I’m slow. It’s a very smart hoodie etailer out of Petaluma, California. If you like hoodies—and who doesn’t—it’s definitely worth checking out.

Thanks to hoodiepeople and their excellent blog, I was pleased to discover Marc Ecko‘s got a line of Star Wars hoodies that are entirely too clever. I particularly like the X-Wing pilot hoodie (which hoodiepeople don’t seem to carry for some reason) and the Boba Fett hoodie. So, y’know, if you’re trying to decide what to buy me so as to curry favor, well, now you know.

The good people at Groklaw have a post up from yesterday entitled, “The GPL Barter Cycle — A Graphic” which endeavors to elucidate how open source software is a self-contained barter cycle. The process diagram is lucid and the thesis it explains is similarly clear. But, there appears to me to be something missing.

For those that don’t know, GPL is a “copyleft” license. It provides a framework by which software source code can be freely distributed, and ensures that any derivative work carries the same expectation of free distribution. Which, I think this is a great thing, isn’t it? Because of GPL, we have innovations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Mobile devices, embedded devices, start-up businesses; a great many things have been the beneficiary of the open source movement.

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