The idea from this week's reading that I will be responding to is Design Principle 3.3:

Principle 3.3: Imbue Personality

I think what interested me the most about this design principle is that there are, what I believe to be, two main ways to go about the imbuing of personality in design - one easy (and gimmicky to a certain extent) and one of considerably more difficulty. The easy and gimmicky way to make something read as personality in design is to simply give it "person"-hood, hijacking our positive predisposition towards anthropomorphic things. Give it eyes and a mouth and you're good to go.

Now I'm not trying to claim that anthropomorphism is a bad thing in all cases - the sense of familiarity that it conveys can help to encourage us and give us the confidence to overcome all sorts of hurdles. Take Clippy for example. Yeah we kind of clown on him in the meme age and have moved away from skeuomorphism as a design pattern in general, but I think anthropomorphizing what is ostensibly a help menu was a great idea for a time when many people were still new to and hesitant towards home computing. What I am saying, though, is that it is not hard to reach the bar of "personality" when taking this approach, because you (as a designer) are leaning on inbuilt biology to make the effect.

What is more challenging as a designer is giving something personality without anthropomorphizing it. It is necessarily a subtler form of personality; it's more about a "vibe" or a "feeling" that emerges when encountering or experiencing a designed artifact. My current view is that this sort of personality is an emergent property of designs with a well-defined and consistent visual language. It's easiest to see this effect at its extremes - just put a playground next to anything from the Evil Buildings subreddit and you'll see what I mean.

Imbuing a design with personality in this sense is an art that requires practice and patience on the part of a designer, because a designer's personal visual language must necessarily precede the development of context- or personality-dependent signifiers. Only once you have an understanding of and deep familiarity with the building blocks with which you construct your designs are you able to speak in the types of full visual "sentences" that allow a personality to emerge.