Here we go. The tickets are finally bought. I’ll be in Japan from April the 6th to April the 26th. This life-long held dream will become a reality. I’ve always been a Japan-devoted, for so many reasons… Fascination is an accurate word to describe this strange relationship, that I’ve cultivated since I was 7 years old. Happiness!

Every time we hit the mark of January the 1st, my panurgic abilities rise to the point where it hurts. Yes, I want to take good resolutions and write them down like I’d draw little monsters, read to bite my ass every time I’ll read them out loud after a few days.

Let’s be honest. No one keeps their resolutions seriously for more than a week unless they’ve been given some super-spiritural self-control abilities. And if you do, please stay in the shadows so  I can comfort myself with the idea. So, well, I won’t make a list this year. Let’s say I just want to find peace. Wherever it is.

Anyway. I wanted to wish you all a very happy new year.
I’m not fond of this peculiar tradition but well… there’s quite a lot of you by now (by my standards) and my lack of consistency in posting make me say that you’re all pretty nice to come over so regularly.

So thank you for the read. Thank you for the Stumble upon. Thank you for the 25.000 visits in a day last April that I truly hope to be able to reach again. Have a great year people from the internet, you deserve it.

Lots of love,

Zélia

‘”Usually, when something become useful, it ceases to be beautiful”
Théophile Gautier

I read this quote by Theophile Gautier when I was 6, and it never ceased to haunt me until then. As a child, I thought it was a pretty harsh statement to say beautiful things were useless. Of course I didn’t have, at the time, enough abilities to catch all the subtleties of  this statement. Anyway, I thought that was paying no respect to the spoon designers, cause spoons were a really nice object after all.

As I grew up, I studied fine art and learned a lot about aesthetics over there. I learned that it’s not something we all share equally. I learned that aesthetics were more influences by your education than I primarily thought. I learned that not everybody thought spoons were nice and beautiful.

Today, I work as a designer for the web. My job is to design useless things, sort of. Useless things that are used anyway : people go on those websites. They read them. They navigate through them.
I started questioning myself about the aesthetics of the website I saw. Some were nice to my eyes, other were really not appealing. But in the end, those I came back to more often were not the sexier, shinier website.  And I was not alone. Facebook, Myspace, Amazon, Ebay, Google… all those websites show not that good design when not no design at all. They’re not beautiful, not even slightly.

Aesthetics are a lure when designing interactions and digital behaviors, somehow. The role of a designer is not to design “pretty”, it’s to design efficiency, usability and brand consistency.
Pretty is the cherry on top that proves you’re good at what you do.

And by the way, read some poetry by that good’ole Theophile Gautier. It’s useless and beautiful. Just like he wanted.

Fashion Show with Google from Robbin Waldemar on Vimeo.

How much do you love Google Japan and their way to preset the new image search features ? Squeaky girls and cute dresses, ahhhh, the dream of every girl.