A Unified Field Theory of Design

Overview
Information Interaction Design

Information Design
Continuum of Understanding
Experience of  Knowledge
Organizing Things
Multiple Organizations
Goals & Messages
Clarity

Interaction Design
Having an Experience
Continuum of Interactivity
Control & Feedback
Productive and Creative Experiences
Communicative Experiences
Adaptive Experiences
The Experience Cube

Sensorial Design
Media Differences
Style & Meaning
Conclusion

Additional Resources

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Your approach to style will be an outcome of the various goals, messages and objectives you have established for your particular project. We can talk about the meaning of a corporate style or a whimsical style and immediately understand that what is right for one would be wrong for the other.

style: a particular manner or technique by which something is done, created, or performed.

In typography, style refers to the structures of information such as, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic arrangement and font. However, no matter what design techniques you use in a project, all style has meaning, whether it is implied, accidental, or deliberate.

Here are some of Shedroff's thoughts on the subject:

• Choose the appropriate attributes for a project and implement them consistently. This is imperative to the development of a cohesive experience. Example: do you want to disrm your audience and make them feel like children again, then serve them milk and cookies. For large projects, this cohesion can easily get lost as many people implement various parts to their own standards.

• Add cool details to your project. That's the fun part. They seriously affect the presentation, legibility, and understanding of the meaning of a message. Even a detail like justified type (flush left, flush right, or centered) changes the legibility and perception of a paragraph and, therefore, the text itself.

• All sensorial details must coordinate not only with each other, but with the goals and messages of the project. Look for ways to weave the details into the overall pattern of the whole.