In some high school English class, I was taught how to analyze a text through different lenses. For example with The Great Gatsby, I could either explain the symbolic meaning of the green light or connect the wealth disparities to the historic time period of the Roaring 20s.
Also around the same time in my life, I was a casual sneakerhead. This meant knowing all the brands & models, memorizing colorways, knowing when new collabs were dropping, and separating hype from not. A side effect of this was staring at everyones feet- my subconscious automatically querying and updating a database. I felt like a kid who just learned about farm animals pointing at any moving object yelling “COW”. A friend told me this was weird, but realized they do the same for outfits.1
In the past week or so, I’ve been learning pixel art. I read a series of blog posts by Pedro Medeiros. Now, I automatically identify features such as anti-aliasing, shading, and pixel-perfect lines when any form of pixel art is in front of me. I am still very much a beginner, but I hypothesize that exercising these subconscious muscles is part of what makes an expert.
There is some discussion to be had between recognizing aesthetic patterns and understanding the behind-the-scenes processes. I can anti-alias a line, but it requires some understanding of color theory to both decide and select a color. It’s a richer experience to understand what changed between each generation of the Adidas UltraBoost.
- Maybe gatsby example should be same plot piece but different interpretation technique
- Sneakers
- Ikea shelf in Framework video
- Pixel art
- distinguish aesthetic identification and understanding behind the scenes
Footnotes
-
Cars are a very similar domain ↩