we arePoeticA Team of Digital Architects

The Digital Empire in Review

How to Avoid the Afternoon Crash

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The clock hits 2:17pm. Your eyelids betray you, drooping and heavy. Sitting at your desk drooling, you have officially crashed. Is there some internal biological clock that says "Hey, It's afternoon...Sleepy time!"? Yea, I know, this is the part where I chime in about some energy drink right? Well actually, no. What is happening is known as the “Afternoon Crash”. This is something I battle against everyday at work and I have found some healthy strategies to battle the crash. Sleep, diet, and exercise are the "healthy" keys to unlocking a long lasting and productive energy. Adjusting these appropriately will help make your afternoons much more productive. There is also a way to cheat the crash, which I will get into later after I tell you about all the healthy stuff.

Healthy Stuff

Exercise regularly. Exercise, without overdoing it, improves almost every aspect of health. Having a regular exercise routine will improve mood, regulate appetite, and increase sustainable energy levels. Exercise also helps you sleep better which leads us to the the next weapon in our arsenal...

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The Modern Designer

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With today’s technological proliferation in many aspects of our daily lives, we can see a degeneration of our work ethic, creativity, and plain motivation. Now that we have computers and phones doing every nuance of our bidding, we’ve become, in a word, lazy.

As a day-to-day schmoe, this didn’t come to me as much of a shock, but as a designer this means that the very tools I use to create may actually be sapping the juice out of my imagination.

I realized all this when I stumbled upon an article called “The Dying Art of Design” from Smashing Magazine, which infers that modern designers rely too heavily on built-in program tools and effects, online freebies, and inspiration lists that what they end up designing becomes so diluted and generic due to the massive and immediate information transfer of the Internet. Trends spring up and designers pounce on them to gobble the best and brightest of visual elements until newer, cooler trends emerge.

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Creating a Design: Method or Muse Driven

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Unlike traditional architecture, web design requires less strict rules and dimensions, although it definitely has some. And unlike traditional fine art, web design must serve a functional, digital purpose further than as only decoration, although fine art is not only for mere decoration!

Web design is a modern functional art form based on well-measured margins and intuitive operations. So where do you start: form or function? Obviously, a website would be pointless to use if its function was not made priority one. After all, you only use a website to glean some kind of information. But then, if form is pushed way back in the dark, where does that leave the expression, atmosphere and feeling that creates the interest to even use the site?

I believe there must be a balance, from celestial movement all the way down to browsing the web. Form and function must build upon each other; the muse must have a method.

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