I have a confession. Before I got my first job in web development, I had thought ‘user experience’ was made up. I had thought it was a made up title, created by 55 year-old CEOs because their generation simply couldn’t grasp how “The Twitter” worked. And that any millennial that grew up with an iPhone would be perfectly qualified to draft wireframes and instruct on the flow of a website.

Designing For Emotion, by Aaron Walter, preaches that while anyone can design an interface or photoshop some design screens, “remarkability only happens when we’ve achieved another plateau: delight.” In the same way the most memorable meal of your life was so memorable not only because of the perfectly cooked filet, but also due in part to the drinks, crowd, and ambience too.

Walter does a “remarkable” job connecting the bits to the brain. Much has been written about web development, and psychology in their own separate domains, but Designing for Emotion dives in to that intangible layer. The one that gives mental cues so your users not only enjoy their web experience, but keep coming back and back.

A brief read, Walter gives a refreshing take on what many times is skipped right over. The connection between the bytes and the brain is no longer going to a bonus addition for a web presence, but a requirement for all brands, people, and online applications.

There’s much chatter about the science of creativity these days. Where ideas come from, who has them, and how to get more. We’ve moved relatively far away from the original thought that it was a divine, outside force that temporarily inhabited a person to produce great ideas. After all “inspiration” literally means “immediate influence of God or a god“. And the thought that creativity was reserved for left-brained bohemians has faded as of recent too.

At the forefront of these studies, Jonah Lehrer with the release of his latest book Imagine. He argues that creativity isn’t so much innate, as affected by our surroundings. We will be more creative in a blue room than a red one, and going out for a beer will be more productive than grinding away in our cubicles late into the night, he says.

A quick google search will corroborate some of these counter intuitive thoughts. Some examples include that the spark plug for our ideas is boredom, and that a formulaic regiment of making lists is the ticket to the idea-highway. Whatever the process suggested, the one thing they all have in common is the grind-it-out nature of the “ideation” process.

In Imagine Lehrer states, “Creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb … If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.” Someone once told me “Dating takes practice.” I had first thought how could something as natural as an attempt at making human connection over coffee take practice?! After countless failed attempts at wooing the fairer sex over 7 dollar cups of fair trade coffee, I no longer disagree.

The superbowl madness has came and went. The archnemesis Patriots were defeated by the cross-town brothers, the Giants. The ad world was abuzz in the BrandBowl hashtag for a solid 3 days. And the Jets now have the very same record as the world champion Giants. So of course, the only natural thing to write about, logos.

The NFL announced recently that it would stray from it’s logo-a-year redesign, and instead move to a static, roman numeral based, monochromatic logo. While many fans seem to be against the move; design snobs, Co. Design, and hipsters alike have been wetting their pants over the move. While the newly designed logo may solidify the superbowl brand in the minds of it’s fans, it sucks the very life out of the game so many people love, almost as much as the new kick-off from the 35 instead of the 30 year line.

Design is representative of the times. While no one is going to look at the 1968 logo of superbowl III and think it representative of great design, it does conjure up images years past, a simpler time, and a basic-ness of the start of the NFL as we know it today – all representative of one of the greatest superbowls ever played, in which the underdog Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts.

1996? Not many people will remember it as the turning point in Desmond Howard’s carrer by looking at the gauche purple and yellow, but it will give us faint images of New Orleans.

And is it coincidence the 2008 logo’s similarities to the new Bank of America logo that were the foretelling of the financial collapse in the not too distant future? Maybe.

But the 2011 logo? Almost as disappointing as this year’s commercials.

Recently Louie CK decided (against the advice of his business partners, lawyers, and countless other advisers) to release his most recent stand-up special directly to consumers, for the low price of 5 dollars. He was able to do this as it seems he funded, edited, and distributed this whole thing out-of-pocket. So any losses would be a hit directly to his pocket, but any profits would be as well. The avoidance of large corporation as the middle man of production and distribution represents a shift in the paradigm of entertainment distribution and consumption.

This shift, which is nothing new, was predicted by Chris Andersen in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Where this relatively new information super highway allows the sharing of media from one hard drive to another. But even this new business model can be subverted using Torrents. Chris Andersen concluded these illegal sharing techniques could actually benefit media producers in the new business model. For example, it could be a supplement for a live band’s (for-profit) shows, which aren’t reproduced very well with pixels, versus an in-the-flesh experience. But what’s a comedian to do who doesn’t have any “supplemental material” to hawk?

Be honest. This isn’t an example of a shift in economic model, but a psychological one as well. Louie acknowledges the whole sharing thing: “I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing… But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.” By not only acknowledging the low price, but by acknowledging what he intends to protect against, I’m sure he gained a couple more sales from computer-savvy consumers why would have torrented his stand-up, had they not read his plea to them.

We are seeing this more and more, from the prevalence of open source software, to wireframes, to designs. The profit doesn’t seem to be in the process anymore, but in the product. Louie himself probably put this “economic shift” best:

“I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.”