No more boring drawings!
28. January 2026 2931 views
Many drawing tutorials show us how to draw things. Why are these drawings so boring?
28. January 2026 2931 views
Many drawing tutorials show us how to draw things. Why are these drawings so boring?
2. April 2025 3568 views
A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas.
1. January 2025 2156 views
About 2300 years ago, the great Chinese thinker Xunzi 荀⼦ wrote: “Human nature is bad“.
19. October 2024 3026 views
Should we just live in the moment? In “Matter and Memory” the French philosopher Henri Bergson claims that this is not even possible.
13. July 2024 4020 views
To “animate” means to breathe life into things. In these 5 exercises we make stones come alive.
28. May 2024 3798 views
You are awake. You think and you feel. But what is it that is doing all this thinking and feeling?
28. February 2024 37171 views
2400 years ago Aristotle found out how to be happy. His Nicomachean Ethics is an operating manual for a good life:
20. January 2024 6596 views
Why is beauty so important? It leads us to truth and goodness, says Immanuel Kant. How?
1. December 2023 11342 views
How do I even begin my drawing? The secret to jumpstart our creativity is fun. But how does that work?
1. November 2023 26547 views
If you are interested in truth, be it in the form of scientific knowledge or artistic beauty, there is no way around Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. In this book Kant asked the simple question: “What can we know?“
1. October 2023 4767 views
Last summer, I found myself at a farmers market of a small town in Southern France. The air was alive with chatter and the joy of yet another sunny day ahead. I made my way through tourists, neighbourhood regulars and other early birds. To escape the buzz, I stepped into the nearby cathedral.
13. June 2023 9789 views
The emotional rollercoaster I experience in art supply stores can be summarised in one word: greed.
2. May 2023 12791 views
How do we know which food is best for us? We might start a low-carb diet. Then we switch to whole grains, or even go fully vegan—only to return to a low-carb diet yet again. We constantly change our minds.
1. December 2022 57008 views
Great ideas are hard to find. Drawing makes it a lot easier. And fun. How?
1. November 2022 16773 views
This secret to creativity will help you come up with many ideas.
1. October 2022 13749 views
A quick introduction for beginners to J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. Gibson was an American pragmatist and psychologist.
21. August 2022 9490 views
This article gives a phenomenological definition of what a picture is.
18. April 2022 8936 views
What is Design?
Designers share a problem with politicians and business consultants: nobody knows what they are actually doing. I can shed some light on what designers do: They shape our daily environment.
5. December 2021 7918 views
Why you should study philosophy. 5 reasons why philosophy is useful.
28. September 2021 23105 views
This is a quick introduction for beginners to the philosophy of Rene Descartes.
29. August 2021 21165 views
This is a quick introduction to the virtue philosophy of Confucius.
2. December 2019 10103 views
Introduction to the Yijing or “book of change”, China’s oldest philosophical book.
14. August 2019 7821 views
This is a quick introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
22. September 2018 5644 views
This article is about creative ideas and illustrations.
2. May 2018 22042 views
on the difference between seeing and knowing The following exercises are a bit more advanced than the ones in the “Quick beginner’s guide to drawing”, and I hope you find them equally fun!
13. February 2018 11478 views
An ancient feud rages at the very core of your creative endeavour: The rational logical you and its fuzzy intuitive rival are in constant dispute.
28. January 2018 40576 views
Until recently everyday objects were shaped by their technology. The design of a telephone was basically a hull around a machine. The task of the designers was to make technology look pretty.
22. August 2017 77960 views
6 drawing exercises to get you started right now! The basic craft of drawing is about two things: you learn to control your hand and to see.
28. June 2017 7423 views
Some drawings look fresh and alive while others … don’t. What is their secret? Let’s look at cameras first.
6. June 2017 2808 views
Many creatives know this phenomenon: They start a new project on a promising topic with excitement, but when they can’t come up with an original idea instantly — they lose interest. They come to the conclusion that they picked the wrong topic. So they restart with a new topic, only to find out that the […]
18. May 2017 2347 views
It is fashionable to be outraged about lies in mass media. News agencies, corporations, and — God forbid! — even politicians all seem to mislead us. And they get away with it! How is that possible? Niklas Luhmann has some answers in his classic book from 1995 titled “The Reality of Mass Media”.
23. March 2017 71711 views
In 1942 Albert Camus wrote a book called “The Myth of Sisyphus”. It is about the one truly important philosophical problem: Given the circumstances of our existence, shouldn’t we just kill ourselves? This is his answer:
6. March 2017 27 views
There is this forbidden question which many people would love to ask when confronted with a piece of art. And it goes something like this: “What does the artist want to say with this piece of art?”
29. December 2016 3433 views
This article is a quick summary of a basic design course. It addresses a simple question: How do you design interactive systems that are easy to understand? Well, it all comes down to two things: structure and process.
11. October 2016 3362 views
The digital revolution was a gold rush for curious minds. Nobody knew what digital media actually was, only that it was about to impact our lives profoundly. It was unknown territory waiting to be filled with new artforms, designs and ways to understand the world.
6. July 2016 2073 views
Ask: “Does it need to be done?” Almost any creative person I know has to deal with heavy doubts in their process. And to a certain extent this might be an unavoidable part of our artistic lives. But I might at least pull one painful thorn out of your side: The question of whether your […]
1. June 2016 5424 views
We are obsessive problem solvers. When we see something imperfect, our perception wants to figure out what is going on — we get curious. On the other hand, when something is too irregular or “crappy” we ignore it as irrelevant noise.
25. May 2016 3354 views
Pick a small topic for your creative project! One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your creative project is to pick a topic which is too big. As an artist and designer I keep making one mistake time and again. So if this article sounds like me giving advice to other creatives… it […]