“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou
It isn’t only about what we see. It’s about what we sense.
Noticing is an active skill that transforms observation and knowledge into intuition, mood, and experience. This is intuition at work, a person’s ability to trust their gut before logic and expertise fully catches up, a deep and sometimes clear understanding without fully knowing. Feeling is often the first indicator that something is working, or not, and it usually comes with a question. These reactions happen before we rationalize them, making them just as essential, or more, as a path to execution or knowing.
Don Norman’s Emotional Design theory explains how people react to design on three levels: visceral (immediate gut reaction), behavioral (interaction and function), and reflective (conscious thought and meaning). A cluttered website induces stress before a user can articulate why. The material and aesthetics of a business card signal value before the words are read. Typography sets a tone before a message is fully understood. When we enter a space with dim lighting and soft textures, we instinctively feel calm. Great designers recognize and use these subconscious cues (both literal and abstract semiotics) because they influence engagement before conscious thought even begins.
Design is a visual language of relationships; where elements (images, colors, shapes/symbols, type) go between purpose (info, emotions, usability) to create meaning/aesthetics. I would call the combination visual literacy - the ability to interpret, analyze, and create meaning from the visual media. The feeling is crafting an experience that can be felt before it is understood. The best design moves beyond predictability, creating something that resonates on an instinctual level, not rigid academic analysis. Rigid frameworks like “design thinking” (not a fan) and over-strategizing (I have seen strategy both improve and kill projects) can strip the nuance and emotion from design. The most compelling work often comes from embracing seasoned intuition and allowing for the unexpected. When making “art” I usually find a muse or start with no set path besides medium and time. I find design solutions by concepting beforehand or digging through a lot of diverse ideas (iteration with refinement)… usually a combination of both.
Iteration isn’t about fixing, it’s about discovering and making. Experimentation is essential because the arts are learned primarily through doing, not theorizing. Recognizing when something needs adjustment, before knowing why, is what separates great designers/artists from those who merely follow rules and trends. Work that connects on a deeper level resists obsolescence.
Noticing is also about perceiving how others may experience a design. The best designers don’t just anticipate user behavior; they can sense it. Good design also requires empathy. A frustrating interface is as inefficient as it is emotionally exhausting. A well-designed book is inviting. Empathy helps recognize what makes people trust, engage, or walk away. The strongest work acknowledges frustration, curiosity, and delight, engaging users toward clarity and connection.
Noticing is sharpened through practice and curiosity. Engage with an “object” beyond its function and see what emotions surface. Also looking beyond visuals—sound, materials, smell, movement, environment also influence perception. The subtle 'click' of a button, the resistance of materials, or the way light interacts with a surface can transform how a design is experienced. Trusting your gut as intuition will often notice imbalance before logic does. If I have to ask whether something is working in a piece, it usually means it isn’t.
Sometimes not fully understanding something… an image, a sound, an experience, creates space for interpretation. Misunderstanding and abstraction are often where the most interesting ideas emerge for me. My favorite working process in design is fully understanding an “objective” with its surroundings and then working loosely from that brief. I feel like I get work that is richer in both emotion and substance. Hopefully it's obvious by now, but one must also have seasoned knowledge and understanding, or intuition can never fully be realized.
Noticing isn’t just about the arts. It’s about how we make sense of things; how we interpret, respond, and engage with the unfamiliar before we fully understand it. Noticing is also about allowing intuition and feelings to shape meaning before analysis catches up. The best creative work isn’t simply the result of knowledge, trends, or process. It emerges from the tension between experience and the unknown, structure and spontaneity, intention and accident. Some of the most powerful ideas surface in moments of uncertainty, in the space between knowing and discovering. Perhaps that’s the essence of noticing, not just seeing what is there, but sensing what could be.
Would love to hear your thoughts. I am using “design/art” somewhat interchangeably which is slippery but I am looking at the larger picture. I also wonder how many people are visually literate and to what extent.
Links: Cina Associates, Cina Art, Public Type
When I was getting my MFA in poetics Allen Ginsberg, who was my teacher and founder of my program, had these maxims he would use to get us to think about the poetic mind or capture. One of them was, "Notice what you notice." That stuck with me. I was doing a street phtoography workshop that had only one student in DTLA and when I couldn;t get this kid to take a good photo for the life of me, it hit me to say to him, "notice what you notice." Something came back. The cross-disciplanary art practice is that ALL art, wheither it references a reality or creates one, starts with what we NOTICE. It's not just a way of seeing, its knowing how you see. Then learning the best way to execute that very vision. In TM (Trancendental Meditation) as related by David Lynch, he talkes about the "Universal Field Theory" the basis of modern physics is that we have this idea that the first thing we knew about what everything is based on was carbon, then atomic theory, then that broke down to subatomic, then finally this universal feild that permiates and is the glue that connects everything. As creatives we dive into it now and again, and we have like bad eyes or ears or senses sometiems so we arent always going to see or hear or taste the same thing that the person next to us sees or hears or tastes right. THere is this universiality, but its what we filter it through that is the main thing. It is what we "notice" and the intelligence behind that is that we can slow down and "notice what we notice." Thanks for this Cina!
Interesting, you’re the second person recently to tell me about gut instinct in relation to art. Yours being “if you have to ask if something is wrong, it is” and theirs was “if I do a double take, I do a triple take.” But I know what you mean, and I’ll need to think about it more. I guess it’s an about trust and how much of it you have in yourself. I find myself doing Automatic Writing style design a lot lately — where I will start off with no plans in the slightest and see where the moment takes me.