I think aesthetics are like paradigms. They start developing as soon as we are born, the things we see, the emotions we feel, the colors we taste, the smell we hear. Like paradigms, aesthetics mostly changes and adapts itself to the environment and to the society.

While working with various designers and clients, I seem to notice that the less you know about design, the more your individual aesthetics sense comes to the forefront. For example, a couple of years ago a client of mine was quite adamant to use the color red in his poster which was for his spa.

It seemed to clash with my tinted aesthetics sense – databases of colour theory knowledge – using peaceful soothing blues to denote peace, calmness; lighter shade of blue would also reflect pureness, lightness and tranquility. But how was I to convince this client?

Many companies tell us to reduce the verbosity of their documents; they are placing a higher emphasis on tables, charts, data visualization and info graphics. They want stories to be told through visuals. And it does seem a more memorable way to express and help retain information which is otherwise just a series of numbers – or mumbo-jumbo to most of us.

Parsing data, showing relationships between variables, expressing timelines in a meaningful manner and showing crowd behaviour in dynamic displays (such as the rising popularity of key words in a search or data displayed on maps) is an art. It can be entertaining as well as educative. But above all, it must communicate what is critical to the consumer of the data. Often, designers and content management folks miss the point. Especially because today it has become simple to visualise data using the tools tucked away in PowerPoint or Keynote. Who isn’t a PowerPoint or Excel commando in today’s world? But they all turn out yawn-inducing visualizations of data.