Reading Response #3

to Artful Design • Chapter 3: “Visual Design”

Huijun Mao

Oct 10, 2026

Music 256A / CS 476a, Stanford University

Reading Response#3: Design is the whole greater than the sum of its parts

I want to respond to a few ideas from this chapter, some are design principles and some are interesting concepts. I think they all help me understand what is design and how to do it.

Principle 3.4 Simplify Form

Principle 3.16 Originality is Recombination

Design is convergence

My brief interest in becoming an artist/designer started and ended in high school. The biggest effort I made at that point to pursue this dream was to persuade my mom to spend 4000rmb to pay for an online design academy. I took about one tenth of the provided curriculum and a few years later was bombarded by text messages claiming the academy had gone bankrupt and old customers could request request through the following link (I never actually confirmed whether those text messages are scams but I just don't believe they are kind enough to give out money)

If there is anything I learned from that period of time, then it’s how we can fill up seeminlgy empty space in our design work with simple elements of lines and circles. Since then, I’ve been adopting this principle whenever I became upset with the lack of aesthetics of my posters/slides. It’s such an incredibly easy and effective design principle.

In the past, I’ve been using simple forms to complement my work, but now I learned that we can also use them to start a work. Looking deeper, I think this principle conveys a message that design should start simple and remain simple, until the different simple components converge to make the entire design not simple anymore. That’s how Achilles ended up catching up with the tortoise. Weirdly, I think this also relates to Ge’s suggestion of “lower your standard” at the start of this class, as a way to start simple

When I say start simple, I not only means that we can start with simple shapes, but also what principle 3.16 suggests that we can start with ideas/objects that we are familiar with and recombine them to achieve originality. 

Finally, I want to take the time to respond to a separate idea at the end of this chapter when Ge reasoned that art serves no purpose beyond itself. Because human beings have no preordained purpose, humans are arts and humans are ends in themselves. I think this is very profound because it’s responding to the eternal philosophical questions that we’ve been asking ourselves: who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going. It places the value of human back to existence itself, rather than in any external measures. It’s simply saying: we exist therefore we have values.

Additionally, I just want to say, I love the photo of baby truck on a truck, it’s so absolutely amazing pretty cute adorable…