Biases: The Mistakes Our Minds Make

I have been reading The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli - it presents 99 biases that afflict the human mind. I say "have been reading" because they are not easy to remember, and hence to avoid or mitigate the effects of these biases is even more difficult. The book certainly is an excellent read but I wanted to capture two resources that give a good list of "frequently" occurring biases.

• The Reformed Broker posted a link to the Psy-Fi blog The A to Z of Behavioral Bias - biases listed alphabetically - short and sweet for us to internalize. I highly recommend going through all of them.
• The social media sharing app Buffer has an excellent list of 8 common mistakes that our minds make and how to work around them.

Designing Symbols

I recently acquired the book Symbol and around the same time the vector art software from Bohemian Coding called Sketch. These two assets have made me start thinking about how designs especially symbols & logos are mathematical operations (to be specific a combination of set operations - union, subtract, intersect and difference).

More than thinking - I think in time - it is going to be more like solving the Rubik Cube in your mind. When I was in the middle school - Rubik Cube was at its height and I was hooked on to it - and I used to plan the moves in my mind all the time till I cracked it.

For now I am using Sketch to re-create some of the symbols/logos in the Symbol book such as the one below:

Left to right is my work in progress - the rightmost comes closest to #45 on page 27 of the Symbols book. This per the book was commissioned by CharacterStation.com for Zee Retail, Switzerland.

It was really simple to create - create a triangle in Sketch, and then use the "edit" functionality to round the edges followed by using Layer > Paths > Rotate Copies.