The Resolution of Constraint

I've spent decades designing visual interfaces. I was lucky to get my start at Xerox, where the modern GUI was born. And I can't see the blackboard.

If I walk past you without saying hello, don't take it personally — I probably didn't see you. It's just how I see the world.

The clinical term is ocular albinism. It's not the lenses. It's the structure. I see the world just fine. I just lack the resolution most people take for granted. Hold a book an inch from my face, and I can read just fine. It works. It's just different.

In college, I studied CS and Applied Math and carried five STEM classes plus an elective every semester. The STEM classes all had problem sets and proofs. I never asked for accommodations. It never occurred to me.

But here's what I could never do, not in college, not in high school, not ever: see the blackboard.

So in every class, while everyone else watched the professor work through a proof, I opened the textbook and taught myself. Because I had no other option.

That discipline had a side effect I wouldn't understand for decades. Teaching myself from source material meant I built my own understanding from scratch. Not just once, but across five subjects every semester, for years. Do that across enough disciplines, and things end up in unexpected neighborhoods.

That's how Markov chains ended up next to Mozart in my head. That's how I wrote a paper in the 80s arguing that computers could compose music, using probabilistic ideas that wouldn't become mainstream in software culture for another thirty years.

I didn't make some brilliant leap. I just didn't have the walls between subjects that a more conventional education builds.

I took studio art and art history simply because I enjoy art. I studied Mondrian and De Stijl to understand how weight, counterweight, balance, and flow create equilibrium without symmetry. I studied Whistler to understand why a room full of gold and blue-green can make you feel quiet.

What I didn't realize then was that my eyes had been doing something like this all along. When you can't resolve fine detail, what you see first is contrast: edges, mass, the weight between shapes. I was seeing the weight of things before the surface.

Mondrian didn't teach me to see that way. He gave me the language, one inch from the page, like everything else.

Decades into a career in software, I designed a game — the interface, the visual language, the composition. I can tell you exactly why every screen works: the restraint of negative space, the balance of weight across the grid, the color pools that set a mood before you read a single letter, the shift in focus that brings it all into clarity.

I can trace every decision back to a principle I learned from a book I held against my face.

I see things differently. But I've always been a pretty solid designer.

Q.E.D.