If you’ve followed anything I do online you’ll know I’m somewhat inconsistent in my publishing schedules, so I carry no illusions that this place will be updated on any kind of dependable basis, but I do promise I will try to keep it updated regularly.

2017 was a bit of a year of stagnation for me, it didn’t carry a feeling of moving forward, just of doing the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and I have no intention of stopping, but I know there is a creative itch I need to scratch.

I have a head filled with possibilities and last year I didn’t manage to make any of them come to pass, probably because I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing I could focus on enough to gain a bit of traction and get it over the starting line.

Laughter for Life in November proved that I can still make things happen. The entire gig came together over the course of just a few short months and was a roaring success, so I just need to be able to find that intensity of focus and delivery that I adopted there and apply it to the other things buzzing around my head.

So in 2018 I’m going to be trying to focus more directly on the things that I know I can do, and pushing myself to make them happen. I’m letting go of the more whimsical, overly-ambitious stuff (maybe more on that in another post) and embracing the still-ambitious but achievable side of the things I want to see in my life.

I’m also going to be paying more attention to my mental health and making time for myself: time to recharge, to properly rest when I need it, and to not let myself slip into the black cloud that descended at times in 2017.

I believe 2018 can be a great year, but I also know that great things don’t happen on their own, so I’m gearing myself up for the hard work and hustle that’s going to be needed to make this all come about.

Human faces are very powerful. User Experience designer Aarron Walter describes in his book Designing for Emotion why we appreciate human faces so much. He explains that we are constantly exploring the world around us by looking for something familiar. Familiarity gives us a feeling of comfort and reassurance.

When we see a face, we are automatically triggered to feel something or to empathize with that person. If we recognize content on a website — such as a problem, dilemma, habit or whatever else — we feel connected and understood.

Since we know ourselves so well, we unconsciously try to relate everything we see to ourselves. Obviously, we do that with other human faces, but also with when there are no human features involved. Only the recognition of our body’s proportions in a design is enough for us to perceive the design as being familiar and harmonic.

This is the reasoning behind headless mannequins. We subconsciously take what is on display and substitute ourselves for the mannequin due to the lack of ‘human’ in the image.

So faces add a human touch to your website – they help you trigger your emotions, which make them a powerful design element. Here are 10 effects human faces can have on your visitors.

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If we trace a path that starts with Gutenberg’s use of moveable type to Malcom McLean’s invention of the shipping container, we start to recognize a very interesting pattern: Each new layer of abstraction and standardization creates value out of the resulting increases in scale and efficiency.

Today’s digital innovators can trace a similar historical path that starts with mainframe computers and monolithic applications and then, step-by-step, reveals software’s interchangeable parts until we arrive at today’s cloud-based era of microservices and continuous integration.

Microservices is an approach to building software that shifts away from large monolithic applications toward small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces. The benefit of this abstraction is specialization, which drives down costs to develop and drives up agility and quality — while operating much more resilient systems.