Form and Structure

There are many examples of well established arrangements - “shapes” - that creators use when designing various things.

In music composition, songwriters have primitives, the verse, chorus, bridge, intro and outro which they can shape or arrange into a song.

In cinema, directors are essentially communicating a story and so the primitives that combine to form a compelling narrative, the intro, rise, climax, fall and resolution are their primitives.

One of my favorite directors, Dan Harmon, has created something he calls “The Story Circle” which is a fantastic example of how these primitives are arranged into a shape ( in this case, literally a “circle” ) - ultimately providing a recipe for good storytelling.

Perception

The well established shapes I’ve mentioned take advantage of human perception.

These shapes have emerged through understanding what “sounds good” or “reads well”.

I won’t claim to understand the details, suffice to say that to consider form and structure without having any knowledge of how the human brain will respond to it would be to design in the dark … you need to know what you’re optimising for.

If a song sounds familiar to us when we hear it for the first time, it’s because our ears have been trained to recognize the most commonly used song structures

I think there’s a lot to unpack in this statement. For me, the lesson I take from this is that it’s more than just physcis or physiology .. sometimes by using familiar structures we’re appealing to the human brains desire for familiarity and building on the work of previous designers.

Applying this to my blog

I’ve been reflecting on how I can get better at writing about the things I want to share on this website.

The truth is that I have very little experience doing this.

I know which articles from other websites I have enjoyed reading in the past, but I would struggle to explain why I enjoyed them apart from the content itself being interesting to me.

Perhaps a side-effect of a well structured article is that the structure itself vanishes to people with less awareness of the patterns in play.

What are the processes that other blog authors follow when arranging or creating the shape of their posts ?

Are there any well established recipes like some of the examples I mentioned that apply here ?

Once again thanks for reading

Please comment if you liked it

I would love to hear your thoughts