Noah E. Miller

I’m an
Art Director
— and a —
Designer

I live in Brooklyn with my wife and daughter
and a rabbit named Carrot.

I work for two major New York institutions
where I’m the manager of a team of designers and a photographer:

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
— & —
Weill Cornell Medical College

Sometimes I write about aesthetics,
design theories, bad business ideas, typography,
music, and some amateur psychology.

Settled Objects & The Weight of Dust

Primarily, I work in digital interactive media:
Communications, experiences, interfaces,
information, workflows, and architecture
that have a computer behind them.

I’m adept at making these things myself and I specialize in
helping other designers make the best things they can.

In my experience these are very different skills
and I’m fortunate to be able to do both of them.

I’m keenly interested in using
design as a tool to solve
communication problems,
both concrete and abstract.

I believe design is a social medium
that relies on a complex and ever changing system
of signs that refer to, transmit, and provoke
history, class, race, gender,
and a million other
connotations
& contexts.

In other words, it’s not just about
making it “intuitive” or “professional”.
(that’s the baseline)

It is about
dialogue, signal to noise,
and meaning making.

I spend a lot of time thinking about
design methodologies.
Everyone creates in different ways.

As an art director it’s important to find
processes and tools for
ideation, collaboration,
communication, governance,
project management, workflow,
production, and business
that allow
clients, audiences, users, and designers
to get the most out of what we do.

Of course, I’m also interested in technology.
I’m a web standards zealot. I’m an idealistic proponent
of the semantic web. I believe in collaborative,
open source software and data standards.

I’m particularly excited by finding
elegantly simple solutions to problems
that might otherwise be tackled by brute force complexity.
Its my experience that the more complex a system becomes, the more fallible it will be. Work smarter, not harder counts for machines too.

And finally, and somewhat unusually for a digital media professional,
I’m a typographer. I trained as a typographer and publication designer. I’m a reader. Most of the internet is for reading.
Most of the web has terrible typography.
I want to fix that.

So, that’s it. If you want to know more, contact me at mister@noahemiller.com or take a look at my résumé.