Who wrote this

The bill only came due later. I used to ask my mother to put labels on my colouring pencils, because on my own I could not tell which was which — and the worst was always brown, because the casing of the maroon pencil looks brown to me, and the difference only shows when the tip touches the paper. She took me to an ophthalmologist. He ran no test at all: he asked whether there was anyone colour-blind in the family, heard that my grandfather was and that I have a cousin, and settled it right there.

Unable to trust colour, I learned to infer it from everything else. Texture. Material. What the thing is. If it looks like a tree trunk, it is probably brown. I took that habit everywhere, and for a long time I thought it was a patch. But I never stopped drawing.

Back then I wanted to be an inventor, and I drew my ideas. I still remember that the first problem in the world I tried to solve was the keyring: I found it clumsy, and drew one where the keys came out of a single body, like the blades of a pocket knife. Years later I saw the finished object, patented by someone else. It did not make me angry. It made me certain the instinct was right and the method was missing.

Older, I gave up on becoming a TV science host, but the inventor in me stayed, and I figured advertising would let me keep inventing — over there they call it creation. I was there for the ideas and the angles, maybe an award, but not to be an artist: colour blindness would be my arch-enemy in Photoshop. And yet, in my first internship in communications, I ended up making a few noticeboard posters in PowerPoint, and it was those unpretentious posters that got me a job in a creative department. I stayed there for almost ten years. And in all those companies, I never told anyone I was colour-blind. I was afraid of being let go.

From advertising I moved to designing training material, where without quite meaning to I was a product and experience designer solving instructional problems — without the salary of one. Training led me to gamification, and my first talk on the subject was already an attempt at inventing a method. I tried to build a business out of it and it did not take off, though not for lack of content: every time I heard the brief, I realised the client did not need gamification. They needed something else.

I went after that something else and it had a name: experience design. Years later I went after the thing underneath that one too, and it was called neuroscience. I finished a postgraduate degree at PUCRS in 2025, wrote a dissertation on what neuroscience has to say to people who design interfaces, and this site began as an attempt to translate it.

Before I found out I was colour-blind, my best friend was blind. We played in the school corridor by a rule we invented together: I had to stay silent so as not to be found. It was hide-and-seek for him and tag for me. The same game, two rules, because the bodies were different — and neither of us had the age or the vocabulary to call that accessibility (or Flexibility and efficiency of use, which Nielsen would write almost ten years later).

While writing this site, that childhood came back as a technical question. If the same corridor needed two rules, what guarantees that a UX law measured on the average body holds for yours?

I went and checked, one by one. Fitts’s law was measured on young right-handed people in a 1954 laboratory. Social proof, in the Netherlands. The endowment effect does not appear among the Hadza. And the figure I myself used to repeat about colour blindness — 8% of men — holds for northern European populations: in Durban it is 2.2%.

That is why no state here depends on telling hues apart. It is not compliance. It is the method I would use anyway, because it is the only one I trust myself. The key to the map fits in three lines and none of them is a colour:

It is the scribbled sheet again. The information does not vanish because the colour failed; it is held up by something else, and the work is finding out by what. That is what I did across the thirty-eight laws of this site, one by one.

I did not write this to conclude anything. I wrote it because I still think the hard part of design was never the screen, and because distrusting the first reading became a trade: it is what I do when I get on a stage, when I open a conversation circle, when I publish a tool instead of an article. I think about the profession out loud, and I would rather be wrong in public than right alone. Two things take up the rest of my time, and both came out of that same habit of thinking out loud.

Beyond that, I curate tracks at TDC and speak about design, neuroscience and applied AI — the seven-year-old inventor still thinks the object can be improved.

Underneath, it is the same work as always, with a method the boy did not have. I am still organising the keys so that nobody is left outside.