services
work
home
across time
Why
design
time?
A person’s attention, knowledge, expectation, and memory are different at every point in an experience.
The Perceptual Arc
An earlier event creates the conditions for the next one.
It can prepare it, delay it, intensify it, interrupt it, or give it meaning afterwards.
Designing time means designing this change between moments.
The designer decides what must be understood first, what can be withheld, when a change should occur, how long a condition should remain, when a repeated element should return, and what should remain after the event.
A sound, image, movement, scent, material, or spatial condition can change its role during the experience.
It can lead at one moment, support at another, and disappear once its function has been understood.
Time therefore gives the design the developing structure and narrative orchestration.
Where it applies
Film & TV
Narrative, editorial and broadcast motion. Titles, channel identity, on-air design.
Live & Event
Immersive and spatial experience. Stage, projection, exhibition, festival scale.
Info & Explainer
Knowledge, systems and visual understanding. Science communication and complex processes.
Brand & Commercial
Identity, campaign and motion branding, with behaviour as part of the mark.
The designer chooses which moment becomes the memory.
Retrospective judgement of an experience is predicted by the average of its most intense moment and its final moment. Duration barely enters the judgement. Kahneman and Fredrickson named these the peak–end rule and duration neglect.
Intensity is registered relative to the density and restraint that preceded it, and an ending reads as resolution only against the expectation the sequence has built. Both of the moments that carry the memory are therefore outcomes of the full arc, which is what makes the arc the object of design.