Considering Microsoft's efforts to rebrand, redesign and rebuild its Windows platform, it's no surprise to hear the company is tweaking the visual aesthetics of its other brands, too.

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Today, the relevance of design is expanding far beyond visual aesthetics -- to everything from tackling global issues such as climate change, to making sense of the overwhelming amount of data that surrounds us.

CNN: How to design a better world

Yet I believe that taking principles from one domain and applying them to a new context -- in this case mixing traditional visual aesthetics with advanced computation and algorithms -- is where the practice of design tends to make its biggest marks.

CNN: How to design a better world

The borders kind of bleed in terms of who's doing what with visual storytelling, but the lighting is defined by my aesthetics and desires.

WSJ: Spielberg's Eye | Lincoln | Janusz Kaminski | Cultural Conversation by David Mermelstein

Then we find the visual artist(s), musician(s) and, recently, also videographer(s) whose aesthetics make an interesting complement to the literature.

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