Before I solve the quality problem from the last block, I want to take a detour. The problem pushed me into a bigger topic that I find more interesting than the fix itself, and it is worth thinking through out loud: the difference between the variables you can plan for and the ones you cannot, and between the things you can measure and the things you simply cannot.
Let me start with the obvious layer. In this experiment there is a whole list of variables I can name in advance and, with enough effort, hold steady. The quality and finish of each set. The consistency between frames. The colour. The amount of background detail. Whether the character reads as the same person. The style inside each medium, since illustration and photography are each huge worlds on their own. These are the expected variables. They are annoying, but they are visible. I can see them coming, and at least in principle I can control them.
Then there is the other layer, and this is the one the detour is really about. There are variables you cannot predict and cannot measure, because they do not live in the design at all. They live in the person.
I learned this the hard way in my previous master’s thesis. I was testing whether lighting alone could tell a story, so I designed four scenarios and let people walk through them and do whatever they wanted. The scenarios were controlled. The people were not. One person came at lunchtime and was so hungry that they could not really engage with anything. Another came last in a long day and was already tired before they started. Their reactions were shaped by hunger and tiredness, not by my lighting. And there was no scenario, no matter how carefully built, that could have accounted for that. I could not have predicted it, and I could not have measured it even as it was happening in front of me.
So this is the food for thought. No matter how clean your test is, there is always something you did not think of, sitting inside the person, quietly bending the result. And the frustrating part is not just that you cannot control it. It is that you often cannot even see it or put a number on it. A questionnaire will never have a field for “arrived hungry.”
There is a simpler lesson hiding in this too. Sometimes as designers we get so deep into a project that we forget we are designing for real people, and not just for a rectangle on a monitor. We tune the file, the colours, the spacing, and we forget that the thing will eventually be seen by a person who is hungry, or tired, or distracted, or sad, a person with feelings and a whole day behind them. The work does not live on the screen. It lives in front of someone.
For a while this felt like a reason to despair about testing at all. But I am starting to think the opposite. Maybe the messiness is not noise to be deleted. Maybe it is part of what is actually being studied. When I show someone an image and ask what it means, their hunger, their tiredness, their language, their mood are not contamination. They are the real conditions under which images are actually read in the world. Nobody looks at a picture in a perfect vacuum. People look at things while distracted, rushed, hungry, half paying attention. An image that only communicates to a calm, rested viewer is arguably a weaker image than one that survives a tired one.
I am not resolving this here. The expected, measurable variables I will still try to control, because that is just good practice. But the unexpected and unmeasurable ones might be worth turning toward instead of away from. Maybe the question is not how to eliminate the human conditions around an image, but how much an image can carry despite them. That feels closer to the real life of visual communication than any perfectly controlled test would be.
For now this stays an open thought. But it changes how I see the quality problem from the last block. Control what you honestly can, accept that something will always escape, and consider that what escapes might be telling you something too.
