Scratchpad
(curiousity, design, ideas, inspiration, reading, tantalization — )
10 Jul. 2008
I love reading because of the ideas and insight it gives me, but for much the same reason I have little patience with pedantic, trivial, belabored, or non-insightful writing. I can think of nothing worse than reading something that has nothing new to say, or reading something painfully long and slow that spells everything out for me. Instead, I like to read short snippets that fire my imagination. Things that have something new to say, or that come at something from a surprising angle, or that expose me to a thought or tidbit I've never had before. I like playful writing that takes chances with language or ideas and puts things in a way no one else ever has. Writing that dares to fail.
It almost goes without saying that I rarely have the patience to read a full book - certainly not non-fiction, though I love it and buy it all the time. I do love learning and reading, yet I rarely have the staying power to see the author through to the end. My guilty secret is that I absolutely adore magazines, because they expose me to something new and then leave me with just enough info to tease me, to leave me thinking about the ideas, chewing them, worrying them, playing with them and turning them this way and that and coming up with my own. Just enough to whet my appetite but leave me hungry for more.
Okay, I'll admit it. I like to be teased more than anything in the world. There's something sumptuous about magazines that books don't necessarily have. If not just the fact that they are overflowing with different positions and perspectives - as if it weren't enough to have a hundred ideas in the course of 4 hours, or the serendipity of finding a new voice you'd have never found otherwise - magazines have a tactility that's oddly missing in books. I especially love magazines with matte paper that soaks up the ink. The images become super saturated and acheive a lushness and depth (god the depth, you feel like you could fall into the page) that books rarely have. Each page brings a new image, a new writer, a new idea, a new font and layout. All but the best books are ossified in their presentation, formulas, and ideas, and it's easy to put out a shit book. But putting out a magazine consistently is expensive and risky, which ends up meaning the signal to noise ratio in the magazine world is a lot more favorable. I have a small collection of magazines that I have bought simply because they are so damn beautiful I couldn't pass them up. I purchased them thinking that someday I might create my own magazine, and I keep them for inspiration.
Just a few fantastic magazines I have been drawn to, whether beautiful, insightful, novel, intriguing, brilliant, necessary, or just plain good:
Cabinet, Coupe, American Scholar, Gagarin, Canteen (beautiful but notably sorry reading), Foreign Affairs, Polar Inertia, Farimani, Dumbo Feather, The Economist, Texas Monthly, Brick, Leonardo
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(css, data visualization, design, style switching — )
1 Jul. 2008
Smashing mag just wrapped up a contest with a nice article on style switching. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as an interesting solution to dealing with sites that contain a massive amount of data. In particular, it seems to me that the problem with such sites is twofold - the most obvious is that you must cram a lot of info into a small space, but the second is that the user must also be especially engaged to wrap their head around such quantities, regardless of the badassness of the design. So I've been thinking about the possibility of style switching as a solution to this.
In the Smashing mag contest, most of the switchers changed the background of the site they were placed on. But I'm thinking, what about completely changing the layout of the site altogether? In this way, users could choose not just a color scheme that they find pleasing, but an actual structure that is logical and intuitive. Since each user will find something slightly different to be intuitive, the possibilities are endless. Even more so if you allow users to upload their own skin (a bit like the good ol' CSS Zen Garden, but done so that the user's choice of stylesheet sticks with them throughout the entire site) or choose from an entire library of uploaded skins. Skins could even be shared across similar types of site, so, for example, if there was a consortium of libraries involved, they could coordinate their markup and share the skin library so that researchers could get data laid out in the same way from site to site.
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(books, design, internet, reading, writing — )
19 Jun. 2008
I'm absolutely fascinated by the structure of older books. Books written before typewriters and computers. I'm looking at my copy of Democracy in America right now, for instance. The table of contents for Chapter 15 looks like this:
254 _ Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States, and Its Consequences
257 _ How the omnipotence of the majority increases, in America, the instability of legislation and administration inherent in democracy
258 _ Tyranny of the majority
262 _ Effects of the omnipotence of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of American public officers
263 _ Power exercised by the majority in America upon opinion
265 _ Effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the Americans. - The courtier spirit in the United States
268 _ The greatest dangers of the American republics proceed from the omnipotence of the majority
The amount of information contained in each headline here is boggling to me, used, as I am, to terse and non-helpful subsections (if they exist at all) in modern book-length works. In essence, the table of contents here is what we now consider an outline - something to be done in prewriting stages but never actually shown to the reader in the completed work. And yet as shown here it makes the structure of the document, its theses and points and major themes, immediately obvious to the reader. As a designer...as a reader...as an impatient bitch...I fucking love this with every fiber of my tiny being.
It also breaks the text up into tiny, digestible chunks (notice how none of these subsections is more than a few pages at most...some not even a full page) - if I turn to any of these pages in the book, each subsection actually begins with the headline given above and is set so as to obviously indicate the start of a new section. And this makes me think of a recent discussion on the AoIR listserv in which several participants cited an Atlantic Monthly article lamenting the death of reading (yes, yet another of those goddamned 'reading is dead' articles). The gist of the article this time was that the Internet has changed reading for the worse - instead of digging into a long, windy, excessive book with loving OCD, the author now finds himself impatient with verbose crap and just wants to get to the heart of things already.*
Now - assuming for a moment that people are, in fact, expressing more impatience with what they read - could it not be because what people read is being more poorly written? Not that people are becoming more impatient or changing "how" they read? I look at the outline form used above, and it seems to me that it actually makes reading longer works of nonfiction seem significantly speedier. The design of the work means that you are getting slapped upside the head with the point. There's no hunting, wondering, head scratching, or going back to re-read. It's written linearly (something rare in modern works), the main points are immediately obvious and accessible (again - rare in modern works), and it's broken into smaller chunks that are more easily digestible.
In other words....older books are an awful lot like what is supposedly so terrible about reading on the web.
* Note: I adore reading and yet I have never enjoyed reading long winded bitches who fail to get to the point. It's one thing to read a novel that circumnavigates the globe ten times, but I have never, ever had the patience to read a work of nonfiction that does that. Has this author actually enjoyed reading long nonfiction in the past? Or are they confusing reading novels for pleasure with reading reference for pleasure? Seriously. I've just gotta ask. Did this dude really enjoy that once upon a time when he walked uphill to school in the snow both ways? 'Cause that would be really....'interesting.'
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(css, design, gallery — )
3 Apr. 2008
Apparently, CSS can actually make me weep with joy.
I'm working from home today and waiting for an eternal virus scan to end before logging into the company VPN (yes, I'm a nerd and actually do this step....deal with it), so I decided to kill 0.5 seconds by looking at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom map. The map isn't perfect - namely, I hate that the little info bubbles stay in place even when you move away from a particular tree, preventing you from activating other trees that are underneath the bubble. Even so, I really like it and am impressed by it every time I obsessively reload the page to see whether it's been updated yet or not. It's simple, beautiful, easy to use. So, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity about how they get the map like that, I looked at their source code and realized they do the entire layout with nothing but CSS. There's a little javascript for the popup tool-tip, but the actual map itself is entirely CSS. Holy crap. That is some loving, painstaking work, and proof that you don't need the latest code fad to accomplish a beautiful interface!
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