Marco Arment’s wonderfully illustrated explanation of how rules don’t solve problems of behavior. (Via Gruber at Daring Fireball.)
Category Archives: design
“Whatever Works”
In his New York Times blog David Pogue writes about about low tech solutions to the problem of keeping track of his Keynote slides when they are being run by someone else backstage rather than by him from his own laptop onstage. This bit made me smile…
Anyway, every now and then, though, this system goes off the tracks. A few months ago, I showed up for the technical setup and met the projection tech. “O.K., I’ll go ahead and take your laptop backstage,” he said. “We’ll be running the slides from there.”
“Oh,” I responded. It was a new talk. “I was sort of hoping to be able to control the slides from the podium myself.”
“You will,” he said. “I’m going to give you a clicker. It’s like a remote control. When you press the button, the slide advances.”
“Ah,” I said. “So it’s a USB transmitter?”
“Uh, no,” he said sheepishly. “The clicker just makes a light go on backstage. My buddy will advance the slide manually when he sees the light go on.”
I couldn’t believe that that was the arrangement he had in mind. So much for split-second timing. The bigger problem, though, was the slide previews and notes that I wouldn’t be able to see.
I’m often the “buddy” backstage advancing the slides manually. The solutions he mentions are ones we often use. It’s also possible to have the remote transmitters directly operate the presentation, which for a presenter like Mr. Pogue makes perfect sense.
Once upon a time they called them “e-books”
Google’s new Twenty Things I Learned About the Internet is both a great illustrated reference of how the Internet works, and also a good example of how to build beautiful documents that live online. Delightfully illustrated by Christoph Nieman.
Self-reference
Fitting illustration in Wikipedia’s entry for webpage.
Some work endures…
Maria McLaughlin emailed me an article from today’s Chronicle about EcoTimber. Nice to see the logo I designed sixteen years ago remains basically the same. So much of my work is completely ephemeral: a presentation that gets seen onscreen for one live event and then is forgotten forever. The EcoTimber brand has outlasted the participation of the company founders. I’m also glad that Jason, Aaron and Eugene went with EcoTimber rather than “Arbus.”
EcoTimber sources sustainably harvested woods for floors, in case you know of anyone remodeling a house…
Sarcasm Isolated
Perhaps there’s something to the idea that designers are more prone to sarcasm than the average person. According to Katherine P. Rankin’s new study of Alzheimer’s patients, the part of the brain we use to appreciate sarcasm is not in the left brain where most of us process our primary language, but in the right hemisphere. As explained in the New York Times:
…the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.
15 seconds of fame
If I am to be forgotten for anything, perhaps it should be my brief tenure as the J. Walter Thompson ad agency’s first “webmaster”.
The Principles of Uncertainty (now free of charge)
I must have missed the memo. To my great pleasure, I discovered today that the New York Times has recently made access to their archives free of charge. In addition they’ve abolished their irritating Times Select experiment, where certain columnists and content was offered for a fee. I hope that this change proves to be a profitable one for them. I think it will. I think that institutions like the Times must learn to deliver their service free of tiered corrals of “premium” content. My intuition is that the more obscure that information becomes, the less commercial value it will retain over time. Of course not all information is like this. But particularly for art and opinion, the value comes in sharing the experience.A perfect example is the guest blog by Maira Kalman called The Principles of Uncertainty, which was previously only available to Times Select subscribers. Enjoy it now for free online. Or wait a few weeks and buy the book.
Watch out for that diamond sign
Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, maintains one of the homelier homepages on the web. But he has a refined eye for design. I’m fascinated by his photographic collection of diamond road signs. Knuth is known for attention to minutia. He invented TeX a system for typesetting and Metafont a format for creating and encoding typefaces on computers. Perhaps it’s his eye for typographical detail that drew his eye to the distinctiveness to be found in common road signs.
Dean Allen thinking clearly again
Over at A List Apart, I ran across an archived article by Dean Allen published back in November of 2001. Dean is an interesting character with a keen insight into how communication design works. His critique of Edward Tufte’s rant against PowerPoint is what first got me listening. He created Textpattern, a PHP-based content management system for websites. Anyway his thoughts titled Reading Design ring refreshingly true to someone who makes a living trying to wring clarity from OPP (Other People’s Powerpoint).