‘Appropriate’ design
It sounds obvious to the point of trite, but it’s a
misconception and a mis-framing I see too often:
frequently, people talk about ‘good’ design as if it’s
some kind of empirical, objective ideal. I think that
sets the wrong priorities; you should think in terms of
appropriate design. People starting a project
with the former mindset might ask the question “what’s
a good font?”, while those starting with the latter
would ask “what’s the right font?”. (Comic Sans is a
bad font, right? Nah; it’s not one of the greats, to be
sure, but it’s usually just that it’s used in
inappropriate contexts.)
I was reminded of this when creating the sleeve and face for the movie I put together of Jenny’s grandma’s birthday, using one of the shots I’d taken of her birthday cake. I don’t usually do this kind of pastel, chintzy affair, but it’s entirely appropriate for this project.
I was reminded of this when creating the sleeve and face for the movie I put together of Jenny’s grandma’s birthday, using one of the shots I’d taken of her birthday cake. I don’t usually do this kind of pastel, chintzy affair, but it’s entirely appropriate for this project.
Dog of the Week: Red
This little pocket rocket of a Staffie is called Red, and at the time of writing, he’s available for adoption at BCDH. Pant-pant-pant!
Five things I’m thinking about right now
12 July 2010 @ 22:01 in Life
Five blogs for the price of one, following an open invitation from Ian (who
was himself inspired by
Matt,
Alice,
Ben and
Dan)…
What can it do? Run software, dumbass…
Mention or dumbly hand an iPad to a non-geek and they’ll ask you what it can do; a geek would never do this because a geek knows that it runs software. And with software, the more useful question, especially in the context of Apple’s controversial App Store, is “what can’t it do?” Non-geeks will show surprise when they learn than you can, say, watch TV on an iPad, and would struggle with the – yes, esoteric – concept that it’s not ‘TV’, but bits of data flowing from, say, tvcatchup.com; it’s not ‘doing’ TV, it’s just doing software. (This is why Apple’s advertising – not “hey, it’s a smartphone” but “hey, you can book a find a table at a nearby restaurant” is clever.) And as for what it can’t do? You forgot about “yet”.
Magazines are good
I am, yes, a magazine journalist, but credit me with enough integrity to make this point without it being interpreted as “of course you’d say that”. Fact is, I think magazines are great. The price is right for a little treat – though I suspect many of us now would drop that cash on a few apps instead – the shape, robustness, disposability, flickability and sheer information delivery mechanisms are fantastic. I have been surprised at how much I enjoy reading magazines such as Wired on the iPad, and there’s lots that magazines do wrong (often because that’s just how we’ve always done them) but I genuinely struggle to envisage a world in which sheets-of-paper-fastened-together-down-one-side are no longer a significant part of the way many of us consume media.
Fragmented work patterns
Too often these days, I ⌘⇥ to my email client, say, to find I’ve opened a new message, typed “The best thing we” and then gone to do something else. Or I turn from my iMac to my MacBook Pro to find I’ve opened a new tab but not entered a URL. Or pick up a pen to write something in my notebook only to find, when I refocus after answering a colleague’s question, I have no idea why I started to write “Fol…”. Hell, maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I am genuinely concerned about my ability to focus. (I’m not alone in this, right?) I need to retrain myself. Or just wear headphones and play whalesong.
The perfect font for writing
What, for you, is the font you write in? Lots of people are font-blind and either don’t notice or don’t care. I’ve recently switched, though, to the classic Franklin Gothic, and it’s gorgeous. It’s smart and workmanlike, but with just enough flair – the squat (not old-style) numerals are very clear, and the double-storey lower-case g is lovely – to make things interesting. It has a kind of Rhapsody-in-Blue, New-Yorkey kind of busy authority to it, and it lends a perhaps-unwarranted authority to whatever I write. I use it at 10pt, at 200% with 1.2× line spacing and 6pt after a para.
Knee-jerks and smart arses
Increasingly, I tire of the habit so many on the internet (and possibly in meatspace too, though I’m certainly exposed to it less) seem to be developing of forcing a polarised, black/white, rocks/sucks reaction instantly to everything that happens, and also of the habit of showing the fuck off. I’ll often make a throwaway remark on Twitter and someone will ping back with a rebuttal, a tangent, a wilful misinterpretation or a random criticism. That’s all well and good when it’s in the spirit of debate, but so often it comes off as merely an attempt to demonstrate knowledge and garner attention. It’s taking the fun out of it.
Your turn.
(I’ve also been thinking a lot about my wife. She’s swell.)
What can it do? Run software, dumbass…
Mention or dumbly hand an iPad to a non-geek and they’ll ask you what it can do; a geek would never do this because a geek knows that it runs software. And with software, the more useful question, especially in the context of Apple’s controversial App Store, is “what can’t it do?” Non-geeks will show surprise when they learn than you can, say, watch TV on an iPad, and would struggle with the – yes, esoteric – concept that it’s not ‘TV’, but bits of data flowing from, say, tvcatchup.com; it’s not ‘doing’ TV, it’s just doing software. (This is why Apple’s advertising – not “hey, it’s a smartphone” but “hey, you can book a find a table at a nearby restaurant” is clever.) And as for what it can’t do? You forgot about “yet”.
Magazines are good
I am, yes, a magazine journalist, but credit me with enough integrity to make this point without it being interpreted as “of course you’d say that”. Fact is, I think magazines are great. The price is right for a little treat – though I suspect many of us now would drop that cash on a few apps instead – the shape, robustness, disposability, flickability and sheer information delivery mechanisms are fantastic. I have been surprised at how much I enjoy reading magazines such as Wired on the iPad, and there’s lots that magazines do wrong (often because that’s just how we’ve always done them) but I genuinely struggle to envisage a world in which sheets-of-paper-fastened-together-down-one-side are no longer a significant part of the way many of us consume media.
Fragmented work patterns
Too often these days, I ⌘⇥ to my email client, say, to find I’ve opened a new message, typed “The best thing we” and then gone to do something else. Or I turn from my iMac to my MacBook Pro to find I’ve opened a new tab but not entered a URL. Or pick up a pen to write something in my notebook only to find, when I refocus after answering a colleague’s question, I have no idea why I started to write “Fol…”. Hell, maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I am genuinely concerned about my ability to focus. (I’m not alone in this, right?) I need to retrain myself. Or just wear headphones and play whalesong.
The perfect font for writing
What, for you, is the font you write in? Lots of people are font-blind and either don’t notice or don’t care. I’ve recently switched, though, to the classic Franklin Gothic, and it’s gorgeous. It’s smart and workmanlike, but with just enough flair – the squat (not old-style) numerals are very clear, and the double-storey lower-case g is lovely – to make things interesting. It has a kind of Rhapsody-in-Blue, New-Yorkey kind of busy authority to it, and it lends a perhaps-unwarranted authority to whatever I write. I use it at 10pt, at 200% with 1.2× line spacing and 6pt after a para.
Knee-jerks and smart arses
Increasingly, I tire of the habit so many on the internet (and possibly in meatspace too, though I’m certainly exposed to it less) seem to be developing of forcing a polarised, black/white, rocks/sucks reaction instantly to everything that happens, and also of the habit of showing the fuck off. I’ll often make a throwaway remark on Twitter and someone will ping back with a rebuttal, a tangent, a wilful misinterpretation or a random criticism. That’s all well and good when it’s in the spirit of debate, but so often it comes off as merely an attempt to demonstrate knowledge and garner attention. It’s taking the fun out of it.
Your turn.
(I’ve also been thinking a lot about my wife. She’s swell.)
Dog(s) of the Week: Bongo and Nina
27 June 2010 @ 19:17
Because it was so hot today, we were only giving the
dogs short walks, so I took two, one after the other. I
expected to be handed Genghis again, but instead was
asked to take out a couple of new boys, Bongo [really?] and Nina. They could scarcely been more
different:
The
soundtrack is “See You Later” by
Pitx, and is released
under a Attribution
Noncommercial (3.0) licence.
Dog of the (past two) Week(s): Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan – he of the floppy ears – has become my regular companion at BCDH, and, though the picture above was taken last week when I was on my own, Mrs P and I both went up today to give the young mutt a bit of exercise. We actually managed, after an hour’s walk and a half-hour frantic scamper around the paddock in pursuit of his rubber ring, to tire him out to an extent that the carers thought most un-Genghis-like.
It’s glorious up there these days; Summer is at full strain, and the greenery is just stunning.
Wired on the iPad
Wired has launched a true digital magazine for the
iPad. Some thoughts, from the perspective of a geek who
works in publishing:
As a turbo-charged magazine, it’s very good…
…but better can be done.
What is a magazine? In the issue, there are reviews of glasses for geeks, with a beautifully-shot picture of them. It would be cool to let you virtually try them on using a photo from your library, but you can’t. And there is, as yet, no exploiting of, say, location-awareness or the always-on internet connection to parse data from the web for live charts. But is this the role of a magazine? To what extent can we play with its definition and still deliver something that makes sense and that, crucially, the public will ‘get’ enough to buy into?
Interactivity ≠ tapping a button to play a video full screen.
Yes, it’s a big download. Perhaps ironically, some of that heft comes from advertisers’ videos, the stuff buyers don’t actively want. (But if advertisers want to, they can take advantage of the fact that the line between editorial and advertising seems peculiarly blurred here, and create ‘advertising’ with genuine ‘editorial’ value.)
Flickability is poor. Despite the nav, it seems to focus you to a linear reading style. The print magazine format is still peerless for browsing.
Whether as a consequence of the low-res screen (forcing large point sizes) or the fact that content ‘reflows’ when the orientation changes, I don’t know, but there’s a real rash of ugly hyphenation. (I assume the pages are static, flattened graphics, and that text isn’t in any real sense reflowing; the level of layout and typographic control Condé Nast surely demands would be difficult to the point of impossibility with truly dynamic content, I suspect.)
I dislike, as I have begun to in some traditional utility apps, that the content changes depending on orientation. Not just the layout; some content only appears in particular orientations. While gamers might like this hidden feature malarky, it gets right up my tits. One reason magazines are good is that they’re finite; they curate, unlike the constantly-fed web, and you can ‘finish’ one. I have never in my life finished a game (actually, I could end that sentence there, but let’s carry on) and felt the need to go back through it to ‘collect all the coins’ or whatever; I have no desire to reread a magazine in a different orientation solely to see a few fragments that I might have missed the first time round.
If you believe £2.99/issue is too much,
(And I can’t think of even a good business reason, never mind a good UX reason, to sell individual issues as discrete apps.)
It is, ultimately, the best digital magazine on the best platform yet for digital magazines. Don’t dismiss it, but don’t hold it up as a paragon either. I’m sure Condé Nast is delighted with what has been achieved; I’m equally sure it recognises it has built a 1.0 experience.
As a turbo-charged magazine, it’s very good…
…but better can be done.
What is a magazine? In the issue, there are reviews of glasses for geeks, with a beautifully-shot picture of them. It would be cool to let you virtually try them on using a photo from your library, but you can’t. And there is, as yet, no exploiting of, say, location-awareness or the always-on internet connection to parse data from the web for live charts. But is this the role of a magazine? To what extent can we play with its definition and still deliver something that makes sense and that, crucially, the public will ‘get’ enough to buy into?
Interactivity ≠ tapping a button to play a video full screen.
Yes, it’s a big download. Perhaps ironically, some of that heft comes from advertisers’ videos, the stuff buyers don’t actively want. (But if advertisers want to, they can take advantage of the fact that the line between editorial and advertising seems peculiarly blurred here, and create ‘advertising’ with genuine ‘editorial’ value.)
Flickability is poor. Despite the nav, it seems to focus you to a linear reading style. The print magazine format is still peerless for browsing.
Whether as a consequence of the low-res screen (forcing large point sizes) or the fact that content ‘reflows’ when the orientation changes, I don’t know, but there’s a real rash of ugly hyphenation. (I assume the pages are static, flattened graphics, and that text isn’t in any real sense reflowing; the level of layout and typographic control Condé Nast surely demands would be difficult to the point of impossibility with truly dynamic content, I suspect.)
I dislike, as I have begun to in some traditional utility apps, that the content changes depending on orientation. Not just the layout; some content only appears in particular orientations. While gamers might like this hidden feature malarky, it gets right up my tits. One reason magazines are good is that they’re finite; they curate, unlike the constantly-fed web, and you can ‘finish’ one. I have never in my life finished a game (actually, I could end that sentence there, but let’s carry on) and felt the need to go back through it to ‘collect all the coins’ or whatever; I have no desire to reread a magazine in a different orientation solely to see a few fragments that I might have missed the first time round.
If you believe £2.99/issue is too much,
- you are an American who has had your reasonable perspective on pricing trashed by the American market’s ad-driven (rather than coverprice-driven) model, or
- you have no idea of how much work goes into the production of a print magazine (or that you need to square it for a layout that can change, and cube it for anything that includes even basic interactivity or multimedia content), or
- you’re a moron
(And I can’t think of even a good business reason, never mind a good UX reason, to sell individual issues as discrete apps.)
It is, ultimately, the best digital magazine on the best platform yet for digital magazines. Don’t dismiss it, but don’t hold it up as a paragon either. I’m sure Condé Nast is delighted with what has been achieved; I’m equally sure it recognises it has built a 1.0 experience.
