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Thanks Tessa!

Gotham has become the Barak Obama typeface. For those not familiar with it, it’s the one always used to write the word CHANGE. It’s big, bold, simple, and has both a sense of present trends and of history (it should, it was inspired by New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal).

I have to wonder if Starbuck’s recent campaign to give everyone who votes a free coffee, was also a way of subtly endorsing Obama by also using the Gotham typeface.

I’m not surprised that Starbucks would do this, I just find it notable that a typeface has become so linked to one man.

Photo from Gum Election via Wooster

The debate over the American Election has been fierce over the last few months. Obama has been running some negative ads, especially hammering home links between John McCain and the Bush/Cheney camp. For the most part though, his campaign has been more issues based. His 30 minute prime-time did not mention McCain or Palin at all.

McCain’s campaign, on the other hand, has seemingly consisted almost entirely of ads which attack or demean Obama in some way, linking him to William Ayers, claiming he’s a socialist, or what have you. I’m sure many of these ads are effective, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all about Obama. They don’t mention what McCain will do, only what he won’t.

The situation has thus pretty-much become a referendum on Obama. The two choices being Obama and not-Obama, instead of Obama vs. McCain.

Regardless of the outcome tomorrow, I think this has been a tragic flaw in the Republican campaign. From the outset they have been behind on the issues that matter. McCain has been catching-up in trying to embody change, encouraging economic regulation, reforming health care, and speaking to the middle and lower classes. Obama has been hammering these points from day one, and in too many cases that has allowed him to shape the debate that followed.

If McCain loses tomorrow, as I hope he does, I think this will be a big reason — He has purposely kept the eyes of the public on his opponent, not on himself.

Here’s an excerpt from an older article from the Washington Post, which — as an aside — discusses some of the differences in how colour use affects the placebo effect:

“One of the most important things about a pill is [its] color,” said Daniel Moerman, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied the placebo and nocebo effects across different cultures. “That seems to be fairly widespread.”

But the mind is a funny thing, and generic responses to color go just so far in explaining the placebo or nocebo response. Consider this: In Italy, Moerman says, blue placebos made excellent sleeping pills for women but had the opposite effect on men.

The apparent reason? “The Italian national football team’s color is azzurri,” he said. “Blue.”

I’m going to place this in the “interesting, but needs more research” category. Still, an interesting notion of how perceptions can be different for different cultures.

Gotten off of Flickr.

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

See the rest of the article, from the BBC (via Martin).

Via 37Signals.

Digital technology moves so fast it can be easy to forget that a few things have been consistent for decades — like the QWERTY arrangement of the keyboard, which has been in use for well over 100 years. Looking at a computer keyboard, it’s extremely difficult to tell why this layout was chosen over the alternatives. Even a straightforward alphabetical arrangement would make more sense at first glance. The Dvorak keyboard layout in particular has been shown to increase typing speed by almost double, reduce errors, and reduce the amount of finger movement by a huge margin.

Using this Dvorak to Qwerty-comparison applet, the last paragraph took me 576 key presses. Under QWERTY, my fingers moved about 14 metres, but they would have moved 8 under Dvorak. Most of that comes from the Dvorak layout being able to handle almost 65% of the text on the home row keys, compared to a meager 32% for QWERTY.

The Dvorak Layout. Vowels are along the left side of the home row, most-used consonants on the right.

It turns out that the reason for this apparently silly layout goes all the way back to 1874, when the QWERTY layout was developed for mechanical typewriters. The earliest models used an alphabetical arrangement, but were prone to jamming. According to this summary:

The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called “typebars.” The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession.

So QWERTY was designed to specifically place the most commonly used letter pairs on opposite sides of the keyboard. Astonishingly enough, this layout has continued to be the standard for english-language typing ever since, despite it being less efficient than the alternative.

I’ve kept my eyes on Dubai’s development ever since hearing stories about $300 slices of cake served in the restaurant atop the Burj Al Arab (the world’s fanciest hotel, apparently, and certainly not the most reasonably priced). Just the lobby of the building is large enough that clouds formed in it when first built. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Dubai has embarked on mega-project after mega-project, including a whole series of islands, a downtown core, the world’s largest amusement park, and much more. Before they had even completed work on a record-breaking 800m high Burj Dubai, they began drawing plans for the 1200m high Al Burj.

On a certain level I have to respect their vision. Financial-crisis aside, oil is most-likely running out, and they seem to have embraced tourism and trade as replacements. They’re trying to build a world-class metropolis from the ground-up.

Aside from many glaring questions about whether this is sustainable financially and environmentally, my main concern is the sheer speed of expansion. A city is an incredibly complex web of various factors, and I personally believe that it is well beyond the capabilities of any designer or design team to draft up a fully functioning city in the middle of a desert in one fell swoop.

They may well get lucky and come up with the right mix of ingredients, but in my eyes a city is something that builds itself over the course of decades. Only time will tell, but the speed here certainly is alarming.

For a summary of recent Dubai building projects, I suggest the aptly, if not overly-simplisticly named Dubai is Nuts.

On his ambient music, like Music for Airports:

It’s closer to sitting by a river than watching an orchestra. . . Some of that music came out of trying to find something I could listen to while trying to work. . .

[the other music was] too attention-grabbing, it was designed to grab your attention. . .

One is always inclined as a composer to put in more than you need as a listener. So one of the very good things about working on this, is that there’s a speed control. I work on them much faster than I end up releasing them, generally. In the days of analogue tape a lot of the music I released was released at half the speed I recorded it at. . .

This is the opposite of what people are doing on television, where they accelerate everything. . .

I find with music — if you’re making it — you always tend to fill the gaps. You want to paint the whole picture. But if you’re listening, you actually want a lot less than that. So I do that the simplest way by slowing it all down.

From a session with game designer Will Wright done by the Long Now (view the summary or download the audio). I’ve cut out Wright’s comments only to get to the heart of what Eno was trying to say.