Smashing Telly brings us yet another landmark series which I’ve heard mentioned many times, but had not had a chance to see until now - John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The series led to book of the same name, which is still available, but to the best of my knowledge the series has not.
Reading through James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, which chronicles the sorry state of (North) American urban planning and architecture, which seems to create spaces as forgettable and disposable as the fast food wrappers sold in these places.
Setting aside the many downsides of suburban life, I myself have sometimes wrestled with notion that so many suburban places are just plain ugly. I’ve wondered whether the aesthetics really matter. They almost seem secondary to the argument.
Kunstler’s passage on this issue, which he describes as charm, summed things up for me nicely:
Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use the term to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply into a building.
For more, I suggest Kunstler’s pithy and sarcastic podcast.
Here’s a photo I took in Kernave, Lithuania. It’s a sign telling one not to climb a steep grassy hill.
I recently completed some work on a poster for a music show coming up in December in New York at Carnegie Hall. I did the concept and the background image with Kate McGarrigle, while the text was put together by another designer.
The show looks promising too, with guests Emmylou Harris, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Jimmy Fallon, Teddy Thompson, and most likely some more which have yet to be announced.
Some proceeds will be going to the McGill University Health Centre Foundation.
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.
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.
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).
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.
