5. Style is the message.
14.may.08
The passion of finding a way, casting a message with style
Organize letters on an empty space, to communicate, to transfer information to someone else, ... there are lots of ways of naming this, but it's always a complete challenge for you and your designer skills as a visual thinker.
You need to brainstorm, to create, to imagine, to layout blocks of text, to previsualize in your mind the grid where you will place every item, you need to see your product as something functional, but also beautiful for the eyes that will be reading. In short, you have to focus yourself on finding a way, a style
For example, finding a beautiful typography according to the content you will present is not easy, and you have to read a lot of books and walk a long way to easily find a typeface that would fit in every project if you want to be genuine.
Because of that, I think it's a nice point to consider (a homage to those who love styling), to keep improving your skills on calligraphy (even thinking about reaching the "mastering copperplate" alphabet!). As an example, studying some calligraphy will teach you about the origin of the serifs of the most common true type fonts you use so often: it was just a way of spreading the resting ink piled under the feather (or sharpened stick) dipped into ink to write, in order to not to leave huge spots of ink after each traced letter.
This post is not about technical issues, but an essay that collects some interesting ideas that I am reading in some books and maturing on my own these days. So, it's dedicated to those who love styling and the beautiful designs, to those who learn from everyone they meet, to those who value every little shape or combination even in the daily life, ... everything influences us all so in deep, even though we just don't realize.
For example, years ago when I was a more active graffiti writter i was always trying to customize my lettering to find a new and particular style that everyone would relate to me. I met a lot of local writers that helped each other to find their own style; and some of the shapes and skills I found those days are still influencing me toda; and the search is not over yet.
Being a lover of the stylance is about always finding something new to analyze and consider in your future projects. I think that a good designer is like that, keeping open the door that leads you to explore new ways of doing the same things or just doing new things you believe in.
Some interesting background points
Focusing in the particular matter of typefaces and its history, first of all I want to remember you reader about the importance of the printed words. This technological advance, the ability we got about reproducing a piece of written knowledge and share it around was the spinal reason why oriental civilizations evolved slower (even having so much knowledge, and maybe really more advanced than the occidentals).
Oriental alphabets had a stopper. They would have required tons of symbols graved into metal pieces in order to be able to be printed as big books production. They would also be full of knowledge, but the conceptual way of representing words was worse to be reproduced multiple times. On the other side, latin alphabet was much easier to mechanize on printing, so it was an easier way of sharing and spreading its knowledge.
As history says, many changes introduced in typography were seen as something ugly and sometimes stupid and non-functional. But obviously, as everything, it has to evolve. A nice example of this anxious need for evolution and revolution is the alphabet presented in 1967 by Wim Crouwel; an alphabet designed just using horizontal and vertical lines (no diagonals or curves) supposedly optimized for the old matrix based computer screens with low resolution.
But what about now?
When we design a website we can make the text to be solid or liquid, stone or water, using float layouts, playing with the spacing between letters/words/paragraphs/etc. but the point that fascinates me is that typography allows us to represent the silence of the spoken words that we are not able to represent using just an alphabet. Moreover, we can dress up a text making it more accessible, more fancy, more kiddie, etc. and the content would be the same. That's the point where I want to make the difference, the way we design the box or container, the way we layout this or that, the colors that will be used, ... every little detail casts a different experience to the reader.
We think that we play with the text, but I assure that the text is also playing with us, always. For sure depending on the receiver/reader/visitor, but obviously depending on how we present the block of text. This could be aggressive, pleasant, relaxing, blinding, astonishing, freak, paranoid, ... all the feelings that an artwork would be able to transmit are also possible to share through a displayed/printed text and its design.
Maybe because I care too much about style sometimes, but: don't you find all of this really interesting?
By now that's all folks! Hope you enjoyed this stolen time spent reading something (kind of unconcrete) different through your everyday life! :)
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4. Drive disk is nearly full. Please free some space.
21.april.08
In 2006 the digital universe was likened to 12 stacks of books extending from the earth to the sun (ok, if the sun didn't burn them before... but take this just about the distance).
The fact, and the tendency, is that nowadays we are producing, sharing, multiplying, copying, ... more digital information (a.k.a. bits) than yesterday. Some companies are storing daily around 2 terabytes (17.592.000.000.000 bits) of information, some... even more. The newest law regulations force the enterprises to keep a lot of information about a wide range of issues, and of course, all this data must be stored under the privacy standards.
I came across a with a really interesting whitepaper from a congress about the expansion of the digital universe. If anyone wants a copy in PDF of this whitepaper, drop me an email and I will send this to you.
From the whitepaper: "In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured and replicated was 1.288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that's 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. In 2007 the amount of information created will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available."
In 2007 the first terabyte drive (1000 Gigabytes) was shipped. And of course, the tendency is as always: more capacity/smaller disks.
As an example, here is the conversion of capacity of my 750GB USB external drive, take a look at the biggest units, frightening!
I don't know if there are endless multiple prefixes for byte scalation units, ... are we going to create new ones as we need them?
We store a wide variety of information, and this ranges from digital pictures to bank account transactions. The predictions say that in the 2010 the 30% of the information will be produced or replicated in workplaces, and the other 70% will be mostly music, videos, pictures, etc.
The funny part is that we can't give real-life stats in this kind of studies (digital universe quantification), because they are for example quantifying about compressed images and not about RAW shots. Imagine that since now, everybody shoot in RAW format, we need more space! Or take a look at the digital music, studies just manage data from legal music shared, and we all know the unbelievable amount of illegal data shared through "supposedly" illegal P2P.
Though there are lots of emerging new store technologies (nanobits, heat-assisted magnetic recording to reduce the amount of magnetism needed to store a bit, etc.) the physical space is limited (also height, because the buildings cannot grow infinitely as they would overlap into other planet orbits). Even if we fill the earth surface including the underwater one, and we build endless skyscrapers we would be able to place finite drives.
Well maybe we have a workaround... wasn't the universe expanding? If it expands faster than the storage we need... we can place the info ... wherever! By now, we can't reduce the data devices to atom size, but we can't say this is not going to happen.
Imagine the situation when we have ended up the earth surface... "Hey men, I'm gonna call tech support cause the SysAdmin has lost my site logs stored in the wi-fi server's drive in the asteroid number 388424 as it passed near Mars. This kind of things will not happen in the new Pluton server platform."
Crazy? Maybe not so much in the end.
In addition, I must remember you that our digital archives doesn't last forever stored in any device. For example, the life expectancy of a CD or DVD is around 20 years as much. We will have to replicate the information, again and again, this means more devices?
Well, as you see I had a philosophic weekend... haven't you realized? :)
Hope the article will make you think about that issue, but take it easy, these are just some ideas.
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3. The "Lorem Ipsum", the great unknown.
1.april.08
A survivor
Since the 1500s, coming from the "ancient" inked paper industry and still alive in the digital era ...
Popularised in the sixties with the release of Letraset sheets, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker ...
This famous piece of text of classic latin literature by Marcus Tullius Cicero from his "De finibus bonorum et malorum" (On the ends of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil); written around the year 45 BC, and being part of a treatise about the theory of ethics (very popular during the Renaissance) is a completely unknown even for those who use it in their everyday work.
In order to avoid distracting the reader/client from the style of a demo design, trying to focus him/her on the style/presentation of the design, lots of designers use this piece of text to fill their layouts (text zones contents): beta website designs, posters, books, newspapers, check font sizing effects, etc. Most of they think they are using a fragment of the original print of the book, but far from this, most of the versions used nowadays are just a randomized serial of words and phrase structures with non-latin words, non-latin characters, with changed punctuation signs, invented and humorized fragments, etc.
I won't lie, having a girlfriend studying Classical Philology, we have been interested about the origins of this omnipresent fragment and the original written work. She came across with an original language version of the book in one of her campus library and copycated some pages for me. Here you have the transcriptions.
The original
"Nemo enim ipsam uoluptatem, quia uoluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione uoluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet consectetur adipisci uelit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat uoloptatem."
The English Translation
"No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure."
Randomized fragment mostly used nowadays
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Suspendisse porta lacus vel ligula. Nulla dolor. Proin auctor, risus eleifend convallis dignissim, est ligula egestas risus, eu adipiscing libero nunc nec leo. Pellentesque tincidunt enim sit amet purus. Phasellus eget orci in dolor sodales porttitor. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Cras tincidunt enim id nisi. Nunc id velit."
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2. Information through color? Meh... bad idea.
24.march.08
Common color associations in our life.
In our everyday life, we are used to deal with the tricolor traffic lights, with the red alerts, with the yellow warning signs,
with the green indicators showing properly working processes, with the beach flags telling us the state of the sea waves, the
lights in our car control panels, the green or red votes, the red cards on sports, etc.
But wait! How many of you have developed GUI's also using the color to transmit information? Or going even further, how many
of you have been arguing with someone else about which color is this or that? Yep, that's the point: what about the colorblinded people?
Not an insignificant portion of the society.
I know that being colorblinded is not as hard as being fully blind, but I know it's also a big problem to see things as the most of
the people don't. Colorblinded are estimated to represent nearly the 15% of the society, but only about 8% are aware of suffering
this impairment (and I must comment that the 0.4% of females are also colorblinded though we think it's a male issue).
So it's more common than we may think and we must remember it when developing.
Visual empathy.
I've found a really good application called Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin from Canada
( Project Website ) that allows you to simulate the most of the variants of color blind impairments (by now it's just working on Mac OS X)
within a great interface. I recommend you to check this out.
As an example, in the next image you can see on the right traffic light the colors as the most of you do, and on the left the colors
through a "tritanomaly" impairment:
So please, check the usability and accessibility of all your applications in development or production, do not transmit information through colors
uniquely and you will get a larger target of happy users about your app. Or even more critical, imagine an unaware colorblind plane
controller using your "flight manager app" in the control center of an airport: you may be preventing a huge chaos or ... some plane crashes.
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1. Men! Hard to read... help!
22.march.08
Accessibility? Access... what?
Many years ago I began caring about accessibility on websites and software in general, sometimes I think it's maybe because I suffer daltonism,
sometimes I think it's really necessary to respect web standards and respecting the whole society range of disabilities,
and sometimes I think it's all about comfort or lazyness. I'll explain myself.
Don't you like to read an interesting essay from your favourite weblogger with a large font size while you sit comfortably far from the screen?
Don't you like to read it in plain text? Without blinking and colorful adverts distracting you?
Have you ever wanted to print a site content without style?
Of course you do! So why don't your favourite geeky writer gives you this feature? Now he can, and in a really easy way.
I found a really interesting article about alternating CSS on webpages written by Paul Sowden from the U.K.
( Article )
and I adapted his script to my site. You can check the option of enabling and disabling CSS on the top left of this page.
But beware! Depending on a javascript makes you disrespect some accessibility best practices (i.e.:"Device dependant events are used and there are
no redundant events" and "There are 2 links activated through links"). An office mate tells something like: where do you prefer to sleep, ember
or flames? (but in other words as some of you readers may know)
So it's about your own choice.
Power to the content
I think that giving the visitor the option of switching CSS on and off is also a neat way of giving more importance to the content you publish and
not just to the style you give it. Though I admit I love styling HTML with CSS, I also love accessibility, order and easy-working.
Ordering your code and content
Once you have the option of enabling and disabling CSS, you'd realize your code it's not so ordered or clean as you may thought; and you
will begin caring about what to write first.
For example, for screen readers it's important to find AccessKeys, ordered links to the content to surf fast and easily, use standard
HTML headers, don't use images to transmit information or layout your site, "alt" tags on images, etc. In example, I place first the "Recent Posts"
menu in my code before the whole article. It's just a simle example, but it gives the visitor a better experience.
And when I build any new page I try my best to respect all this stuff and W3C standards. As you won't pass a red traffic light in a crowded
day of transit, come on: respect the traffic lights of W3C. Let's make the web universe a better place for everybody.
Hope you've found this interesting, and if you think I can improve any part of my site, write me an e-mail and I will.
Salut!
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0. Welcome to my new notebook!
20.march.08
Post Zero
Okay! This is the post zero in my new weblog.
I want to thank everyone who has loaded this page in a browser and then even cared about reading some of my published content.
You may have reached this site by multiple reasons, but if you like it, I invite you to come around here often!
About
I created this site from zero just for fun with lorem ipsum's and so just for the pleasure of designing the template, but I found interesting to use it as an on-line notebook.
By now my publishing method is a bit "old school": editing html by hand, but if this project grows I'll maybe implement some kind of lightweight posting system following the example
of a mate called Pplu, visit his technical blog!
My intention is to keep it updated with some articles, from my point of view, about web design and technical issues that I think are interesting to write about.
You may probably know more about what I write, so don't be destructive and drop me an e-mail with your point of view!
Well, see you soon!
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