When I wake up, I check my email and a few websites. Sometimes I listen to a podcast or flip through something on my iPad. Sometimes (rarely) I make an effort to read the news. I often hop on Adium pretty soon after I wake up to see if anyone is online to chat with. I spend the majority of most days with my laptop, and it sits next to me as I fall asleep listening to a podcast or audiobook, and then wakes me up with an alarm in the morning. During the day I sometimes entertain myself by watching a TV show or two. I make a lot of phone calls most days to stay in touch with friends and family on the other coast, and even then I often have the computer open in front of me.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual for people my age, or for most ages at this point in time. Even if I didn’t primarily do my work by making websites, I would probably be on a computer for a good chunk of the day at any other sort of job I could get. And I don’t even consider myself to be that bad with how much I’m in front of a computer and connected to the web. I spend hardly any time at all on Facebook, which I always hear about everyone spending gobs of time checking out. Ditto with Twitter. I have a lot of high-minded opinions about why social networking websites are bad or stupid or whatever name I come up with that day, but the truth is probably more like I just get bored easily with them.

I consider myself lucky to say that I generally feel like a productive contributor to the web, and a productive person in general. I’ve had my hand in a number of websites, none of which have probably changed the world or made it a better place. But there is something to the feeling that I know how to make something on the web, which to me feels like something beyond posting aphorisms to Twitter every so often.

I spend a lot of time on the web, and I think for that reason alone, I want it to be a really great place. I personally started interacting with the web through an AOL account my family got in 1994, when I was 9. I hear about people making interesting contributions to the medium as early as high school or middle school, and at this point I’m sure that means there are a lot of meaningful contributors to the web who grew up in a world where the web has always existed. I’m sure a lot of people who interacted with various precursors of the web would say that I’m already a member of that group. I believe in some ways I’ve watched the web grow from a subculture into mainstream culture. I wonder if there is any remaining doubt that it is probably here to stay and has simply become a part of humanity in the way that books are the primary record of our history. Books aren’t a subculture, they are a part of our culture, and the web seems to be as well.

This issue gets batted around every now and then, and seems to bring out a lot of polemicizing. I think that there is a distinction to be made between typing and typesetting, similar to the difference between composing and editing. For most writers, drafts are probably riddled with typos, spelling errors, poor sentence construction, etc. At some point in the editing process, before a piece of writing is published, these are meant to be ironed out.

The one-space/two-space issue is similar in my mind. Published writing, meant for reading, should be set with a single space between sentences. It doesn’t matter at what point in the process this happens, and drafts need not adhere to the rule. This is similar to how apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and ellipses are treated. At some point prior to publication, the single and double primes (generally reserved for feet and inches, minutes and seconds) must be replaced with apostrophes and quotation marks; some hyphens and double-hyphens must be replaced with en- and em-dashes; triple periods must be replaced with ellipses.

With unpolished type-written prose – such as an email or text message – it is much more up to the individual where to set a tolerance for variation in spacing, spelling, grammar, etc. Conventions will probably emerge, but these casual forms of type-written exchange are still fairly new, and more time is needed.

However, with more and more writers having access to a “Publish” button, we’ve had to adjust some of our expectations surrounding writers’ ability to edit their own writing either on the fly or prior to hitting “Publish”. It is not unreasonable to add proper typography to the list of quick checks writers routinely make. Its kinda like checking for “its” and “it’s”.

Growing up, my grandmother always told me, “Nevan, I’ve lived in a different world.” She was talking about the changes in technology over her lifetime, which made her feel as though the world had changed significantly enough to be as new. This always sparked my imagination, and I often tried to fill her in on what I thought were the remarkable developments going on – often things with which she had little to no first-hand experience. She was born in a log cabin in 1910, rode to school in a buggie, and didn’t have access to telephones. As a young woman starting out as a teacher, she was asked by the principal to spend half her time as secretary because she had taken quickly to the typewriter.

She never used a computer, and it was clear she couldn’t form a coherent understanding of the internet based on my abstract descriptions. I generally lapsed to explanations like the ability to store all of the text of Shakespeare’s plays on a single disk, and the idea that entire libraries of information could be stored electronically in something that could sit on a desk or be accessed over a telephone line by request.

Technology brings with it the allure of greater efficiency and therefore productivity. Some innovations, like the telephone, make possible the previously impossible. Others, like the telegram and email, speed up the previously slow. It’s important to remember that our minds don’t actually work any faster than they used to, and training one’s mind still requires a kind of effort that cannot really be artificially expedited. It is one thing to learn how to use a telephone, send an email, create a user account, publish a web page or blog, type on a keyboard, type on a mobile phone, fill out and manipulate a spreadsheet, use a camera, assemble a slide deck. It is another thing to learn how to reason, how to hold a conversation, how to write, how to express one’s feelings, how to describe ideas, how to watch for special moments, how to give a presentation, how to read. To some extent, learning the former can aid the learning of the latter. It can also distract. Negotiating a balance in a high-tech world is an individual process that depends on an understanding of both kinds of things, and of one’s self.

Obscurity is far more popular and widespread than popularity. Most, even we, the obscure, will, in a moment or more of popularity, never point this out and probably have a difficult time recalling its truth. But there it is.

To each an obscurity unto herself. Popular ideas can be uninteresting simply because their shared nature has shaved off all the interesting bits. Others are so interesting, and feel so profoundly connected to all of us, that we imagine they are hardly ideas at all, at least not those of individuals. What popular person could have invented forgiveness, passion, understanding? If these ideas came from us, maybe they came from many of us at once, maybe the seeds grew in all of us, maybe they regrow in each of us to this day. Maybe one of us had a bit of a notion, and shared it with a few more who worked and molded and shared with more, who rephrased and reshaped and inserted their own selves before passing it on yet again.

Plato may have described the jewel beneath the rough surface, whose nature we can infer, but I think our attempts to understand only make the idea rougher, exposing new crevices and tributaries, cracks and holes, outgrowths and sharp edges. The beauty is not buried deep within, and we are not digging. Instead each is piling on, adding ugly refinements to the whole.

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It begins with a storm that shipwrecks a boat on an island and ends with the ship setting sail for a voyage home. We learn that the storm was conjured by an exiled noble turned sorcerer named Prospero; one of the passengers, Ferdinand, falls in love with his daughter Miranda. Prospero has a famous line toward the end which goes “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” But I think there is an action that speaks louder than these words. Prospero proclaims:

[…] But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

As he is set to regain his dukedom and, returning from exile, rejoin his world and fellow man, Prospero determines to break his magic staff and drown his book of spells and incantations.

Magic is not an explanation of, but a shorthand for the unexplained or inexplicable mysteries of the world around and within us. Months ago in Los Angeles, I stopped with a friend at a carnival in our neighborhood to ride rides and eat cotton candy and forget about some of the world around us. As we sat on a bench, my friend became reflective and she observed that she missed the magic of her childhood, when going to carnivals like this one she was attended by a sense of wonder and excitement – where now the mechanics of the rides were exposed in her mind and the banal tragedy of the workers of the rides was plain on their faces.

I told her that the magic wasn’t gone. Think, I said, of the odds of you and I being together and finding this fair. The stress of work had been weighing us down in the way it can do to young people, and just when we needed it the most, this carnival presented itself to us, around the corner from the condo we were sharing with its owner. None of this had to be intentional, it probably was unplanned, the best explanation we had for it was sheer serendipity. That is the magic that remains as we age and see some of the workings of the world people before have made for us exposed. Despite the odds, circumstances had convened and here we were, two people, sitting, sharing the last bits of fluffy goodness, part of the world and apart from it. What other magic could one want?

It is difficult to make an argument against the creative power and urge of people, which is a really good thing. In his Ted Talk on music and passion, Ben Zander begins:

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes. And they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote: “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other one wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”

Now, there’s a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Zander stands alongside those who look at any given situation and prefer to see the possibilities. There is an ever-present difficulty when facing any change, because with change comes an uncertainty about the outcome of the future. At any given point looking to the future, one can imagine either something very bleak or something filled with promise.

I’m of the opinion that there is an innate quality of mankind that drives toward improvement, so I prefer to look ahead to opportunity rather than dystopia. I hear what you are saying already: there is a danger to imagining only good things for the future, because this could cause a blindness in decision-making that opens the door to having all the good intentions in the world but still on average making the world a worse place. Surely, anyone who is serious about partaking in the human project needs to be careful about supporting changes whose outcomes are unknown.

A simple answer to this is that we have mountains of empirical evidence showing that the risks involved in taking chances are well worth it, and that the story of human progress is the story of the people who embrace change and move forward. But this is a sort of grandiose way to think about things, and misses the point on the individual and day-to-day scale. It is fallacious to imagine that we have much control over what will happen to us tomorrow, and a little absurd to imagine even more control than that. Things happen to me every day that surprise me, as I’m sure they happen to you as well. We may sometimes be in a better mood to recognize and respond to those things, but the surprises are there if we are open to them.

I would say that it is fairly easy and a little lazy to argue that some change in the way things are is going to lead to the demise of some sort of human potential. Thinking that a change in technology is going to limit our ability to realize our creative selves implies a fragility that I don’t think most people making such arguments take into account.

On the eve of the release of the iPad, Cory Doctorow wrote:

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

This sounds like a pretty limiting take on kids’ potential. And a pretty limiting take on the adults those kids grow up to be. On a human scale, is the difference between growing up with an Apple II and a shiny new iPad the kind of difference that really makes a difference? If we have learned anything about humanity over the course of, well, recorded history, isn’t it that we’re a pretty resilient bunch?

And yet leading into this conclusion, Doctorow claims:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Doctorow’s argument sounds a lot like “Here, finally, is something that’s going to stop kids from wondering about the world.”

John Gruber has a nice piece in response, “The Kids Are All Right,” in which he points out an email he received from 13-year-old Sam Kaplan who has a chalkboard app already for sale in the iPad App Store. In Gruber’s words, “Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.”

This is, in a way, how it always goes, and Gruber’s conclusion in his piece is on point:

Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained.

All change is of that nature. Some attempts at change don’t catch on, and so don’t make a difference. Those that do inherently bring loss and gain. I don’t fault Cory Doctorow for standing on the side of concern – but looking ahead, pessimism is no more warranted than optimism. That being the case, I’d prefer to choose optimism. At least enough so as to try to promote a good outcome. To my mind, Doctorow’s opinion is based in the same kind of belittling view of people that he seems to be deriding.

Let’s be honest. In the short time that I’ve been a user of Apple’s products, I have always been enthusiastic and excited about impending announcements. I was one of the few people who saw those fake videos of the iWalk and got all excited that a successor to the Newton was imminent. In fact, my excitement about portable computing in particular runs deep and further back than my use of Macs. There was a period in the 90s when I was avidly reading everything I could about what was going on in the worlds of Windows CE and the Palm Pilot. My family can probably recount for you how annoying I was about it. I would talk about small portable computers over lunch and dinner. When we went out, I would want to stop by CompUSA or Best Buy or Office Max, just to play around on devices like the LG Phenom, the HP Jornada 820, or the Psion Series 5mx and Revo.

These devices were not meant for a kid like me. (Or probably any kid.) The potent general idea from my point of view at the time was that these were devices which offered a subset of the functionality of a full-blown desktop, but simplified to the point where they were actually possible to use. This was not long after I had switched from browsing inside AOL to connecting over dialup through AOL, minimizing it, and browsing with either Netscape or IE. I was learning a valuable lesson about feature creep: extra features often come at the cost of usability. The Palm OS, Windows CE, and Symbian OS all boiled down to the same main choices about what users needed and what they could do without. “Productivity” apps like email and calendar were in, other things like games were out. Not a lot of fun for a 14-year-old.

But I wasn’t really all that interested in games. What I cared about was writing. When my parents bought me an iMac in 1998, the first best thing that I noticed about it was how much easier I found it to write on. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you why very specifically. I was too young and writing is an odd experience that is hard to understand any way you do it. I can still remember what the experience felt like, however. It was as though the computer had really just melted away, and all I was left with was the keyboard and a canvas, uninhibited and unencumbered. It was great, and some of my fondest memories of writing took place in front of that lime green iMac.

When I went to the stores to try out the Phenom or the Jornada or the Psion, I was trying out what it would feel like to write on the thing. I cared about the keyboard, I cared about navigating the file system, I cared about how my words looked on the screen… hoping that the confluence of the OS, keyboard, and screen would create something that felt right to me. I didn’t need a calendar, contacts, or even email really. I certainly didn’t need PowerPoint or Excel, although I was fascinated that they were able to get something similar to those things working on such small devices. I wanted something that I could take with me to start writing whenever the mood would strike.

Every time new products came out, or were speculated upon, that might fit what I wanted – a portable writing device – I was excited. I was excited when laptops with full keyboards got smaller and lighter. I was excited when the Visor was doing well and when the Handspring team rejoined Palm. I was excited about the Psion Series 7 and about the creation of subnotebooks. I was excited about the idea of “thin clients,” computers with more limited built-in power that off-loaded most of the work to a remote server over an internet connection. (That one sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Anything that was making computers smaller and lighter, and anything that was making the activity of typing more portable, I watched with baited breath. When Apple introduced Inkwell to Mac OS X, I thought that surely a foray into the tablet format was in the works, with the intention of giving users a pen-based interface and pen-based text entry.

Now that the iPad is here, I’m not sure quite what to make of it from this perspective. I think that it’s because I am still falling in love with my iPod Touch. My iPod is now my portable writing device. I wrote the first draft of my last post in Simplenote while flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In fact, I read the essay I was responding to on the same flight in Instapaper. After getting used to the auto-correction, writing on my iPod feels right to me in the way that I have been looking for. And it is portable beyond what I thought possible for a digital writing tool. I can carry it in my pocket with me everywhere at all times. I never thought that typing with two thumbs on a screen with no tactile feedback on a device that sits comfortably in the palm could feel like writing. But it does. A need that I’ve had unfulfilled for ten years has been met. I will of course be excited to try out the iPad in the Apple Store when they find their way there, running it through my usual motions, trying to determine whether I can really see myself writing on such a thing, weighing the feel of using it against its portability. For now, I couldn’t be happier with my iPod.

In “Faux Friendship”, William Deresiewicz argues that friendship – once noble, private, intimate, and deeply meaningful – has become watered down and scattered to the point of falseness:

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling – from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.

I agree with almost nothing in this essay. This is odd on the surface considering I probably share Deresiewicz’s viewpoint on many things. I have long been critical of Facebook and the way that many people use it. I’m critical of the way many use Twitter, but prefer its system because for now it is still basically possible for me to use Twitter in a way that suits me. However, I believe short one-off broadcast communication need not inhibit other more substantial, directed, and intimate forms.

(Has it ever? Just because literature hasn’t always shown it doesn’t mean that people haven’t been making small talk for as long as they have been talking. Did Goethe and Schiller in their great friendship have to stop holding small conversations with acquaintances and more casual friends in order to reserve their resources for their own more intense conversations? Did they never fill in space and time with small familiar talk with each other?)

Technology can’t be the root problem in the degradation of communication and friendship – at best it can enable people to communicate and relate to one another in less meaningful ways more frequently. Thankfully this isn’t an argument that Deresiewicz makes, although it is lingering in the background.

Changes in communication technology have enabled something else as well though. Far more communications – written, verbal, video; live, delayed; broadcast, directed – are made in either a public or recorded way now than potentially ever in human history. (That we communicate more on the whole is unfounded, even if potentially true. If it is, I think the increase has more to do with population density than changing technology.) The public pieces of communique cause an interesting dilemma: as a consequence of having these publicly available bits of expression/communication, the more casual forms of relationships and the communication styles that go along with them are so readily available as to almost feel forced upon the world as a tide.

Of course this mass of quips and check-ins and preening and exhibition doesn’t represent or display the qualities of deeply connected friendship. (How could it?) Because Facebook uses a definition of “friend” that you disagree with (rightly so) does not mean that Facebook has redefined the word. In pockets of our culture where the word “friend” has been watered-down substantially already, new words fill in to describe the relationships, still strong and powerful, that one paying attention only to the tidal wave can easily overlook. “Bromance” is not the most potent of these; I have heard the phrase “hetero life-mates” bandied about more in recent years – almost the perfect descriptor of loving non-sexual relationships Deresiewicz seems to long for.

Perhaps in Deresiewicz’s disconnected circle he has come to the conclusion that no one has the sort of friendship had by Achilles and Patroclus. Yet he claims to feel a sense of oddness in reading Facebook updates – that the point of many is to advertise the having of friends. My own experience has been that against a sea of these types of communication and relations, I hold the relationships that are important and close to me all the more dear. I would not be surprised at all if others’ experience is quite similar. The behavior of teenagers is not a good indicator. Most long for fame and celebrity and are drawn to the appeal of making their private lives public for reasons that have to do with our culture and media but not, I think, with some changing nature of friendship.

If people in general are having a harder time establishing close friendships, I think that is an unfortunate development. I don’t know that there is a good way to measure this, and I’m not sure just asking a bunch of people would be a good approach. However, if that shift is taking place, I do not think it is because people treat friendships differently. I have never known anyone to take the term “BFF” at face value. Everyone knows that these language devices are a lark. They are made to sound cute so as to remove the pretension and gravitas connected to what Deresiewicz calls “classical friendship”. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want, seek out, or understand the meaning and work required for close bonds of friendship.

I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but I’m considering it still. What bothers me about this is that I don’t know why I want to go see it.

First of all, I don’t really like James Cameron’s movies. In fact, when I was looking over his list of films recently, I discovered that my favorite of his movies is True Lies — which I enjoy almost entirely because of Jamie Lee Curtis’s transformation from clumsy awkward business-woman fantasizing over an exciting life (however false) into a surprisingly sexy “spy” convinced that her pretend role is part of a real assignment, even though it is actually constructed by her husband whose normal life with her has always been a lie. When Arnold’s eyes drop his tape recorder in astonishment, I’m right there with him every time.

The simplistic reality of a husband suddenly stunned at seeing his wife in a newly attractive light cuts through all of the layers of pretense, falsehood and deceit into a palpably real story of two people who love each other.

If I’m going to give Cameron credit, it’s for being able to reliably create exactly this type of moment. In Terminator 2, which has an equally if not more complicated story-line, Sarah Connor and gang track down the engineer who is building the technology that will become Skynet. We meet him first at his home with his family, and he agrees to plot to destroy the technology which he has been building by harnessing advanced technology from the future, based on his as-yet-incomplete work, left behind by the first Terminator film. All of these layers of metaphysical conundrum slip away as we see a man with a family back home, mortally wounded, holding onto his life long enough to detonate a bomb that will obliterate himself and the legacy he wishes not to unleash upon the world his children will grow up in.

I have heard many good things about Avatar. Alex loved the story and the story-telling. Cori finds the movie growing on her as she thinks back to it and thought everything was gorgeous (although she hated the use of Papyrus or whatever derivative for the subtitles).

I remain skeptical. I can’t say I’ve ever liked the whole of a Cameron film, for one thing, as much as I may hold a few moments of his stories very close. But there’s a more important problem I don’t know what to do with: motion capture.

Until earlier today, I hadn’t actually seen a trailer for Avatar in full. My impression has been that I don’t like the quality of the CG, and I am a long-standing skeptic of the use of 3D for anything but IMAX documentaries about outer space narrated by Tom Hanks or Sigourney Weaver. Part of this is my tendency to prefer minimalism. There is probably a lot of hoo-ha out there about the virtues of minimalism, but the only reason I think anyone subscribes to any point of view about creative work is because they believe it will positively affect the outcome of their own creative efforts. I like minimalism simply because I like constraints.

More importantly, I just don’t see how it’s possible to really do anything creative without constraints. I’ve often heard (and sometimes espoused) that design is about solving problems. I pretty much think the same thing about all forms of creativity, whether they be expressive or not. With design, it is easy to see its problem solving nature by thinking of an example. Take a newspaper. There’s an interesting design problem. We need something that is easy to scan for headlines, easy to read when settled on a story, easy to hold while reading and easy to carry around during the day, but also easy to print millions of copies of every day. Now there are some constraints! Oh, and by the way, we need to use typesettings throughout that reflect the history of newsprint journalism in this particular country while remaining easier to read at very small sizes despite variations in inking due to the high speed of our press.

Sometimes, we are working without enough of these kinds of constraints, so it is useful to impose some. That, perhaps taken a bit to an extreme, is my view of minimalism: making the problem more solvable by pairing down the tools with which you can solve it.

I may have to eat these words if I see the movie, but I’m inclined to think that Avatar is going to be yet another example of a big-budget movie suffering from a lack of constraints placed on the director. (I’m looking at you, George Lucas and Tim Burton.) I can only imagine how this might have gone:

James Cameron: I’d like to do a movie.
Studio: Finally! Why can’t you make more hits more of the time? We love you even though you’re crazy.
Cameron: Oh and I want to film it so that everything will be presented in 3D.
Studio: Sounds expensive, but people are eating that shit up these days. Disney’s been doing it for a while with some good results. You’re the boss.
Cameron: I think that a lot of the characters are going to be humanoid, but alien. Without going into too much detail, can I get an enormous budget to use motion capture on some actors’ faces and digitally turn them into, well, blue kitties?
Studio: I think you lost me, but let’s just go for it.
Cameron: So you’re saying that I can just come up with whatever the fuck I want and no matter how much it costs you’ll foot the bill and promote the thing like crazy with my name on it and we’ll all get stinking rich and get one thumb up from Roger Ebert?
Studio: Silver platter, buddy — unless you prefer gold.

Maybe Cameron’s team pulls it off — I honestly don’t know because I haven’t seen the movie. However, the odds are certainly stacked against him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie make good use of 3D or motion capture. Alex, however, has likened Cameron to Steve Jobs (“a phone, an iPod, and a breakthrough internet communication device; a phone… are you getting the picture?”) and I would be a fool to take Alex’s opinion lightly.

Most importantly, I haven’t wanted to see the movie because I’m afraid that I want to see the movie just so I don’t sound like an asshole when I criticize it without having seen it. Sounds like a pretty dumb reason to see or not see a movie. So now that I’ve gotten the asshole uninformed criticism out of the way, I’m free to make my own choice about whether I want to see the movie.

Maybe there will be one of those magical Cameron moments that cuts through all the confusion about who is on whose side, and the metaphysical questions bound to come up when a man’s mind inhabits a body that is a genetic mixture of himself and an alien species which behind the scenes is being done by animating the results of an electronic capture of an actor’s movements. Maybe this moment will be Cameron’s own statement about the craft of movie-making and the age-old ways of story-telling and fiction’s relationship to the truths of daily life. Or maybe it will just all be an overblown sci-fi fantasy wet dream.

I guess it could be both.

I believe I agree with the sentiment here regarding ads, especially on pages that are intended for reading.

As for Readability, I wish that it were an unnecessary tool. It is a much more difficult project to try to educate writers and designers and readers about typographic treatment on the web. It is more work for the standards makers and browser builders to devise, agree on, and implement ways for type to be treated far more intelligently on the web. But it’s worth it, because even though there are rules and guidelines to making texts more readable, writing will never be one-design-fits-all.

So, David Pogue, I know you’re listening. Take on this cause! If people are responding to you so well on Twitter, point them in the direction of something by Mandy Brown. The best way to tackle the readability of the web isn’t by trying to automatically reformat it (although it’s a good stop-gap). No! We need to raise awareness to push the community of people who write for and publish online to take the extra care to make words readable.

Thank you for your help. :)

For context, John Kricfalusi created The Ren & Stimpy Show. Here’s his take on the new movie based on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:

I had a tough time sitting in my seat through Meatballs, because what was happening and who it was happening to was not remotely interesting. It’s hard to pace a story around characters with no personality.

But as a cartoonist and designer, there was enough visual interest and unique action throughout the movie that intellectually I found things to stimulate me.

It was an optimistic portent of what could be. It’s basically an undirected film – but one that allowed many of the artists to take nothing scenes and add some kind of cleverness, design and action to the formulaic events being told by the story.

This in itself is so far ahead of an overdirected film (overdirected by executives typically, not by directors that actually have a point of view or style) that stops creativity from happening every step of the way, just so that more stock plot points, filler and bad puns can happen.

I think this kind of thing is enjoyable to read not just because of how harsh it is, but because it touches on something that is really true about the current state of, in my opinion, not just animated films, but most major films. I often find myself settling for the little things in a movie that make it good, rather than expecting something more, maybe in order to seem less like a cynic and an asshole.

But the truth is, there’s a lot of terrible stuff out there, and the industry that has grown around making movies has moved it from an art form into a calculating box office science. I can only remain optimistic by holding onto my belief that the creative juices going into films have stagnated due to lack of competition. Lower production and distribution costs, one hopes, will eat away at the joint monopoly whose long project has been the reduction of creative work to “content.”

Time will tell. Quality endures, but only if it can first find life.

(via Khoi Vinh)

Came across this again while digging through the DF archives. Rob Walker profiles the then-two-year-old iPod for the Times:

A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this — it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This idea has, I think, taken root since then, and a respect for the relationship between usability, readability, and visual character on the web in particular has really grown. And yet, some companies seem to continue to try to “copy Apple” in all the wrong ways, drawing the wrong inferences, and learning the wrong lessons.

Think about what you’re making, respect the user and the reader, and make informed decisions along the way to the best of your ability. Setting everything minimally against a white background is not the great lesson of Apple’s success. The takeaway is to place an emphasis on the user in the design process and not to underestimate the value of quality.

Kernest is one of the first good options for using embedded fonts in a website. Unlike projects like Cufón or sIFR, Kernest takes advantage of @font-face embedding, which is now supported by Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

One of the problems with @font-face at the moment is that Safari and Firefox support font formats like OpenType and TrueType, while Internet Explorer only supports Embedded OpenType. The usual workaround is to supply a different format depending on the requesting browser. This is exactly what Kernest takes care of for you.

Not only will it serve the right file type depending on the browser, it will only serve the font files when the request comes from a domain name tied to that particular font. Many of the current selection of fonts are free, but in order to make them available to your domain, you must activate them. Based on my brief use, this is a very simple process, requiring only a user account, and adding new domains is completely effortless.

After activating a font for your domain, you simply link to a stylesheet specific to your domain on their server. It is worth noting that there is no javascript involved, and this is as it should be.

I’ve been trying Kernest out for a few days now, and have found the experience very pleasant all around. I don’t know much about what TypeKit’s model will be like, whether they will have some fonts available free of charge, or if there will still be a charge for the service. If not, Kernest looks like it could be a great free alternative for projects without a budget for fonts.

And in the meantime, I highly recommend giving it a try. There are already several serviceable fonts on the site. I’m currently using Droid Serif from Ascender Corp.

Update: I’ve since switched to Heuristica.

Update 10 Dec 09: In case it isn’t obvious, I’m using neither Droid Serif nor Heuristica anymore.

Sadie Lou’s own Rebecca Rubenstein lands an exclusive debate-day interview with Sarah Palin.

Rebecca Rubenstein: As a Sarah Lawrence student, I tend to be very confrontational and opinionated, so I’m just going to put it out there —

Sarah Palin: Oh sure.

RR: Mrs. Palin…or do you mind if I call you Sarah? I’m kind of used to calling authority figures by their first names.

SP: Oh, you know, as a hockey mom, as you know I am one, all the kids on the team call me Sarah. But, really, I have to say that since being given this wonderful opportunity to be the vice-presidential candidate for John [McCain], who I feel is the most qualified presidential candidate to date, what with his maverick, should be having me be called Mrs. Palin. After all, I have been married for 20 years now to my childhood sweetheart Todd.

RR: Okay… [Confused look.] To get to my first question, right off the bat I’d like to ask you about your so-called foreign policy “experience.” I know that you had some difficulty answering when Katie Couric addressed the topic in her interview, but since you will inevitably be discussing this at length in tonight’s VP debate, perhaps you’ve had some time to rethink the question.

SP: It’s funny you should ask that particular question in such a way, because I ultimately take a strong stance against rethinking. We are in such a state of Iraq that we can’t afford to blink, much less think more than once. Rethinking, if you think about it, is clearly a sign of weakness. But to answer your original question, I think foreigners are really given a short stick in this country, but it is nothing compared to the sticks in their countries.

RR: I see… [A look of slight alarm.] Could you specify your experience with foreign policy, though?

SP: Um.

RR: For instance, I am experienced at going to the gym…because I walk to the gym, and I interact with the equipment in the gym. Do you understand the question now?

SP: Oh I think the gymnasium is one of the favorite places of myself to spend time in the day.

RR: I’m sorry?

SP: Oh gym equipment and me go way back, you know that I was Miss Congeniality in the Miss Alaska pageant, of which I am still very proud, and I have been going to the gym every day since to try to keep myself in figure.

RR: Maybe I should ask another question. Your eldest daughter, Bristol, has received a lot of media attention during this campaign due to her pregnancy. As someone who has been so outspoken about teaching abstinence and family values, how does this affect you?

SP: I have to say I think all of the attention has been rather offensive. There is nothing more American than a man marrying a woman.

RR: But Bristol isn’t married yet…

SP: I’m sorry, our wedding invitations have all already gone out.

RR: What?

SP: Well, I’m sorry to say this during an interview, but it would be very difficult to invite you, this has been a very popular wedding after all.

RR: [Sigh.] Nevermind. Third question: how do you feel about Tina Fey’s portrayal of you on Saturday Night Live?

SP: First of all, let me just say that I usually don’t stay up that late to watch shows, but my son was nice enough to show me some parts from the You-Tubes. Honestly, I don’t understand why everyone in the liberal media could think that she looks so much like me. I know that part of taking on such a public face with the public means being open to humor and mocking, but as you know, John and I have tried very hard to differentiate our campaign from the celebrity-driven campaign of Barack Obama, which was further supported by the work of Paris Hilton, you know. And I think that if anyone deserves humor and mocking, it is clearly Barack Obama and not John and me.

RR: Let’s be candid for a second. What do you really think of Barack Obama?

SP: To be frank, it still amazes me that Barack Obama had the audacity to go on a vacation to Europe while we were heading toward such an economic crisis that this country has never seen before, of which John McCain instead of going on vacation has done everything in his power including suspend his own campaign not lollygagging around with the French and the Germans while we’re at war with the terrorists and everyone at home is suffering from the demands of a weakening economy.

RR: Yeah… [Checks watch.] Well, fancy that, we’re almost out of time.

SP: Oh dear.

RR: Last question: if John McCain were to die during his term, and you were to become President of the United States, what is the first thing you would do while in office?

SP: God forbid such an event should ever occur, I think the first thing I would do would be to – well, I’ve heard that the President receives free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – and I think the first thing for me to do would be to order myself some Chunky Monkey, because ice cream always makes me feel better when I know I’ve got tough times ahead.

RR: Uh huh… [A look of immeasurable disdain.] Well, thank you for your time.

SP: No, thank you, and God bless America.

Computers offer a fascinating window into the play between the simple and the complex. The alphabet of computer language is as simple as they come, with two figures: 1 and 0, known as bits, which typically correspond to high and low voltage electronic pulses. From such a simple base, however, complex functionality can be achieved. On the other hand, seemingly simple behavior can require a substantially complex arrangement of ones and zeros. It also requires well-designed complex machinery to sculpt the flow of bits into something useful.

In Computer Organization and Design, David Patterson and John Hennessy describe in detail the design of a particular type of machine and its instruction set called MIPS (originally for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages). MIPS is one way to create the balance needed to make a good computer. The questions at hand in designing such a system include: what functionality need be built directly into the machine itself? how will instructions be represented? how will data be represented? how will the reduced set of operations be sufficient to accomplish a wide variety of more complicated operations? how will these operations be carried out quickly and efficiently?

The authors outline four design principles that guided the solutions to these problems in MIPS. The first of these, “simplicity favors regularity,” indicates that a reliably consistent design affords simpler solutions. For example, MIPS-32 uses a consistent ‘word size’ of 32 bits, meaning instructions and pieces of data are represented by a string of 32 ones and zeros. Having a regular word size allows for some simplicity in the hardware, for example: 32 wires, one for each bit, can be used to communicate both instructions and data – in fact, the same group of 32 wires can be used for either purpose and for any instruction or piece of data. The second principle is “smaller is faster.” Whatever the medium, the representation of bits has to travel through the computer. Shorter travel distances allow for faster computation, plain and simple. The third principle, “make the common case fast,” sometimes requires compromise. “Smaller is faster” asks for a small set of instructions and corresponding hardware, “make the common case fast” asks for instructions and hardware for as many frequently-used operations as possible. Hardware built to parse and quickly compute a larger instruction set take up more space, which can in turn slow down the overall function of the computer. These two principles must be balanced for maximum computing power and speed, which leads to the fourth guiding principle: “good design demands good compromises.”

These four principles all inform the design of MIPS. Thirty-two memory registers are kept close to the processor for temporary storage of 32-bit words currently in play. Access to these words is fast because of their proximity. Likewise, only six bits are required to indicate each, leaving room in 32-bit instructions for a wider variety of common instructions involving values in registers. The size of the architecture is kept small by reusing parts with basic functionality for multiple tasks. Compromises are made to reduce size while accommodating common cases: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are built into the instruction set and the hardware. To take a square root, the operation must be broken down into more basic parts.

In The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder follows Data General, a successful computer company, through the late 1970s as a team within the company worked feverishly to build a state-of-the-art microcomputer. This new computer, the Eagle, needed an architecture built from scratch with lofty restrictions and goals in mind. At the time, Data General’s bread and butter was a 16-bit microcomputer called the Eclipse. The Eagle would be a 32-bit machine roughly based on the Eclipse. It also set out to be backwards-compatible with the Eclipse: software written for the Eclipse needed to work on the Eagle.

There were also realities in place which added further restrictions to the design of the Eagle. Development of the Eagle was set on a very short timeline: one year. Why? The team working on the Eagle in Massachusetts was subject to competition with another Data General group in North Carolina, also working on a new 32-bit flagship microcomputer. The North Carolina group had a head start and was favored by the company. In fact, the Eagle team operated low key within the company, and included mostly junior engineers fresh out of school. Data General, meanwhile, was playing catchup with rival DEC, which had already brought a 32-bit machine, the VAX, to market.

The need for backwards-compatibility with a 16-bit instruction set, combined with the limitations on time and resources added to the compromises required to design and build the Eagle, and get it out the door.

The size of the instruction set was already a compromise. Doubling the word size would cause an increase in the size of the parts of the computer, working against the “smaller is faster” principle. The increased word size also vastly increased the number of instructions and data that could be represented with a single word, accommodating more common cases. Sixteen bits offer a vocabulary of about 66,000 words. Thirty-two bits represent 4 billion. In this case, the overwhelming vocabulary gain of the increased word size outweighed the speed hit of the size increase. The jump from 16 to 32 bits also offered another gain. According to Kidder, Eagle’s architect Steve Wallach reasoned that the increase led to “the enlargement of the Eclipse’s logical-address space from 65,000 to 4.3 billion storage compartments.” The number of spaces in memory that could be addressed increased 65,000-fold.

In building the Eagle, the second principle, “smaller is faster,” carried less weight. The goal was to fit the Eagle’s processor onto seven boards, where other companies were making machines using a single board. According to Kidder:

A multiple-board CPU performs simultaneously many operations that a single-chip CPU can do only sequentially… A time was probably coming when components would operate so quickly that the distance that signals had to travel would intimately affect the speed of most commercial computers. Then miniaturization and speed would become more nearly synonymous. But that day had not yet arrived.

Compromises between what operations the hardware and software would handle also took place. However, decisions about how to make these compromises were not always geared toward making the Eagle a fast and efficient computer, and more toward ensuring the Eagle would actually be a computer:

One Hardy Boy [working on the hardware], Josh Rosen, looks around and can hardly believe what he sees. For example, Microkids [working on the low-level software] and Hardy Boys are arguing. A Microkid wants the hardware to perform a certain function. A Hardy Boy tells him, “No way – I already did my design for microcode to do that.” They make a deal: “I’ll encode this for you, if you’ll do this other function in hardware.” “All right.”

What a way to design a computer! “There’s no grand design,” thinks Rosen. “People are just reaching out in the dark, touching hands.” Rosen is having some problems with his own piece of the design. He knows he can solve them, if he’s just given the time. But the managers keep saying, “There’s no time.” Okay. Sure. It’s a rush job. But this is ridiculous. No one seems to be in control; nothing’s ever explained. Foul up, however, and the managers come at you from all sides.

This way of working was even encouraged by the project’s manager, Tom West, who kept the following written on his white board: “Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well.” The limited time and resources available to the project compromised the overall quality of the design of the Eagle itself. There was, however, another human factor contributing to the inability to produce an ‘ideal’ design. West, a talented engineer himself, feeling the pressures of looming deadlines, decided at one point to try to examine flaws in the design to debug problems himself. After a few weekends of looking at the prototypes, West decided, “We’re way beyond what any one person can do. It’s too complex.” The complexity of the design and workings of the Eagle had become great enough that a complete understanding of all the details, decisions, and compromises involved in its engineering was unattainable.

Design, like engineering, is about problem solving. When setting out to design a computer architecture, several problems are at play. Machines need to be fast and small. They also need to be reliable and easy to fix or debug. Preferably, they adhere to some standards to ease programming by offering a consistent base for development. In the case of the MIPS architecture, one of the major design goals was simplicity. The design of the MIPS architecture, led by John Hennessy, began in 1981 at Stanford University, where the demands of the business world did not impose unreasonable restrictions on time and resources. Aspects of the design could therefore be thought out more carefully than the business-world could afford, lending the design a more complete overall grace and understandability. Data General’s Eagle team, however, had to sacrifice this idealism in favor of making a machine that worked and would be marketable. This was born out in West’s policy, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” The MIPS architecture balanced simplicity and complexity in a wholly different way than the Eagle. The difference lay in the problems that needed solving.

Last week I read Michael Bierut’s On (Design) Bullshit in Design Observer from a couple of years ago. He talks about the need to give reasons for design choices in order to sell your work to clients:

Before I could commit to a design decision, I needed to have an intellectual rationale worked out in my mind. I discovered in short order that most clients seemed grateful for the rationale as well. It put aside arguments about taste; it helped them make the leap of faith that any design decision requires; it made the design understandable to wider audiences.

In my far more limited experience working with design, this is true and apt. Even when ‘the client’ is yourself, rationalizing decisions makes you feel better about your own work in the ways that Beirut describes. Beirut himself admits that these rationales amount to bullshit, and at the end of his essay leaves off with an amusing anecdote:

I remember working years ago with a challenging client who kept rejecting brochure designs for a Francophile real estate development because they “weren’t French enough.” I had no idea what French graphic design was supposed to look like but came up with an approach using Empire, a typeface designed by Milwaukee-born Morris Fuller Benton in 1937, and showed it to my boss, Massimo Vignelli. “That will work,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

At the presentation, Massimo unveiled the new font choice with a flourish. “As you see,” he said, “in this new design, we’re using a typeface called Ahm-peere.”

I was about to correct him when I realized he was using the French pronunciation of Empire.

The client bought it.

In this example, it is clear that the reasons for choosing Empire did not include the fact that it is French, because it is not. However, this was the rationale given to the client, who had some predisposition to thinking that the design somehow needed to be French. The client had a desire that needed fulfilling, and the designers did so with bullshit. This bullshit rationale, however, made the choice of font perfect in the eyes of the client.

It may be hard to see this as a ‘bad’ thing overall, because Beirut ostensibly did not choose the font under those same false pretenses. However, this same process – desire or need followed by false fulfillment – can take place internally. In other words, when we are already looking for a particular reason to like a choice we have to make, we can easily be too quick to provide ourselves with a satisfactory bullshit reason why a certain choice fits what we need or want to accomplish.

In this way, having reasons that we are predisposed to sets us up to make some choices by default, without considering other options. The important question, when reviewing your own work or someone else’s, is not always “Why did you make this choice?” Sometimes it is “What choice did you make here?”

Michael Beirut recently announced the publication of his first book, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design.