pareidolia

song

This is of course just me play­ing gui­tar with a bunch of screwy effects. But I like it.

crap gui­tar

reasons to use a baseball bat

—You slept with my best friend.
—There was still some hum­mus in the fridge when I went to work this morn­ing.
—The front of my pants are now cov­ered in water that was recently in a pud­dle.
—You denied my mem­ber­ship appli­ca­tion to the condo board.

list

—Mother thinks I’m being irre­spon­si­ble.
—She wouldn’t like my new girl­friend.
—But Mother’s in a hos­pi­tal bed.
—She’s still proud of me.

The Onion: Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies

This is so funny I had to stop read­ing it, because I’m at work. I don’t want to be that guy that laughs at his computer.

list

—Play­ing check­ers with rub­ber gloves because you don’t want to dam­age your check­ers set.
—Rewrit­ing the lyrics to your favorite album so it no longer makes you sad.
—Giv­ing away all your aspar­tame.
—Mak­ing sure it’s fully drained.

list — Everything about my life is better than yours

—It’s true. Just look at my shirt. You would never be able to pull off this type of fab­ric.
—My girl­friend will flirt with you, but you’re never going to get any­where. Not with that kind of com­plex­ion.
—I speak with style. You speak by blow­ing hot air through your meat­flaps.
—I’m sorry, but that’s just the way things are.

graphic design, science, and art

I believe that graphic design can exist in a vacuum.

I know of some design­ers that work using a data-​​based approach. They do things such as mar­ket research, usabil­ity stud­ies, focus groups, etc. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, they con­duct stud­ies, and use the method­ol­ogy that the major­ity of sub­jects approve of.

Using aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines as an anal­ogy, this would be the soft sci­ence. Soci­ol­ogy, psy­chi­a­try, eco­nom­ics, etc.

I pre­fer a dif­fer­ent approach. My method­ol­ogy is based on my knowl­edge of his­tory, intu­ition, and an abil­ity to gen­er­al­ize. Some­times I will ask other peo­ple if my intent is clear. Often I won’t. Some­times I try to base my designs on log­i­cal prin­ci­ples. When I’m feel­ing more poetic, I won’t.

Using aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines as an anal­ogy, this would be the human­i­ties. Art, Lit­er­arure, Philosophy.

What makes this anal­ogy inter­est­ing is when you com­pare phi­los­o­phy to psy­chol­ogy. Both sub­jects are con­cerned with the mind, and its rela­tion to the exter­nal world.

Both approaches to graphic design are con­cerned with dis­play­ing infor­ma­tion. One uses sci­ence, and one is pri­mar­ily con­cerned with logic. There’s a lot of over­lap, but ulti­mately, I pre­fer using logic as a tool to present information.

Fur­ther­more, I believe that using mar­ket research, focus groups, etc. cre­ates a lowest-​​common-​​denominator approach to design. This makes it dif­fi­cult to inno­vate. It’s like design by a very large committee.

Design as an arts dis­ci­pline allows for inno­va­tion, style, individuality.

I think there is a place for both. But I pre­fer art to sci­ence. Although there is a large amount of evi­dence sup­port­ing design choices, such as UPS’s new logo, Paul Rand’s orig­i­nal seems more authen­tic to me.

Two more about William Gibson

Two things:

1. After I saw William Gib­son 2 weeks ago, I described him this way to Court­ney:

He looks a great deal older than the last time I saw him. But that’s prob­a­bly because he lives faster than the rest of us.

She told me that was blog-​​worthy, so there it is.

2. Also, I have been read­ing my signed copy of Spook Coun­try. It’s great. In one of the later chap­ters, he just throws this out there:

She remem­bered Inch­male describ­ing Stock­holm syn­drome, the fond­ness and loy­alty one could sup­pos­edly come to feel for even the most bru­tal cap­tor. She won­dered whether she might be expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing like that, here. Inch­male thought that Amer­ica had devel­oped Stock­holm syn­drome toward its own gov­ern­ment, post 9/​11. (My empha­sis.)

Fuck.

vagueness

The Onion knows what’s up.

blogs

I really dis­like see­ing this on a blog:

“Check out the rest of our [what­ever] after the jump.”

This is annoy­ing for at least 5 reasons:

1. This is intended to let peo­ple know that there is more con­tent in the “full” blog post as opposed to the “sum­mary.” The only prob­lem is that I often only read the full blog posts, because I am directed to the blog — not from the front­page — but from another web­site that links to the full post. To me, this is just annoy­ing and makes me want to stop read­ing your worth­less blog.

2. “the jump” — who decided to call it this? It sounds fuck­ing idiotic.

3. This can be done in a much more effec­tive way, and I know it, I’ve seen it in blog soft­ware. You could have a sim­ple “read the full entry” or “read more” or even, god for­bid, “read more after the jump” pro­grammed as the text to the link to the full entry, which would GO AWAY when you get there. The only dif­fer­ence is that you don’t get to cus­tomize it per page. No more “check out more of my stu­pid use­less links to free soft­ware you already know about after the jump” or “see more pic­tures of my stu­pid cat after the jump.” Big fuck­ing loss.

4. One of the advan­tages of a blog/​cms is that your con­tent isn’t nec­es­sar­ily tied to the html — poten­tially, your writ­ing could be for­mat­ted for a new blog­ging sys­tem, or a book, or what­ever the inter­net will become in 30 years. The point is, you’d have to go back in and take that out, because you’re a fuck­ing moron. Look toward the future.

5. I’ve never under­stood why you would want to do this in the first place. What’s so wrong with just hav­ing the full post on the main page? Maybe your stu­pid con­tent aggregator/​evil alien over­lord of a boss forces you to com­ply with some arcane ad place­ment algo­rithm. I don’t care, the point is -

Don’t do it. It’s dumb, and it makes you look dumb.