Truth in design, Truth in production

There's a design principle that I've often taken for granted. Distilled down to one word, it's Truth, with a capital T. But what is Truth in design? How does it apply? What, in short, does it mean?

There are two examples I like to use when explaining Truth in design. They both have to do with materiality. Here goes. Say you're designing a poster. You want it to look a little old school, a little messy, but still a little official. In short, you want your typography to have the look of an old-timey typewriter font. An easy reaction, when pressed for time, is to grab a typewriter font. I'm not talking about Courier, but instead about something that tries to mimic the little errors and ink blots of a worn out typewriter. But that font isn't very true. Use it and you'll find that all the letters look the same, each instance of a letter exactly like its siblings. It's not organic. It lacks soul. Not only that, but it's obvious that it wasn't done with a real typewriter. Then there's the truthful way. You dig out the old typewriter and honest to goodness type out the text you want. Scan it, clean it, integrate it into the poster. Each letter is a little different and the whole thing comes by its blotches honestly. In short, it's true. It's meant to look like the product of a typewriter and it does because it is.

Truth, however, is also utilitarian. That's where my other example, the one with the corkboard, comes in. Say, for the sake of argument, that you want the look of pictures or notices pinned to a corkboard. Sure, you can open up your graphics program and plunk a stock texture of cork in. You can drag whatever you want onto it, even simulate the shadows cast by the tacks. But why would you? In real life, light casts shadows for you. If you actually print the photos (or notices, or whatever) and pin them to a real cork board, it looks right, automatically. Why add shadows when light can do it for you? If you try to do it digitally, you'll miss something, or agonize for far too long in order to not miss anything. Do it in reality and the details are taken care of. Nature does half the work for you.

In essence, Truth is about materiality and reality. It's about doing it properly, with the right materials. In an idealistic sense, it's about knowing that you've got something right, that it is how it should be and isn't just an imitation. In a practical sense, it's about covering your bases, not by thinking out every eventuality, but by letting reality do the work. It may not always be convenient, but it will always be right.

Disembodied dress 3

Continuing the series of disembodied dresses, here's the aptly named Disembodied Dress 3.

The building blocks of life

Not DNA or anything else anyone ever calls one of the "building blocks of life." I'm talking about real, literal building blocks, the wooden ones that children use to make towers and forts and cities. Except that I'm talking about them in a figurative sense.

This morning, I've determined that life is a lot like a block tower. Here's how the theory goes: We are a building species. We build in both literal and figurative senses. We spend time building habitats, social networks, routines and reputations for ourselves. We are builders. But we're not building with concrete and rebar. We're building with (you guessed it!) blocks. Block towers can be sturdy or not, inventive or not. They can be anything imaginable. There are block towers that fall over if there's a breeze or someone shakes the table. No block tower can stand up to a determined kicking.

So, we spend our lives building block towers. In fact, our lives are block towers. Sometimes, if we really like the tower we've built, we spend ages admiring it. It's such a great block tower that we can't imagine any other. But then, if we're being pessimistic, the fear can set in. What if someone comes along and kicks the block tower down? If we add another few blocks, mightn't it ruin this beautiful tower? Best to leave it as is and hope nothing bad happens. To me, this is a problem. We're builders. Why should anyone spend a life trying to protect their existing block tower?

What's the best way to keep our block towers from getting kicked over? Tear them down before someone else does. We may think that we already have the best possible block tower, but maybe it can be better, or at least different. We need to learn to tear down our own towers. When we're not busy trying to protect the towers we've built, there's way more energy available to imagine and build better towers.

Considerate Utilities

Something thoroughly awesome has just come to my attention. The Hydro Quebec guy was just here to do a meter reading. He stomped his boots on the front steps and then, as soon as he was in the door, he pulled out a pair of cleanroom booties to put over the real boots. Honestly. Little white plastic boot covers to keep the snow off of my floor. That just strikes me as spectacularly good planning for a utility in a profoundly snowy province.

A Manifesto Stub

Everyone needs access to information, not just those of us with good vision, full mobility, high level language skills and shiny new computers.

OCI logo revisited

The OCI logo I was so pleased with yesterday has been replaced by the OCI logo that I prefer today. Behold! Progress! Magenta progress, in fact.
I think this one looks far more dynamic.

On sensible careers

People try to be too damn reasonable and realistic about the future. I think those are silly and impossible things to be. Everything always changes. How can we expect to be reasonable about the unknown? I don't care if the world will always need engineers and lawyers and accountants. I don't want to be something the world will always needs. Where's the fun in that? I'd much rather be something new.

A manifesto for ginger coons

[Having discussed the idea of mission statements for people, I set about figuring out what I need to remember when times get confusing. The result is the following point form manifesto. I'm posting it because I think several of the points are useful, not just for me, but for anyone else of a similar age and inclination.]

• I will do things that interest me, come hell or high water
• I understand that interesting things are sometimes accompanied by boring things. I will find joy in the boring things because they help with the progress of the interesting ones.
• I must understand that degrees are only pieces of paper and that they may not make me happy or help me along with the things I want to do.
• I will remember that there are twenty million (give or take) different ways to do the same thing.
• I must remember to do things because they make me happy, not because I think I'm supposed to do them.
• I will avoid sulking and stewing and hiding under the covers when I am unhappy. Instead, I will endeavour to take positive action.
• I will not compare myself to other people. Everyone is different. That's the whole point. There's no reason to try to be the same as anyone else.
• I will not seek easy answers from outside sources. They don't exist.
• I must remember that most people do not achieve greatness before the age of twenty or even in their twenties. The people who do so are anomalies. I am not running behind schedule.
• I measure my own success. People who try to measure my success for me are wasting their time and neglecting themselves.
• The same goes for me: I have no right or time to measure the success of others. In short: I mustn't be judgemental.
• I don't have to choose. I can do everything. I just can't do it all at once. I must learn to prioritize.
• I will learn to excuse myself. I don't need to be right all the time. Changing my mind isn't the end of the world.
• Grey areas are okay. Sometimes, "maybe" is a better answer than "yes" or "no."

On Agency

Agency is a double edged sword: I have the power to decide for myself. The only catch is that I have to decide for myself.

Creamer Architecture

I really shouldn't be allowed to go to restaurants where they serve cream in little individual containers. Why? I like corbelling too much. This is what happens when it gets extreme.

An idea for a glossy zine

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous doesn't entirely appeal to me. It just frustrates me to see people who already have everything. It frustrates me because they have it and I don't. It frustrates me because I think it's pretty boring to look at what people do with their vast riches. These people have no reason to innovate or stretch. I have a better idea.

I've dreamed up yet another darn idea for a (maga)zine. I want to do something called Lifestyles of the Poor but Hopeful. I want to look at what people can do with less. How awesome can you make a cheap apartment on a low wage budget? If I'm to judge by some of the places I've seen, people can still do some amazing things with nothing. It strikes me as far more fascinating to see what clever people with less can do than what boring people can do with more.

I think I want to make a marginally glossy zine on this subject. We'll see how it goes. Maybe look for the first installment at Expozine this year. Maybe.

An Easier Website

I was in a design meeting at work today. The complaint: Clients ask for "cleaner" or "more professional" websites. So, the boss muses out loud that we can't just adjust and make a website sixty percent cleaner. It struck me at that point that there should be a way.

Solution: Take a representative sample of people. Give them a word (professional, clean, edgy, etc.). Give them a pile of design elements (colours, layout pieces, whole layouts, typography, all that good stuff). Get them to rate each element on how much it matches their perception of the given word. Look for patterns in the responses. Sort by demographics, psychographics, industries. Take the data. make a website generator with a very simple interface: a white screen with a number of slider bars, where each bar represents a scale of zero to one hundred for a given trait (edgy, contemporary, clean, professional...). Any person who wants a website need only key in a little pertinent information about themself, and then move the sliders to get what they want. Press the button. Don't like the output? Move the sliders some more.

So, I'm sensing another thesis. Doctorate, maybe? The research should be fun and doable. It's just the actual programming that I'm a little scared of. But it could make a good collaboration with a computer science person.

If it actually worked, I'd put myself out of the web design business. On the upside, I'd secure my place in other circles.

Craigslist personals dynamics

I keep thinking up things that I want to study. Most recently, I've been thinking about what makes people reply to personal ads on Craigslist. Do people ever post ads that get no replies at all? What are the factors in a popular ad?

There are variables: Who the target audience is in terms of gender, sexual preference, age, location, all that good stuff; how the ad is written; whether or not the title of the ad is engaging... I could go on, because I think there are loads of factors in the popularity of ads. It's a fun exercise in personal marketing, and I somehow don't think there's a substantial body of literature on it yet.

The life ruiners

There are people who ruin your life by being terrible. They make everything collapse around your ears through malice or other negativities. Then there's the other kind of life ruiner. These people don't want to ruin your life at all. Sometimes, though, it feels like they have. They ruin your life through goodness. They ruin your life by being wonderful. Most of the time, you don't feel ruined. You feel better for having known them at all. It's only when you realize that no one else is as wonderful. That's when you see the good, the wonderful and the true as life ruiners.

Settling and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

We watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg last night in my film studies class. It may be a musical (entirely sung, no dialogue), and it may have killer sets and costumes that verge on the hilarious, but it's still incredibly sad. At least, I thought it was sad. What makes it sad (spoiler alert!) is that there are two characters, who epitomize young love, who end up, through circumstance, being separated and settling for other people.

The two main characters have the wild, irrational, crazy love that we prize so highly. During a period of separation, for social and economic reasons, they both end up settling for security instead of passion. Fine. They both end up fairly happy, in lives that they find comfortable, with reasonable partners who care about them. However, they have regrets. There are a million things I could take issue with in this premise. I could argue that crazy, irrational love is a relatively recent construct, and that mercenary marriages have long been seen as normal. But that's not what's bothering me, this time around.

What bothers me is the reaction of the other people watching the film. The main complaint was that all of the grand, swooping music and over the top set design didn't match the fairly pedestrian plot. Over and over, people complained that there wasn't enough excitement and conflict in the plot. The other viewers found it problematic that the characters had small issues, but managed to move on with their lives. I'm a little shocked by that viewpoint. I'm worried that we've been so conditioned by Hollywood to expect big things that we can accept reality.

In real life, people live with what they have. People make choices based on their immediate situation and their future happiness. People like comfort and certainty. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg presents a story in which characters react in realistic ways. In movies, people hardly ever settle. In real life, it happens all the time. Based on the reactions of the others in my film studies class, I get the impression that people want grand romance in their movies. They want the hope that unrealistic things can happen. That worries me, just a little bit.

Nothing is perfect, but many things are good enough.

I keep a whiteboard in my front hallway. I often get tiny stubs of ideas, little soundbites, that need to be documented before I forget them. Those stubs often end up on scraps of paper, random pages of my sketch book, and generally in difficult to find places. The purpose of the whiteboard is to aggregate the stubs so that I can actually find them when I'm ready to turn those little ideas into bigger projects. Yesterday, on the whiteboard, I wrote the words "Nothing is perfect, but many things are good enough." I like that statement. It sounds pithy. It shows good use of rhetoric. I'm troubled by it, though. It bothers me, as an inveterate perfectionist, to be embracing the "good enough." Should we reconcile ourselves to a world of "good enough?" After all, the quest for perfection leads to so much heartache. At the same time, we need to be able to dream. I'm wondering if the realism of my "good enough" statement is productive or not. Is it actually good to be able to settle? Is it worse to aim for perfection and fail often than to aim for good but never get the lift provided by actually attaining perfection? Is "good enough" good enough?