A common trend in writing is to come up with “clever” names for articles. This annoying attempt to create reader curiousity is only appropriate for print design. The web is another story.
Not only is writing on the web for humans, but it is also for machines, or in many cases, humans using machines that help them find what they want. If a typical contemporary print magazine contained an article about naming articles, there is a good chance that it may be called “What’s in a Name?” While this is annoying to a reader who is trying to decipher what the article is about, this title will not be significantly detrimental to a reader’s ability to find it (though I have many times flipped through my magazines, trying to find that great article I read, only to find out after scanning over the right issue many times that it had been named irrelevantly). However, if that same article is put on the web, not only do you essentially exclude your useful article from search queries about “naming articles appropriately,” but you also run the risk of mucking up the search results for someone who is looking for the origin of the popular Shakespeare quote.
So, next time you write a blog, imagine, if you were someone searching for the information in that article, what words would be in your query. Then, try to include those words in the title of your blog. It’s true that the contents of the blog may be relevant to what someone is searching for, but that information only has a <p> tag around it. The title of a blog on my page has an <h3> tag on it, which holds much more weight as important information to a search engine than a <p> tag. Then, in the archive of my blog, each page <title> includes the title of the blog in it, which I have found to have more semantic weight than anything for determining search rankings.
Keep in mind that you should title your blog postings relevantly. Just because “brittney spears” is a popular search query, including it in the title of your blog post won’t help your search rankings any unless there is truly valuable information in your blog about brittney spears. Search engines such as Google will get you sorted out one way or another if your information isn’t truly pertinent to said search query. I know that seems to run contrary to my previous point about the Shakespeare quote, but nevermind that, just be a good web citizen and name your blogs appropriately.
I have, for the time being, abolished ornament on my blog. Yes, there is nothing but type on it. For usability’s sake, hyperlinks are still underlined, and the fact that I use color to differentiate information is perhaps questionable in this minimalist approach, but I feel much more free now that I have broken the chains of ornament.
It’s not so much that I think that ornament is evil. I do this to make a statement. Graphic Design’s academic programs, from what I have seen, have chosen to concentrate on visuals, and the copying of “styles,” at the expense of their students’ sensitivity to form and space.
Something such as a blog is, in it’s sublime sense, purely information. Most blogs take advantage of the wonderful semantic markup of the web, which, when used wisely, enables search engines such as Google to find the most relevant information to what you are searching for. There’s increasingly more information out there (duh!) so relevancy is more important than ever. It seems that many college Graphic Design curriculums have forgotten that Graphic Design all starts with the transfer of information (this all feeds into my disdain for all-Flash websites and text in images, but that is for another post, and maybe not even then, because (futile) attempts to pound these concepts into the heads of members of the general Graphic Design community have been made) and I don’t mean “information” as in some esoteric, masturbatory, “concept” you are trying to support, I mean information…the useful kind.
So, rather than learning about typographic nuance, students must resort to rummaging through CA to decide what “look” to copy (many of these “looks” are simply rip-offs of the pop-culture graphics of yesteryear). So, I present to you an exercise in space and form. The form being the letters and word-images, and the space being the space between these forms. It’s like that exercise in school that was a great exercise when taught at the Basel School of Design, and was supposed to teach you that the only necessary factors for establishing hierarchy are: proximity, size, weight, color (I’ll omit “visual punctuation” for the sake of supporting this theory that I simply do not have time to assimilate irrefutable information on), but that somehow got bastardized by your reconstituted design school’s curriculum. In my case, we were assigned to typeset a recipe, which has a hierarchy depth of TWO (ingredients and steps). A couple years later, when I finally realized what the actual objective of that exercise was supposed to be, I had to resort to independently re-typesetting the information on a deodorant bar to truly understand the nuances that establish hierarchy (I’m dead serious…I still have the files if you want to see them).
P.S. I have had the honor of being invited to be an author at Be A Design Group and this post, as well as some other future posts, will appear there as well as here.
Since starting blogging, I have increasingly found myself referring people to my blog, rather than explaining things that already reside there. Though my blog isn’t particularly personal, it reminds me of those rather impolite mass-emails you may get from a friend on occasion saying “This is what is going on in my life: yadda yadda.” I say rather impolite because my natural reaction has always been “Who are you to think I care?” and “Am I not important enough for you to write an e-mail just for me?”
That’s what’s great about blogs:
You can tell a story, or get information out there and only have to tell it once
Others who spend a lot of time around you don’t to get sick of hearing it over and over
Others are less inclined to wonder why you think they care, because they have sought the information
Others can consult the information at their leisure
You don’t have to worry about omitting crucial information from one telling to another
Anyway, now I sometimes find myself explaining something that happens to already be on my blog, then I get fed up, stop explaining, and simply say “just read my blog.” How selfish of me to consider my time so precious that another moment of human interaction isn’t worth explaining something an extra time.
Some people get offended if you don’t read their blog. I had someone ask me, “Hey, David, how is the blog going?” I, of course, responded “Don’t you read it? If you read it you wouldn’t have to ask me that question.”
I think some day in the future a man will come home from work and say to his wife “Hi, honey, how was your day?” and her response will be a hurt “Don’t you read my blog!?” Or, he might even hear “Are you reading another woman’s blog!?”
I have noticed in my web stats that I have gotten a couple of referrals from Devilfinder.com, a rather odd search engine that I didn’t know about before. “Send me to hell!” says the search button…hilarious.
Safari RSS which provides great RSS support and a new “Private Browsing” feature that keeps everything you visit out of your cache…you know, so you can shop for bithday presents online and your family won’t be able to see where you’ve been 🙂
One thing I found interesting about the search mechanism was that they had programmed in things like “wallpaper” to help former Windows users find where to change their “desktop”. It would be very useful if they could team up with Google and use Latent Semantic Indexing to find relevant, but not necessarily matching, content on your machine.
Ever been confronted, in Photoshop, with this (totally useless) crop tool icon? Or been using a large paintbrush, and seen this equally useless icon: Even though your preferences clearly designate the “brush size” cursor should be used?
In either case, press CAPS LOCK. You will get the latter icon, which is the only good way to crop, if cropping, and you will toggle back to the “brush size” icon if you are using the brush tool (and your brush size is big enough).
It was quite awhile before I discovered this, and I always thought I had a buggy copy of Photoshop in the “brush size” situation. It seems everyone else I’ve encountered has thought the same, so I hope this helps you.
Most of the pictures you see on this site will have been taken with my Minolta Dimage Xt (its no longer available new on Amazon, but the Minolta Dimage Xg is, and I struggle to see any difference).
I did a great deal of research to find this camera, because I was sick of seeing photo-ops like I was able to capture in CAUTION: Inverted Chairs and not having a camera handy, or going to social gatherings where having a bulky camera was too inconvenient to hassle with. The camera is smaller than my wallet, lightweight, has a flash, zooms up to 3X and with a 256 MB SecureDigital Card, I can take up to 12 minutes of video, with sound, at 320×240 (VHS quality), at 15 frames per second (not VHS quality).
I used this camera to film my ski videos (featuring the music of Criteria), which I edited with iMovie, created the graphic animation with Flash.
The camera is not free of problems, however. Its battery tends to die very rapidly in the cold of skiing conditions, I once had to send it back to the factory for repair (under warranty) because the sliding door that covers the lens wouldn’t operate, and the optics, understandably given the camera’s small size, are not stellar. I also had an issue on a ski trip during which every evening I would replay the day’s movies on the hotel’s television set. After all of that replaying, stopping, rewinding, and slow-mo-ing, some of the quicktime movies became irrevocably corrupted. I now try to avoid replaying my precious videos off of the camera.
I have added a background pattern and framed the content with my parody of the ever-popular drop shadow. I’m tempted to resist the aqua-esque design trend and stick with pixel-by-pixel designs. I feel that it gives a good understanding to how all of the pixels work together, and while exaggerated, expresses the limitations of this medium.
Whenever I do work, or see work, that acknowledges the limitations of the pixel through exaggeration, it reminds me of the de Stijl movement, not only because the forms they derived from the principles of de Stijl are rectilinear, but because, in some cases, the form seems to derive from the limitations of the medium at hand. Granted, Mondrian’s paintings are counter-expressive of the inherent qualities of paint in contrast to the work of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollack, but seeing a piece such as Theo van Doesburg‘s logo for de Stijl Makes me suspect that maybe having a typecase full of only fonts and rectangular rules may have had a strong influence on its final form.
The Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts Table has (sort of) unlocked for me a way to browse almost entirely on my keyboard. I always loved how Firefox would highlight text links just by typing the first few letters of that link, and I always valued the ability to switch browser tabs on Safari using Cmd+Shift+arrow, but I could never get Firefox to switch tabs.
Funny though, that if you follow this table and press Ctrl+T in Firefox on a mac, it will NOT produce a new tab for you. This, I wouldn’t even notice, because I normally just register “Ctrl” to mean “Cmd” on a Mac, since that’s how it’s keyboard shortcuts usually translate from a PC, so as I would expect, one must press Cmd+T to produce a new tab on a Mac, however, Cmd+Tab does not switch tabs as one who uses this logic would expect. In this case, when they say “Ctrl,” they mean “Ctrl.” Press Ctrl+Tab and Firefox will switch tabs.
What do I have against using a mouse? Mice are primitive (mouse alternatives), and I find them especially uncomfortable given that I use a computer most of the day. To do the things I can’t accomplish on my keyboard, I rely on a Wacom Tablet.
