This photograph earned me a sharp rapping on the collector’s window. I just pointed.

Besides, it’s noncommercial.

Like Lisbon’s subway (QED). Take it from Wally Olins, as stated in his lecture on “national branding” (at about 30:00 in the badly-encoded video):

Or you could say – and this is in Lisbon – if we are going to rebuild and extend the metro, we must use the colours and we must use the styles and we must use the design and we must use the culture of the country in which we operate to create a metro system which is appropriate to the world in which we live.

And if you go to Lisbon and you see the Lisbon metro… you will see that, although it’s got weaknesses, its strengths are that it is a metro system for Lisbon. It is not a metro system for Madrid. It is not a metro system for Berlin. It could only exist in the environment of Lisbon.

So what should Toronto’s subway look like?

Is Trapeze Software going around acting like it has already won the contract for an online trip planner? There’s been no announcement about which of the mere three bidders won it. Documents at last week’s TTC meeting stated that the system will roll out in July 2009.

Is somebody jumping the gun? Just asking.

Vicky Richardson, editrix of Blueprint, which I don’t read ([why] should I?), as interviewed on Wodcast. What about design writing on blogs?

Yeah, I think it really has a role, and I think the problem is that the role of the editor – I mean, I would say this, wouldn’t I? – but I do believe there is a role for the editor in whatever form, whether that’s an editor of a magazine or of a Web site or, you know, somebody there giving direction and weeding out the good stuff from the bad. Because blogging’s great, but sometimes it’s just downright boring – reading the mundane thoughts of somebody writing without thinking.

— Do you think at worst it’s irrelevant, or do you think it can damage design in any way? [Yes, he actually asked this question. Somebody started a blog and it damaged my design!]

— No, I don’t think it can damage design. I think it’s part of – it’s a big experiment at the moment. It’s very new. I think it’s great that people are taking part in this mass experiment in new media. And I wouldn’t say, you know, “don’t do it.” I just think that time will tell how useful it really is, and at the moment it’s kind of early days. And I think there are some design Web sites which are – they’re a waste of Web space, because all they’re doing is kind of regurgitating information without any valuable insight into it.

It may be months or years before the Amazon Kindle reaches Canada. I’m pretty sure we can wait.

• Why is it white? I manage to get fingerprints on a black MacBook.
• Why doesn’t it display PDF? Amazon’s claims that PDFs have “fixed layout format” is false. Amazon has more than enough software knowledge and computing horsepower to turn untagged PDFs, even scanned text pages, into real tagged text in reflowable columns. Add Amazon to the list of people who have not left the 20th century and believe, pace Eric Gill, that PDFs are not things but pictures of things.
• A no-CSS Web browser? In 2007? When WebKit is open-source and Mozilla and Opera can and will license their rendering engines? (Opera is particularly voracious in this regard.)
  • I suppose this gives American Web developers a $400 toy with which to check document semantics. (They could just turn off CSS or use Lynx, but then you wouldn’t be using a gadget!)
  • And I’m sure Wikipedia looks fabulous in no-CSS view. (Check the list of long pages.)
• It shows text files, sure, but what happens when it can’t figure out the character encoding or guesses it wrong? What’s the range of Unicode support?
• Exactly one font, and it’s Cæcilia? (What, they asked for a licence for Thesis and Luc[as] didn’t answer the E-mails?) What if I’m low-vision and I want huge white characters on a black background?
• “Kindle” is a great name for a gay dog and a half-arsed name for a consumer product.
  • With the suggestion of burning books, perhaps the first title one should read on a Kindle is Fahrenheit 451.
  • And anyway, Amazon was so named because it sorts high in the alphabet; “Kindle” situates itself squarely below average. It could be worse: The name could be “Zune.”

Just for the record, nobody has a licence to charge for access to any of my sites. You might be able to manage to download them onto your Kindle, but nobody has a right to ding you for them.

Contrary to expectation, 79 Short Essays on Design is not just an exercise in Michael Bierut fame intensification. These are not 79 blog postings conveniently and inexpensively “repurposed” from Design Observer. In fact, “only” 54 derive from there.

In cold light of print, what used to be mere blog posts turn out to have been “essays” – and they read like essays, too, gassy and replete with space-consuming circumlocutions of the “I can’t help but wonder if” variety. Some of that would be marginally excusable in the essays republished from print periodicals, where wordcount means something and if your ideas are too short, you have to pad. Online, it’s a filmed stageplay.

It turns out, then, that Bierut was never writing blog posts at all. He was transposing the failed and mortally wounded medium of design-magazine criticism to its successor, the blog. The only time any of that actually worked would be much later – once the “essays” were reunited with their biological parents, dead trees.

Eventually the elites of graphic design will give up the ghost and cease to perpetuate the fiction that “design writing” as practised over the last 50 years has any relevance anymore. I reissue my old challenge: Do a reader survey of two design magazines and two design blogs. (As far as the elites are concerned, there are only two design blogs. What’s the other one?) Find out how many print articles were read all the way through. Then ask the same about blog postings.

Are you willing to risk that kind of of empiricism? I didn’t think so. People don’t read your shit in magazines (they flip through it). People will read your shit online – if you write for the Web and not as though Rick fucking Poynor were “editing” you. (Because that is what every online design writer needs: An editor.) [continue with: ‘79’ →]