What I’ve been saying for two years really is and was true: Wheel-Trans has been using a snitch line, other passengers, drivers, and video cameras to spy on passengers. Why? To trump up a reason to boot them off the system.

If at any time over the last three years you the Wheel-Trans user appeared mildly less disabled one day compared to any previous day, you were at risk of the tonton macoutes turning you and in and getting your only means of public transportation pulled out from under you.

I filed the complaint about this dystopian bureaucratic outrage with the Toronto Ombudsman, who discovered the program is even worse and more Orwellian than I had imagined.

Now begins the Truth and Reconciliation phase of the Wheel-Trans surveillance program. We will begin with outright ban on such use of video cameras by the Information and Privacy Commissioner (reversing an underling’s post-facto authorization of it), followed by a human-rights complaint and a class-action lawsuit.

Next week I will set up a separate online presence for the Spies of Wheel-Trans, and in September we’ll hold a public meeting.

(UPDATED) It borders on impossible. The reasons have been explored at length (really, beaten to death) by academics and intellectuals, and I have no choice but to agree with them.

Camille Paglia (“Women and Magic in Alfred Hitchcock,” Provocations) explains the effect of the female on the male eye.

Hitchcock’s great films of the 1950s and early ’60s show the tension between men’s fear of emotional dependency and their worship of women’s beauty, which floods the eye and enforces an erotic response over which a man has ethical but not conceptual control. Beautiful women are a fascinating conflation of nature and art. They often have an elusive, dreamy apartness, suggesting a remote inner realm to which a man can claim only momentary access.

The voluptuousness of the female body opens up room for ambiguity and creates lines that are actually curves. While the bosom is noticeable, it is plural, hence not a singular point of fixation like male genitalia. Men are parallel lines that converge at the phallus. (Having neither focus nor line, bears photograph atrociously.)

I have not that many examples of actual innovation in the male nude. Interestingly, “nude” here tends to mean “shirtless.” [continue with: How to innovate in male nudes →]

Helvetica type in iOS 7 will be darker than in early betas. Helvetica – still wrong for screen usage, as Spiekermann tried to explain to Ive – will not be replaced by another typeface; we’re stuck with it. The myriad adjustments you can make in iOS 7, including to contrast for low-vision readers, are desperate compensations for a font that shouldn’t have been used in the first place. (“What communication design looks like if you give the job to an industrial designer: Helvetica Thin, no diversity, just… style” [via].)

Later I will discuss non-Latin scripts in this context. (You wouldn’t believe the arguments I’ve had with people about the issue of matching, say, Arabic and Latin.) For today, though, let’s recap why designers love masses of grey text.

I covered this before in my now-forgotten posting on the International Compliant Style or IC-Style. I was building on an observation by Aycan Gulez that in turn is so forgotten I had to use the Internet Archive. (Segments reproduced here for posterity.)

Recently another Web-design annoyance has emerged in the form of low-contrast text…. It seems that more and more Web sites, and not just small personal Web sites, are switching from black to gray text. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Why would you willingly make your text less readable? After all, black on white is the maximum contrast you can get…. Then why do those Web sites use gray text? Have their designers never heard of contrast? […] Then what is the reason?

The reason is… gray text looks better and more coherent when seen from a distance or as an element of the overall design – but, and this is a big but, it is not meant to be read in these cases. […]

Unfortunately, some visual designers sacrifice readability for a slight increase in visual appeal because they do not really read the text on screen; they treat it as a large block of horizontal lines, and the darker those lines are the uglier they look. So decreasing the contrast a little makes the overall design look nicer but less readable. Poor readability is not the designer’s problem. After all, he will probably never try to use the site he designed. Come on – it is a boring supply-chain-management company Web site!

Designers like unreadable masses of grey text because they look great from a distance. Designers, being barely literate (ask Natalia Ilyin), do not actually read their own designs. [continue with: Designers love masses of unreadable grey text →]

Here we have the Monocle Shop on College St. on the Saturday of its opening. Walking smartly into the shop are two of its enforcers (actually enforceuses), one British, the other Canadian.

These two had followed me out of the store to demand I hand back the perfect-bound Winkreative brochure I had picked up from a pile of such brochures in the office area behind, and clearly demarcated from, the store. We then had quite a discussion about why I was not allowed to take home a brochure. The enforcers alleged that one had to pay for it. But it was a brochure, with no barcode or price tag. One does not sell corporate brochures.

I fact-checked their asses by asking the Monocle online store and Winkreative exactly where I could buy such a brochure and for how much. Whaddya know: No response.

Monocle, a cripplingly dull magazine with a smashing business plan that needs to be duplicated wholesale, always wants you to know you aren’t part of the family. They will fly a woman across the ocean and task her with tailing you outside a store on a winter’s day to tell you that to your face. I contend this is materially worse than getting endlessly strung along for an interview with and by Tyler Brûlé.

What else was I doing at the Shop that day? Loathing the grasping, arriviste young-design-professional clientele visibly currying favour with the boss; trying to get a good photograph of Brûlé’s excellent shoes; and enduring his airy rebuff when I told him his video podcasts required captioning.

The Times, not content to lie just about gays, now lies about product design, in this case in an obituary for Oxo designer Sam Farber:

Made with a spare, minimalist aesthetic in mind, [Oxo] tools sported what would become the line’s distinctive hallmark: Fat black handles of a soft plastic known as Santoprene, shaped and angled to be easy on the hand.

Except those handles were not “distinctive,” nor were they invented. As Objectified and other sources confirm, Oxo designers gave up trying to “design” a new handle and simply reused a grip from a bicycle handlebar.

Not exactly plagiarism, but not exactly not plagiarism, either.

Then there’s the question, never satisfactorily answered, as to why this allegedly designed and perfected ergonomic grip was exactly the same without variation on dozens of products. Default components are the antithesis of ergonomics. Ask Niels Diffrient, who also had the bad taste to die in the last month.

We’ve been through this before in the context of E-books. Authors and editors need to understand semantic markup. But that is a lost cause. Jeff Eaton solved the problem for newspapers by writing a CMS that enforces structural thinking.

(The dumb-as-shit slug for that article – controlling-presentation-in-structured-content/ – is an excellent example of another way online publications fuck it up.)

Are pizza flyers good design? Don’t ask a design intellectual.

I would take issue with the idea that it is the role of the visually literate to impose their values on those they see as the visually illiterate. And I would question anyone who thinks that effective design, no matter how it looks, is not in some way good design. Design criticism, and design history, rarely enter TRW (the real world), preferring instead to inhabit a cozy province where everything looks lovely and no designer ever has to hear the dreaded words “That’s all very nice, but could you make the type a bit bigger and all capitals?” The fact that graphic designers have to make money and work for other people should no longer be our profession’s dirty little secret. And nor should the fact that graphic design is an essentially multilingual activity in which we should, must, be willing to use the same language as the people with whom we are communicating.

Ignoring the invisible visual communication around us, and the powerful effects it has, and looking down our noses at the 99% of designers who operate in that economy risks [our] producing a generation of designers who shun work they see as beneath them and insist on speaking a visual language only they understand. No wonder the vacuum is being filled with amateurs.

Design criticism: The biggest fraud since poststructuralism.