I am back in hibernation mode on LBO, and I don't want to post techie material, stuff that seems to gain me a good amount of flames ;-). ravi
Sorry to hear that. I welcome the techie stuff. Doug
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In an effort to get the tech stuff back ... here goes... (Apologies to the short list who get this twice. I am posting it on list now in hope of starting something tech driven. I like tech. I just have a limited scope of understanding it all the way down..)
In my long gone days of trying to get into the ad agency business, I put together a portfolio of the best work I could do... And got nowhere. I couldn't figure it out. I had studied the styles of design I liked and imitated them.
Well, this blog over Google and Bowman explains it perfectly. Not the brain thing, but the inability of the cyber culture to grasp the first thing about visual design. Adobe tries or tried. What they did was attempt to appeal to the graphic design crowd and they did a pretty good job. So does Mac. I am using an old iBook at the moment. It is definitely prettier that my PC. However the graphic design crew as noted in the blog, doesn't fit with programming and systems crowd. Art ultimately doesn't fit anywhere, mostly because it takes too much time to learn and get good at ... time is money... and good design, like good code costs extra time and extra money.
Beyond the hierarchy of knowledge and its pure snobbery, there is the problem that most graphic design types never learned programming. I tried and discovered something amazing, FORTRAN. It is one of the most elegantly engineered codes I ever tried to learn. It has a very compact command set, but what you can do with it is stunning. There are some principles in my intro to Java HTML that brought a similar, WOW. Then I realized because of how Java is put together it leads in exactly the opposite direction from FORTRAN, into a code mire of truly scary dimensions. COBOL the first code for business, is thoroughly ugly, and because it was designed to be used by business, its programs are vastly more ugly. Postscript which drives much of the visual world we see is also a very ugly language, even if at its deepest roots in linear algebra, the concepts are some of the most elegant of all mathematics. Maybe I take that judgement back a little. Adobe engineers had to do some pretty elegant stuff to set up the font families and make them work in applications. TeX has great elegance, LaTeX doesn't. I never got into C or C++ far enough to see its conceptual unity. From what I could see, I didn't particularly like it.
What's interesting is the business crowd, the regular office cubes behind those vast facades of glass and steel are a similar sort of study in the modularity of ugliness. And the consequences are similar. Completely inhuman world of ugly proliferation everywhere.
A few years ago, FreeBSD ran a contest to change their logo. Their original logo, a red tailed demon in tennis shoes had a sense of youthful charm about him as a cartoon animal. The new logo, just looks stupid. Not surprising, the whole project mostly collapsed. I don't know enough about OS engineering to explain, but I suspect they lost that sense of elegance that the original unix engineers had. A similar thing happened to the X-Window system. The essential problem is that you have to build code modules in a high level organized manner, and keep track of the overview of how the modules work together. The trick is to follow and extremely deep hierarchy starting from the interior organization of the central processor, or processors. If you start adding different kinds of processors, you have to arrange them into highly functional forms pretty much the way they teach Bauhaus architectural theory.
The central virtue of the FreeBSD OS was its deep level continuity with the original BSD4.4 design spec. What that meant to users was, once you learned your way around one version, you learned most of all the other incarnations. The central sense of elegance in design was built into BSD4.4. Along the way the FreeBSD project lost that sense of continuity and elegance just about the same time they destroyed their logo.
I've seen this process of decline and destruction many times before in the mechanical design of power wheelchairs, as well as in the automotive industry. I learned a sense of elegance in engineering by working on engines as a teenager and young adult. My favorite engine of all time was the Alfa Spider 1.29 liter with dual Webers from the late fifties. The team that designed that engine and drive train were gods. It was designed in such a modular way that it could be factory modified in stages up to high end racing. Or it could be used in standard sedan. The street suspension was built to power through S- curves on a race course. Honda did up a similarly beautiful engine and suspension for their Si hatchback in the early 90s. Of course these engines were destroyed in the endless design tweaks. The best designed power and push chairs all suffered a similar fate.
It's capitalism boys and girls. It's the endless cycles of the market. That's what they do for a living. They destroy. Who destroys the elegant engineering, why that would be the Marketing department. Who turns down the best graphic design? The Marketing department. What's wrong with the US auto industry? What's wrong with Google? It sounds to me like Google is all marketing department mentality.
Why do I actually hate Microsoft? Because Bill Gate's mind is ugly incarnate. Now think about what it means when he is used as a model on how to run the political economy. Why do I hate Leo Strauss? The same reason. Look at how he was used as a model on how to run the US government.
Why do I love Cassirer? Because his mind is elegant and beautiful. Why is Einstein loved and admired? A lot of reasons of course. But I see his elegance (as much as I can conceive it) in the way he put together general relativity. Make space, mass, and force identical with the new geometries and algebras. He didn't want to abandon the greatest of all symmetries, the sphere---that's why he hated adding the cosmological constant. They've been tweaking GR for a century now, and their cosmologies have become ugly, and no doubt soon, they will collapse. There is an elegance and beauty out there in the universe. The problem is we can't seem to capture it. We are doing something wrong, but I'll be damned if I can see it. My suspicion is that we are trying to force symmetries that don't belong. There is some deep mistake in our concepts somewhere...
Now certain forms of ugliness have their beautiful, and that is always a kind of check on an overly refined sensibility. It's a ying and yang, a mix really, a dialectic of its own kind. The early VWs and Porches of the 1950s looked god awful to me at first, and then I saw it, like a flash. I had a similar flash watching a young ballet group. They had a certain awkward or slightly stiff quality in their movement and expression that would be criticized from a strict classical sensibility. But that was exactly what made them beautiful, actually better than their professional competition. It's the kind of thing that Degas studied in his drawings especially.
We live in a very ugly culture in the US. Most of us don't know how to compose our spaces, our languages, our visual worlds and therefore have almost no sense of elegance and beauty. We have been constructed this way by our political economy. Mostly its the time factor. What the fuck is the rush about at work, at school, at play? Time is money. Ugly idea, ugly culture, ugly life style, ugly food, ugly bodies...
CG