> 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..)
Basically you write about stuff without knowing how it works. Fair enough, given the disclosure in advance..
> 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.
Do people actually "work" at "ad agencies"? Wow. -sorry, couldn't resist-
> Well, this blog over Google and Bowman explains it perfectly. Not the brain
> thing, but the inability of the cyber culture
WTF is cyber culture to begin with? Hardware? Software? Web Design?. I hate when people wave buzzwords in front of my face.
> 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.
The first and imho best graphics application was DELUXE PAINT by Electronic Arts, it ran on the Amiga. Most of the bitmap editors after it copied many of its concepts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPaint
Adobe is also mega-expensive. yet, down here and around the world people just "pirate it" without exploring other, more affordable (Paint Shop Pro, Corel Paint come to mind), or, gee, open source options (GIMP).
The ignorant mainstream press also added insult to injury by repeating "photoshopped" and "photoshopping" at every possible chance without saying "bitmap editor software".
> So does Mac.
Macs are symbols of status, just like driving a BMW. People buy those both for the function but also due to the image it projects to peers, as it separates the owner from "mere mortals" ... giving the false aura of sophistication.
> using an old iBook at the moment. It is definitely prettier that my PC.
Let me guess... It's white and it's got round edges... hmmm...
> However the graphic design crew as noted in the blog, doesn't fit with
> programming and systems crowd.
I'd like to write what I think of the "graphics design crowd", but my mind is boiling and I can't seem to find the right arrotment of derogatory adjectives right now.
> 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 extraa money.
No. Adding programmers to a project doesn't mean you get higher quality software. Software RELEASES over time fix bugs and make software better.
It took Mozilla.org at least eight years to take a good design concept but with an extremely complex architecture and make it reliable.
> Beyond the hierarchy of knowledge and its pure snobbery, there is the
> problem that most graphic design types never learned programming.
Why do we care about graphic design types anyway?. Why not let them do their stupid logos or whatever the **** they do in their ivory towers and stop talking about them?.
> 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,
Java HTML? That doesn't exist. There's Java (Java ME for Mobile platforms, Java SE for desktop GUI apps, Java EE for server-side multi-tier applications). "Java HTML" I've never heard of.
And now there's JavaFX, an easier to learn, simplified version that aims to fulfill the same role as AIR and Microsoft Silverlight.
>Postscript which drives much of the visual world we see is also a very ugly language,
Nobody "codes" in Postsciprt anyway. Bitmaps and vector graphics are converted to postscript by the printing subsystem before being sent to the printer (that is, if you actually have a Postscript printer). Nowadays, most use just HP's PCL or a variation of it. And then there's the infamous Microsoft GDI-printers aka winprinters, that are just a way for Microsoft to lock people into using Windows..
> Adobe engineers had to do some pretty elegant stuff to set up the font families and make them
> work in applications.
You're speaking history here... that is the transition from bitmapped fonts to scalable font engines... I remember at some point the ongoing wars between the different ones... there was the Agfa one, Postscript, and of course Truetype which was popularized by Windows 3.1...
> 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.
I don't like mushrooms.
> 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.
I nominate "inhuman world of ugly proliferation everywhere" as meaningless phrase of the Year.
> A few years ago, FreeBSD ran a contest to change their logo.
FreeBSD is nice but Linux and the freedoms awarded by the GPL killed its momentum.
> 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.
Yeah, right, people use things because of cute logos rather than function!!!. I forgot about that.
> 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.
Unix engineers had a sense of elegance? Have used the "vi" editor?. It was IBM's Common User Access (CUA) guidelines in the early 1990s that brought some order to a chaotic mess that was the norm in the early days. If you open ANY aplication (Windows, Linux, Unix) nowadays and you find all apps have a File->Open or Help->About option in its menu structure, it's because of CUA, not unix engineers and not because of the wonderful world of Graphics Designers.
>A similar thing happened to the X-Window system.
The X-Window system just draws pixels on the screen. Perhaps you mean twm?
I have news for you: the underlying OS is quickly becoming irrelevant. You can get the same desktop experience regardless if you run FreeBSD or Linux or OpenSolaris as the underlying kernels.
You can have Gnome as your desktop and GUI in FreeBSD
http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/index.html
...or KDE... http://freebsd.kde.org/
or XFCE for that mater if you prefer a lightweight GUI http://www.freebsd.org/ports/xfce.html
> 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
Again, this is a long paragraph surely written with the intent of conveying some important information, but I don't get a single point of what you mean by it all.
>pretty much the way they teach Bauhaus architectural
> theory.
Care to elaborate please?. I don't know about this 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 same applies nowadays to running FreeBSD, or Linux, or OpenBSD, or Solaris for that matter. All share the same foundation, all can run your choice of GUI environment.
> 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.
Oh for crying out loud, there you go again with the stupid 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.
What is good of all that "beautiful design" if the damn car uses nonrenewable fuels, pollutes the environment, and is basically non sustainable?.
I'd take the "ugly" square, yet a lot more simple ELECTRIC MOTOR over a combustion engine, no matter how many "god designers" worked on the former to make it a "design masterpiece".
>The team that
> designed that engine and drive train were gods.
Could they walk on water? I bet they didn' t.
> 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.
Waitaminute... I *think* you are trying to convey a point here... but I'm not sure due to the all the previous babbling... you are actually saying that "modular design is better as it allows reuse and saves time" ???
> It's capitalism boys and girls. It's the endless cycles of the market.
> That's what they do for a living. They destroy.
Agree with something, for once!. But there's a cure: open design. Open Source software, and Open Hardware. See XO. Once the "means of production" (think wave soldering machine) become more affordable, open-design hardware will start making inroads.
Who destroys the elegant
> engineering, why that would be the Marketing department.
Well, marketing people are actually worse than the "design" crowd, but not by a large score difference on the evil-meter.
> Who turns down the
> best graphic design? The Marketing department.
And there you go again with your graphic design ####. I've never heard of marketing killing a good graphic design. It's actually the other way around... someone decides to ditch CUA menus and suddenly all graphics designers are chanting that round edges and no File menu is the wave of the future because of the "clean user interface".
> What's wrong with the US auto
> industry?
Let me guess! They don' t pay attention to GRAPHICS DESIGNERS!
> What's wrong with Google?
They pay too much attention to ROUND EDGES and stupid "new wave" user
interface stupidity?
> It sounds to me like Google is all
> marketing department mentality.
I don' t see a major problem with Google unless they become a new Microsoft. The day they start releasing apps for their own OS exclusively then I'd call tehm "evil".
> 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.
Whom takes Bill Gates as a model? In what silly world of Graphics Designers do you live? Bill Gates is a convicted monopolist. The DOJ, the EU and South Korea have ruled in the past against their abuse of dominant market position.
Nobody outside Wall Street and Forbes pundits LOVES Microsoft.
> Why do I love Cassirer? Because his mind is elegant and beautiful.
Whom?
> Why is Einstein loved and admired? A lot of reasons of course.
Love Einstein? Wow, the world of Graphics Designers is scarier than I thought. I thought only mathematicians could admire a physicist.
> There is an elegance and beauty out there
>My suspicion is that we
> are trying to force symmetries that don't belong. There is some deep mistake
> in our concepts somewhere...
With all due respect: Are you high? Or more appropiately, were you when you wrote the above?.
Would you like to have a notebook that resembled a flower, including petals?.
> We live in a very ugly culture in the US
Don't despair, please. The world needs as many sane graphics designers as it can get.
>. 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.
Are you sure you aren' t, gee, making broad generalizations?
>We have been constructed this way by
> our political economy.
Soviet architecture was beautiful.
http://blog.miragestudio7.com/2007/06/insane-soviet-architecture/
> 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
CG, don't despair. Please. I can see that you have some points, BUT I never read such hodgepdge of comparisons, subjects and views all put into the same blender.
Perhaps I'm wrong... but I'm not a graphics designer. FC