February 20, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I’m finishing up reading Edward Tufte’s canonical The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and the following quote about typography seemed postable:
With regard to typography, Josef Albers writes:
“The concept that ‘the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading’ was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by ‘modernistic’ typographers…. Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading. Without going into comparisons and details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading — because of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.”
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963, revised edition 1975), p. 4.
The message should speak for itself, but I found it striking in particular given the now-cliché trend of lowercase sans-serif company and website names. This was printed over 25 years before the era of flickr, digg, facebook, and mint.
Mind you, this trend in part tends to only apply to logos and images, leaving websites’ copy properly capitalized. However, it takes actual effort to find a modern web service brandishing serifs in body content. If your product’s brand is trying to convey a sense of easy-going, friendly, hipness, then you’re more likely to eschew statistical readability for the cool finnesse of helvetica, lucida grande, and tahoma.
Tags: Uncategorized
December 31, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Subject to amendment.
- Make chai from scratch
- Spend more time reading (books)
- Work out at least three times per week, consistently
- Learn more about stocks, trading, economics
- Redesign this website
- Write more consistently for this website
- Start doing research within the CSE department at UW
- Get really good at cooking
- Get a spice rack
- Be mindful
- Finish learning CakePHP
- Be able to taste the difference between english and irish breakfast
- Get a drum set
- Play a show
- Keep being independent
- Don’t stir the jam
- Break 15,000 songs
- Be able to lift a respectable amount of weight
- Code more fluidly
- Live more fluidly
- Live by the words you say
- Get out of bed in the morning quicker
- Learn
Tags: Personal
December 26, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Among my share of presents this Christmas was Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon In Retrospect, a collection of his writings on war and peace. Having so far read only the introduction written by Vonnegut’s son, I’m already ripe with material to write about:
When I complained about being paid fifty dollars for an article that had taken me a week to write, he [Kurt] said I should take into account what it would have cost me to take out a two-page ad announcing that I could write.
The message here is simple: if you are in a profession where your work is viewed publicly, then you should worry less about how much you’re being paid, and more about doing good work.
Why? Because if your work is publicly displayed (be it in print, the web, or whatever), then it serves as an advertisement for you skills. If you’re a designer, the best marketing you can do is to create attractive products that accomplish what clients want. A happy client will be more likely to share his happiness with others, thus shooting business your way. Word of mouth has exploded.
If you’re a developer working for a company of any size, write the best code you can and make sure others know about it. If you’re a writer, write your ass off. Your name is wherever your words are, so every article you get published is active marketing.
If you’ve got the chops, flaunt them and reap the rewards.
Tags: Marketing
December 6, 2008 at 5:46 pm
As fall quarter winds down and the rush of finals gets into high gear, I find myself thinking broadly in terms of my place in the world and the economy instead of focusing in on linear algebra, fluid dynamics, and electromagnitism. A diet of Vaynerchuk, Godin, and Calacanis has me thinking about the future of technology and its place in whatever economy emerges from the current downturn. As a wannabe computer engineering major, how can I position myself to not only be ahead of the game, but to be happy doing so?
In his most recent email, Jason Calacanis offers insight into how to achieve the first part of this question:
It was our collective sloth, consumption and sense of entitlement that
got us into this mess, and the only thing that will get us out will
be lots of hard work.
This bodes well with Gary V’s concept of “hustle” and aligns itself with the positive side of my feelings toward capitalism. Insidious advertising, closed-mindedness, and corruption aside, a capitalist system appeals to me in that (virtually) anyone can “make it” by simply buckling down and doing work. Got an innovative idea? Build on it and capitalize.
One of the exhilarating parts of today’s software/web industry is its tendency to be a catalyst to the American dream. The cost (both monetary and temporal) of innovation in the software space is so incredibly low that the hardest part of the process becomes the search for an idea to act on. A result of this is my train of thought trying to come up with a revolutionary web service when it should be refreshing itself on linear transformation.
In times like this I try to remind myself of another Calacanis bit from TWIT a couple months ago. In essence, recessions are the best time for entrepreneurs because it gives them a quiet period of time to stay in the shadows and build value. While all this economic turmoil and fail is unfolding, you’re given the opportunity to take a step back and improve yourself so that you can rush out swinging confidently when the economy turns around.
In my case, this means buckling down and learning as much as I possibly can in school and at work. As a college student, the best thing you can do for yourself and your future is to suck it up and learn. Knowledge will always be the most valuable resource in the world and if you can increase your share of it, you’ll end up fine. Even in the face of economic meltdown.
Tags: Economy
July 4, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Just listened to This Week In Tech, episode 149. About an hour in, the panel took a brief break from trading Bill Gates stories and got into a discussion of the future of computers and the science thereof. Jerry Pournelle predicted that in three or four years, computers will have 64 cores and virtually infinite computing power, memory, and storage capacity. As a result, softwares’ strain on hardware will become a nonissue and…
“The people who are going to make money are the ones who are going to figure out how a guy who knows how to do something useful and doesn’t care about computer science can sit down and teach the damn machine to do something useful without having to spend four years learning to program.”
Jerry Pournelle
Good food for thought, to say the least. As a prospective computer science student, this both fascinates and worries me. On the one hand, the engineer in me is excited by the thought of creating this kind of uniformly-accessible development environment, but I also worry that if this were to come true, a degree in computer engineering would be worth that much less. I agree that programming and software development is currently somewhat of a walled garden. Anyone unwilling to spend countless hours learning the semantics and logic of seemingly meaningless code is left dependent on the output of those who are. However, it’s this specialization and difficulty of craft that leads to engineers’ high salaries. Cognitive dissonance FTL.
This week’s TWiT is definitely worth a listen, if this kind of thing interests you. They had some interesting things to say regarding natural language programming, too. It’s refreshing to FINALLY listen to an episode where they don’t spend 45 minutes talking about Twitter.
Tags: Programming, Software
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