brunobergher::blog

CakePHP’s Nate threw it out there, and I’ve read it even in the big, red header of Erik Spiekermann’s blog, so I’ll follow advice by people I respect and just get along with it.

Waiting for inspiration or for having something that I might think to be interesting to other people to read is really counter-productive to anyone involved.

So, for now, on, I’ll try to just go on and blog.

I got my hands on three of the most famous Edward Tufte’s books—The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations— and reading them has been a great experience.

There’s this point I’d like to highlight in this post, but I’m sure I’ll be writing on his ideas again in the future.

On Envisioning Information, Tufte brings up an analogy concerning the design of rich data graphics and the view on dance of Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine, quoting Lincoln Kirstein’s 1972 essay ‘Balanchine’s Fourth Dimension’:

A committed Balanchine dancer (with a small ‘d’) comes to realize that Personality (with an enormous ‘P’) is a bundle of haphazard characteristics frozen in a pleasing mask for immediate identification and negotiable prestige. No matter what is danced—and it makes little difference—stardom dims the dancing. What is danced is perforce secondary. There are two types of ballet companies: those interested in selling stars and those occupied in demonstrating and extending the dance, as such…

I had a great discussion weeks ago with a few designer friends about what we were calling ‘intellectualized’ or ’strict’ design, which is, more often than not, what is considered to be the discerning point between great designers and the average.

That notion that the one that chooses a font for typesetting anything because of the very history of the typographer’s life, or that emulates the visual structure of the work some important designer long dead simply because it is mentally considered to be what’s good among designers, in my opinion, comes very close to this concept of stardom in ballet.

Design is an industrial craft, rooted in aesthetic principles inherited from art, but geared towards production, consumption, objective communication.

The notion that the work that should be exalted is the one that uses visual resources that appeal only to a very strict and design-educated audience, mainly designers themselves, as opposed to the wide appeal that a user- or consumer-oriented approach might result in, at least for me, seems very wrong.

I believe pushing the boundaries of visual design forward is not about exploring personal taste and hermetic visual concepts: it’s about managing to achieve the practical goals for which the designer was called upon with the greatest rate of success possible.

This is thought in progress, and most probably will come up again soon.

Today I stumbled upon this amazing website through someone at work. The site describes itself as

(..) an excerpt of SpaceCollective.org, a soon to be
released, invite only information exchange dedicated to the future of everything.

So far it is a very rich combination of pictures, graphics and quotations with great information concerning many of the topics that might of great interest to a lot of people, among them technology, design, physics and biology.

The layout is very innovative, with a modernist, rigid grid, which is deconstructed in a captivating way, all done in meritorious HTML (although with some intense help from JavaScript).

But what caught my attention the most was the uncanny resemblance between website and Pentagram’s Alan Fletcher’s book, The Art of Looking Sideways.

The thousand-page tome is a precious collection of quotes, curious information, graphical experimentations and visual comments on a huge variety of subjects such as aesthetics, humor, curiosity and the human brain, among many others.

Fletcher writes that he has a necessity to acquire stuff. The books is a compilation and extrapolation on many concepts and information he has been collecting over his life, and decided do put together in the book. It’s an endless source of interesting information, insight and inspiration — probably one of of the best books I ever bought.

Finding Collective Perception brought me back the feeling of flipping through Fletcher’s book. But with the priceless difference that the website is growing, with even more up-to-date concepts and information, while hinting with the possibility of user contribution, which would be great.

* The picture above is a reproduction of a print by German artist Eno Henze, which has great work by the way, found in Collective Perception.

Just writing as a personal note and hopefully as help to others: I’ve just spent quite a few minutes struggling with a deploy package for a PHP site which worked in my machine and not in my co-workers. Debugging the HTTP responses with Fiddler we realized the problem was with the BOM—or Byte Order Mark—, three bytes of non-printing characters that sometimes are added to the beginning of UTF-8 encoded files by some text editors. These are \EF \BB \BF  in hex and usually printed as  when converted to ISO-8859-1 (in UTF-8 only, the Wikipedia article shows the differences among this and other Unicode enconding).

The problem was that a cookie was not being set by the PHP app because the BOM was being sent before the cookies, so the setcookie() function returned false, since it cannot send a cookie after any output has been sent to the browser, because of HTTP protocol restrictions.

We just could not figure out what was causing that, since the exact same set of files was being used in both my machine’s and my co-worker’s installations.

It turned out the problem was in the main configuration file, which had to be edited by him to make the application work on his machine. He used EditPad Lite to alter the configurations, and it seems that, by default, this program does add the BOM to the beginning of UTF-8-encoded files. So, if you use EditPad Lite (or maybe the Pro version), I surely recommend you should change that option upon installation.