Welcome, President Obama.
To mark the inauguration, and let us hope a more nuanced and optimistic USA, here’s a strangemap of America’s state mottos:
Tag: Visual (Page 9 of 16)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on visual arts and graphic design
Via Michelle, I hear that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.
This seems a good opportunity to post a link to the Light Cone RSS Feed:
From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it — this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone.
Not quite a Total Perspective Vortex, but still awesome (in the old sense of that word).
Elsewhere, the Boston Globe’s fantastic Big Picture blog recently ran an advent calendar of photos from the Hubble Telescope.
An obscure star designated V838 explodes in 2002
Now permalinks are the norm, its unusual to lose anything you’ve written online. We are Funes. However, now CSS is also the norm, it is possible to lose the design of any given page. For example, the posts from my archives which announce a re-vamped site design have been rendered pretty meaningless after I re-re-designed the site earlier this year. Having said that, my latest, lazy template does attempt to retain some elements of the old design, on pages that previously carried it. A web designer with more coding skills than me should create a WordPress plugin that allows older posts to use a different template for older posts.
And of course, some websites no longer exist. Permalinks only work if you’ve remembered to pay your hosting invoice. Graphic Designer Jason Santa Maria has asked his readers to post examples of their early websites (via Kottke):
The things we write are published with a specific design and context. When we change that, we break the context and alter the original qualities of that piece of work… We haven’t had enough time to step back and see web design objectively. Will the work we’re doing have historical significance? Sure. Will it have historical significance in design? Probably.
Its definitely the case that web design “dates” just like conventional print graphic design. When I reviewed the Presidential websites earlier in the year, I noted how Barack Obama’s logo and website seemed to be very much of-the-moment. (Given his recent victory, perhaps we have a new predictor for elections: The candidate with the most modern website design wins?)
Anyway, my earliest experiments in HTML is illustrated below. The site was a scrapbook for the year I spent living in Zimbabwe (back when Robert Mugabe and Tony Blair were still friends). It carried a few cute and now totally outmoded innovations, such as a counter and a guestbook. It did include some early experiments in CSS, but the menus committed the double crime of being images, and utilising some italicised version of Comic Sans. Oh, the shame of it!
My first website, using rudimentary CSS and an ill-advised use of Comic Sans
Another page that is still online is a failed pitch for a gallery installation. It is an example of Single Serving Site, before that phrase was coined.
Forking Paths – An online proposal for a piece of art
I’ve added a gallery of a few more old sites below.
Continue reading
The second big question facing the United States at the moment (the first is what dog the Obama’s should get) is of course, what Michelle Obama should wear to the inauguration and its myriad balls, in forty days time.
Sketch by Isaac Mizrahi
Via Kottke, here is an interesting array of proposals for Mrs Obama, from some of America’s top fashion designers. I particularly like the sketches that include proposals for the two daughters, Malia and Sasha: They really capture that slightly timid but proud gait that all three women exhibited when they walked out with the President-Elect on election night.
From WWD.com, by Zero + Maria Cornejo
The final sketch caught my eye. I don’t particularly like the red dress, but the mannequin features of the sketch are very similar to the androgynous fairy I created for an experimental animation a while back:
If, like me, you have a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone suggests regulating the Internet, this A List Apart article on captioning/subtitling of online videos is a challenging read. Joe Clark argues that the voluntary approach to developing a good, standardized captioning system has failed, and that only governments can enforce some sort of progress:
In short, disabled people’s right to be free of discrimination trumps the belief, however fallacious, that the internet cannot or should not be regulated.
Earlier this year, the Liberal Conspiracy take on Andy Burnham’s recommendations on Internet regulation, was that it was merely a sop to the powerful music lobby and their outdated business models. Contrast this with the case of subtitling, where it is the lack of regulation which has allowed the studios and broadcasters to ignore their obligations to provide accessible content, in favour of greater profit margins.
It was the political concept of ‘accessibility’ that got me interested in web design, and fuels my current love of all things social networky. When we made The Unrecognized, I took particular pride in the subtitling, a project I worked on alone and probably took as long as the edit of the film itself. We were in a sense lucky that the film featured three languages, because it meant that a captioned video was the norm, as Joe Clark now recommends.
The internet can and should be an equalising force, yet for deaf people the online landscape is still an unwelcoming jungle.