Fire and Knowledge

Jonathan Hoefler compares the new UK coin designs to the new US $5 bill. The coins are stunning, but even more so compared to that ugly bill.

For all you web developers, Luke Wroblewski’s “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is an excellent primer on getting people to use your service without a sign-in form hitting them first.

Has advertising gotten better since 9/11? Paula Scher thinks so. An excerpt:

On the whole (with the exception of movie and theater advertising) ads are better designed than anytime I can remember since the sixties. The concepts are smarter, the layouts are more sophisticated, type choices are more appropriate, and art direction is more nuanced.

Because taste is grounded in the sense of distinction, it follows that not everyone can have good taste. It is a conceptual impossibility (just as not all students can have above-average grades)…. Thus “good taste” shifts towards more inaccessible, less familiar styles.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

Good taste confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor. This is the primary reason that, in our society, people from different social classes do not freely interact with one another. They cannot stand each other’s taste. More specifically, the people who are higher up in the social hierarchy are utterly contemptuous of everything that the people beneath them enjoy (movies, sports, television shows, music, etc.).

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

There are several ways to perform almost any act – an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner and a joy to all beholders.

–Scott and Helen Nearing, The Good Life, p. 314

The less sophisticated [print designers] lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts. They wonder aloud how we can enjoy working in a medium that offers us less than absolute control over every atom of the visual experience. What they are secretly asking is whether or not we are real designers. (They suspect that we are not.) But these are the juniors, the design students and future critics. Their opinions are chiefly of interest to their professors, and one prays they have good ones.

–Jeffrey Zeldman, “Understanding Web Design“

Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple.

–E. F. Schumacher in Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books: 2006), p. 226