arkitrave :: log

I’m flattered.

In these pages you will find notes curricular, plans, jobs realizes to you, aspirations and even some good idea! The good navigation to all.

The trees are so, well, organic. And the tulipe? There’s something strangely familiar about it. The name of the company might be nicer in a font that was on the opposite side of COMPLETELY AMATEUR. Not to mention the contrast is pretty much terrible.

Seriously, do people think this won’t get noticed? The really funny thing is how many of these purloined designs are done by design studios!

I wouldn’t be nearly as miffed if it were some grandmother posting pictures of her grandkids on her personal site—I’d write a nice note and let her know she really can’t steal my graphics, and I would trust that she’d understand. But “designers” should know better than anyone else that this actually constitutes stealing. I’ll always cut some slack to those who are not as involved with the field. Though this claims to be a personal site, he’s trying to market himself and his services, which clearly involve a lot of original thinking.

A DESIGN STUDIO? If you can’t even design your own website, you certainly shouldn’t be designing anything else.

One of the parts that is free to use and adapt, and the part I’ve freely helped many people with when they’ve emailed me, is the CSS dropdown code, which this joker hasn’t even used.

The good navigation to all, and to all a good night.

UPDATE: He couldn’t even be bothered to write his own HTML! All the IDs are the same as the Zen Garden.

You may be aware that Dave Shea’s and Molly Holzschlag’s new book, The Zen of CSS Design, will be available in bookstores everywhere on February 18. You can check it out and order your copy at Amazon.

I’m pleased to announce that my design, tulipe, was chosen for publication in the book. Designs were featured in several different categories, from such luminaries as Mike Pick, Didier Hilhorst, and Ryan Sims, among others. My work appears in the “Special Effects” chapter.

I’m extremely excited about this. Not only is it the first time my work has been published, but the CSS Zen Garden has been an incredible resource for the web community. I’m thrilled to be in the company of some amazing designers, and look forward to seeing my copy when it arrives.

I didn’t realize I needed a private jet before yesterday, but my eyes were opened by the compelling copy and the AMAZING photography in netjet.com’s (pdf) brochure. The price is right, too, starting at just $450,000 ownership cost for 1/16 ownership, and monthly and flying fees.

Once you understand the extent to which having your own aircraft gives you total freedom and control to travel when and where you want, there isn’t a person in the world who wouldn’t want one…When you acquire your own private jet, air travel becomes effortless. You obtain unprecedented control and flexibility to travel according to your own schedule. It gets you to places you might not otherwise be able to reach…Whatever reason you choose to use a private jet, it allows you to respond immediately. “Maybe” becomes “definitely.” “Later” becomes “now.” “Why?” becomes “Why not?”

I know money wasn’t much of an object with this brochure preparation, but I think the photography is stunning. I’m sold, just on the brochure (if I could just find that pesky half-million that keeps getting away from me).

That said, the website doesn’t really fit such a high-class business. It’s got a mediocre Flash intro, with ugly multi-colored flags above (which are the only place the brochure can be downloaded, and in multiple languages), and when the intro finally dumps you into the site, it’s rather bland and undifferentiated. The logo is simple—nothing wrong with that—but the softness and blur that is so beautifully featured in the brochure doesn’t find its way into any of the website graphics. Perhaps one simple problem is the lack of a background color beyond the fixed-width of the page; the expanse of white in my largish Safari window doesn’t excite me.

I think the real problem, however, is that the brochure photography is HUGE and carries the brochure succesfully even though the brochure text is minimal (and antialiased, which helps).

When transitioning to a webpage, where photography has to be smaller because of page load times, the resultant minimal treatment of everything else feels cheap.

I won’t talk about the code. It’s scary.

But I mention it as an illustration of how difficult it is to work between print and web design. The same people were probably responsible for both web and brochure, and they hired an awesome photographer. But, the photography, which is what makes me start to get goosebumps and want to mortgage my house (15 times) and sign on the dotted line, isn’t able to communicate on the website. It’s nice, but it isn’t breathtaking.

And if you’re trying to sell airplanes, breathtaking is a good goal to aim for.

(by the way, I’m not dead, just working extremely hard on my thesis, the reasons for all the dust that has settled around here lately.)

So, it seems to be the popular subject to write about lately. I’ll get on the bandwagon.

Yes. Drop shadows will be the ugly horizontal rules of the current generation of web designs (however long a web generation is…) We will think they are ugly and over the top in not too many years. But this is really not a problem, people. Every generation needs to define itself somehow, whether it’s with tie-dye and the Dead or that guy Marilyn or Linkin Park…

There were web design ideas that were the cutting edge in 1995. It was all we had. All we knew we could do. And it got published (damn you, Dave Siegel). The publishing bit is too bad, as people get the books after the trend has run its course, and a new trend had taken its place. This, of course, led to really bad sites way beyond when we should have had really bad sites, and a very slow implementation of CSS for presentation.

Please, don’t fault trends, however. Design lives by trends. They are not evil. They allow companies and individuals to define themselves and be contemporary.

For my two cents, subtly done drop shadows still look good. The trick will be knowing when to stop using them, and not being so enamored of our own work that we can’t recognize when it becomes dated. I don’t think that time has come yet. Fortunately, with CSS layout, we can change a graphic on a site pretty easily when the time comes to move on to different graphic techniques.

As I finish the school year and am either sleeping or thinking about design, I thought I’d post Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. He is best known (at least to architects) for being the graphic designer for Rem Koolhaas’ book S, M, L, XL. Many of these are great points; a few I am not so sure about.

Sorry to the non-hover people out there, you don’t get to see the spans. Sorry to everyone else for the schizo-jumping thing…I don’t have time to think about how to get the spans to display without the other list items moving. I think the jumping is the nature of the beast when using list items with spans; my understanding of CSS is that I couldn’t get these to display without jumping unless I did the markup differently and used, perhaps, absolutely positioned divs. The spans aren’t acting as children of the li items when I absolutely position them (i.e. they are positioning relative to the parent element). Anyone know what the correct behavior should be? OK, with position:relative on the li items it would work, but I decided I liked it better the way it is. Feel free to discuss the actual content now!

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites
   for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed
   by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on.
   Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that
   may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you???ë?¬?ll never
   have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process
   we will only ever go to where we???ë?¬?ve already been. If process drives outcome
   we may not know where we???ë?¬?re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of
   growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations,
   attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun
   of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of
   value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different
   question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as
   an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment.
   Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a
   common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge.
    Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous
    environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical
    rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce
    success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities
    may present themselves.
14. Don???ë?¬?t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself
    from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the
    answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate
    of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict,
    friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü???ë??Ü. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven???ë?¬?t
    had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you???ë?¬?ve gone too far, been up too
    long, worked too hard, and you???ë?¬?re separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something
    other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday
    and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don???ë?¬?t like it, do it
    again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things.
    Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration.
    Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big
    difference.
23. Stand on someone???ë?¬?s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments
    of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don???ë?¬?t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you
    can???ë?¬?t see tonight.
26. Don???ë?¬?t enter awards competitions. Just don???ë?¬?t. It???ë?¬?s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the
    amount of information, we leave room for what he called our ???ë??noodle.???ë??
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way
    of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates
    new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens
    in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise.
    Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio
    can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between ???ë??creatives???ë?? and ???ë??suits???ë??
    is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
31. Don???ë?¬?t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry???ë?¬?s advice. By maintaining financial
    control, we maintain creative control. It???ë?¬?s not exactly rocket science, but
    it???ë?¬?s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have
    failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him
    or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine.
    By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions,
    we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your
    TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically
    rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic???ë?¬®simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn???ë?¬?t my idea ???ë??Ü I borrowed it. I think it belongs
    to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don???ë?¬?t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You???ë?¬?ll never
    get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only
    to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp???ë?¬?s large glass
    to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else
    ???묨? but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run
    with the technological pack. We can???ë?¬?t find the leading edge because it???ë?¬?s trampled
    underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but
    still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside
    of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces ???ë??Ü what Dr. Seuss calls
    ???ë??the waiting place.???ë?? Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference
    with all of the infrastructure of a conference ???ë??Ü the parties, chats, lunches,
    airport arrivals ???ë??Ü but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful
    and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes
    are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable
    efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job
    is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since
    I???ë?¬?ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are
    expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory,
    innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory
    is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous
    moment or event. That???ë?¬?s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not
    a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different
    from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control
    over their lives. We can???ë?¬?t be free agents if we???ë?¬?re not free.

Comments?

My daily traffic tripled in two hours this morning; I checked my email and discovered that my submission to the CSS Zen Garden was accepted as an official design. Welcome to all visiting from the Garden!

The exhibit is done. It opened last night, with important people from all over…the response seemed to be good. It will be up for another three weeks, and I can catch up with the rest of my life. Here are some shots of the shelves I built for the exhibit:

The brackets are welded steel, the shelves are 1/2″ oak plywood, and the pieces around the books are also steel, set into a routed groove. I’m off to Erie for Autumn’s concert (Erie Philharmonic, Brahms Requiem, she is sitting principal second for this concert…)