Essay 31 – Information Design and the Placebo Effect
You know those buttons at crosswalks that people hit frantically when in a hurry to cross the street…. turns out they don’t often work. They are just one example of information design placebo effect, when the presence of something is the only actual benefit of it. This is an interesting topic and relates a lot to what is happening in web development. New websites and applications are quickly making irrelevant technology and conventions of the past, and yet the designs still hold onto them. Take any reader … we don’t need to actually switch the pages. It could just continue to load when we reach the bottom of the page (like your Twitter feed), and yet we still demand the ability to flip a virtual page. You may take away our physcial books, but you can’t get rid of our page flipping!
Essay 29 – Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext
“…this wordy old thing has something to do with design?”
I like this brief reminiscence of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, because it shows that design is thought. An old boring book can be the greatest example of hypertext without having anything to do with the Internet. Hypertext is a way of thinking and organizing information. It has nothing to do with the technology or the functionality, but with thinking about new ideas in a non-linear way.
Essay 46 – I Hate ITC Garamond
Typefaces matter. That’s what I took away from this essay. They don’t just matter to designers. They matter to everyone. The wrong typeface can literally drive people nuts, or make them not read a perfectly innocent book. So, take care when choosing typeface. Oh, and don’t use ITC Garamond!