The Error You Seek Is Yourself
I really enjoyed this image/caption combo from Fail Computer!
Grasshopper, the error you seek is yourself!
Blogless
Grasshopper, the error you seek is yourself!
There's a new book forthcoming about glitch art and aesthetics, and it looks promising. The editors have made some high resolution plates from the book available for download -- I recommend checking them out (22mb ZIP format).
Vagabond was a film and production company that wanted a more "worldly" look. Since they exclusively shot in America and South America- I created a new world for them.
I don't think they "got" it. Also, maybe logos aren't supposed to be sarcastic.
There's something about looking through designers' rejected work and the stories behind it-- the process, I guess-- that I find really appealing. Kudos, Jennifer, for sharing.
Here's what I wrote on Monday:
Philosophical virtue ethics typically concern themselves with the inner states of individuals - an action counts as good because the agent who brings it about was motivated by a virtuous motivation. The analog of this is for design is the idea that a(n object of) design would count as good if the designer made her design choices in a virtuous way. I think that there is a perfectly reasonable concern about the applicability of this ethical model to design for the precise reason that designs and actions have very different ontological statuses.
Today, I'm going to articulate that difference, and illustrate it with one of the design virtues nearest and dearest to DLB's heart: economy.
A week ago Friday, I wrote a somewhat esoteric post about German idealism that ended up with me saying that any good code of design ethics will will have something to say about the practice of design in general.
This amounts, I think, to attributing at least two regulative goals for any given design: first, a design's success should be assessed relative to how elegantly it solves the problems it was tasked to solve (in a vacuum, so to speak). Second, it should be judged by its net effect on the world we live in.
If the consequences of our designs are going to be counted, this means that we need to take our decisions very seriously. Since this is hard, we often find ourselves trying to deflect responsibility. This fact is nicely expressed by Milton Glaser, who is rapidly becoming my go-to guy:
In the new AIGA's code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behavior towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer's relationship to the public.
If your site or program fails, it's common courtesy not to leave your audience hanging. Acknowledge the problem. Offer an intelligible and honest explanation for the error; provide options to resolve the problem. In programming, this is known as failing gracefully. (A little humor doesn't hurt, either)
A popular example of graceful failure is Twitter's out-of-service page, colloquially known as the 'Fail Whale':
Another type of failure is the 404 page, which a website serves up when it can't find an undefined or missing URL. It used to be an Easter Egg to design funny or philosophical 404's, but in researching this post, I found that either I didn't like most of the ones I found or the links I had for supposedly good ones were out of date. Perhaps it's gone out of style?
I did find one that made me chuckle:
And with that, we take our bow for the week. Thanks for joining us.
PS: If you're interested, Jeff Atwood has the whole 404 best-practices angle covered.
A young designer stopped by the studio the other day and as he sheepishly showed work he was doing ‘on the job,’ I flashed back to the last such ‘job’ I held in Baltimore.
I remembered a particular project (one I should have never been working on in the first place) that had degenerated into a situation where the client--some middle manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland--was standing behind me making me move type around etc...I remember insisting that we put a sunset on there just for spite.
I snapped out of it and told this designer to quit immediately, and that he would figure out how to pay his bills some other way. This is advice that I would have found difficult to follow when I was in a similar situation--making a steady paycheck--as I had to be fired before I finally made the decision to start working for myself.
I always wished I’d quit that last job, which is probably why I’ve held onto this piece-of-shit for 15 years.
