Kurt Vonnegut

A carpenter was commissioned to build some boxes for a SPCA cat shelter. This is what he did. He did not even bother to pretend to do a half decent job.

This guy have a three-year apprenticeship, cutting pieces of wood, using a drill, sandpaper and a saw. Screws juts out on the inside of the cages, the doors do not close. Distressed animals will injure themselves on these. I could have done a better job! It would have taken me ages, but I would have done a better job.

I was a teaching assistant at the university college, and one of my students came whining one day, that he had to read. That there was books with words in them. That he was expected to read. He actually said, and I quote, “I canna do it! I try! I open the first page and there are all these words!”

I smiled sweetly and said, “well maybe you should do something else. Maybe you should become a bus driver or a carpenter instead”. He was deeply offended, his classmates rekindled their hatred of me.

I regret that comment now. It turns out you can be as incompetent as a carpenter, as you could be unfit for anything vaguely academic, such as reading. The difference between rubbish carpentry and shoddy academic work is depressingly obvious. A bad house will fall down. A bad thesis will have no impact on anything. You can set fire to both, though, and you probably should.

Art can be made out of any old rubbish. Craft cannot. If you are not in fine art, you are in craft, and there is a quality gauge. If you cannot sign your work with excellence, at least do not inflict injury on homeless kittys.

 “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth..

Encyclopedia of life is an amazing, insane undertaking. E. O. Wilson did a delightful, rambling TED-talk, and things actually happened. A lot of people apparently got together, large sums of money was involved, an awful lot of meetings, I presume, and a website was born. With a whole bunch of impressive collaborators, they started building a page for every living thing. Every living named thing, I should say. We do not really know how may species there is on earth.

Personally, I thought the site was awful. Then – Hurrah! – they rebuilt and redesigned recently. It got much better, I certainly approve. It is made by scientists and the public; we can all contribute, and the information is moderated by scientists. I love the idea, I love the insane ambition of it, I love living things, and I think it is both scientifically and individually important. This is a good start for having a positive dander through a website. Through lifeforms, actually. I excitedly open the brand new EOL. Not unreasonably, I am met with a large search box.

And there I sat. What to search for? Pathetically, I typed in “cat”. I messed around with felidae. You and me can contribute to EOL, so I amused myself looking for pics of peoples pets. I imagine a lot of people would think it wonderous to have their tabby put in encyclopedic context for all the world to see. Then I did “elephant shrew”. Because they are the funniest little things. I fiddle about with the taxonomy for a bit, but my latin is not good enough, my understanding of taxonomy a little shaky, their tree a little unclear (Taxonomy, by the way, is a scary, scary thing, but that is a different chapter). So, as is so often the case, finding something specific, the known-item-search is wonderfully easy. It is the discovering that is a problem.

UI & UX. Unknown terms to many. It stands for usability and user interface; we all know when these things do not work. It is a bit like only noticing the surface you are driving on when it is full of potholes.

I have to say, EOL is not full of potholes. They are doing a lot of things right. But here is what I would have liked to play with, what I would like to discover. If I was the president of the universe, EOL would have these things for me to explore… find living things that have the colour green. All things with fur that lives in Marocco. What creatures are parasites, what have symbiotic relations? (The disturbing Cymothoa exigua, the tongue-eating louse springs to mind) Who eats who? What species overlap where? What is the food chain for a deepwater anglerfish, a bobcat, a tapir? What do humans make and eat of various species? Why are there no green mammals? What species have their closest relation on another contient? Show me all creatures with wings. How many species of dragonflies? What species are directly dependent on each other, and which species are mutually beneficial? I can go on and on and on. I am a little Napoleonic here maybe, EOL is a massive undertaking as it is.

And maybe it is a good thing they do not have this. If EOL ever get these things, I would never leave the site, and get nothing done.

Of course, making this would be either the nightmare of a lifetime, or the most fun you could possibly have. A million potholes, and a million things that can go wrong, I see piles of technical problems, itches and conundrums. But I mean; imagine… dream…

identity, logo

A new company, doing consulting in aviation, in need of a company profile, web, logo. I enjoyed this project, mainly because the client wanted an abstract logo. People often say that, but they do not really mean it, when you get down to it. The logo, I know, breaks pretty much all logo rules and sensibilities, but I am really pleased with it. It gives me assosiations to aviation instruments, radar, sunrises from below, aeroeverything, space, and in some versions, to propellers. For obvious reasons, the logo being so complex, it comes in a few different versions depending on use. What makes me happy is that I can slice the logo, I can use only a part of it, and the recognition should not be a problem.

web

The client wanted different images on different pages of the website. I am not really a fan of background images for two reasons: it can take forever to load, and it is a hassle to scale. Responsive design is a relatively new way of dealing with a plethora of screen sizes, so the “standards” to deal with it is not exactly set in stone.

IA

IA, or information architecture, is not as trivial as many seems to think. This is where clients often gets confused and I am considering building a little “beginners guide to IA” to make it easier for me, cheaper and more understandable for the client. Much time can be basically wasted because of structural uncertainties.

misc

I like testing out the grapics I make on different things. It gives an idea of how it might work in the real world, and problems arrive that needs to be solved for the logo to do the job. A logo like this is not easy to place on letterpapers, envelopes, businesscards, cars etc. Basically, it cannot be in just one version for all these uses. FedEx can, Quality Flight Solutions needs sophisticated solutions.

The devil is in the details. Favicons! Everyone should have one.

HistoryPin is a nifty little site, that gives you the opportunity to load historical pictures in streetview. I think it needs more work and refining, but it is a splendid thing, informative and fun.

This map shows the worlds most interesting remote places from touristiness. It exemplifies basically a heat map, that shows density. This particular map is curiously interesting because it shows interesting remote places, while as the natural instinct would be to go for the – say – most popular places (they do that too). In that sense, it is a “negative” map, and therefore a tad more interesting. The idea is to show you where you are less likely to meet other tourists. As a way of showing density, heat maps are brilliant. Intuitive, easy to understand, and highly flexible.

I also learned about fusion tables, and how Google includes the Similie timeline. This feels a little ironic, as we looked into Similie in 2010 as a potential solution for this project for the Smithsonian. We then decided against it, mainly because it was unnecessarily large, and the documentation a little shaky for our project. Now, it seems, it works directly with fusion tables… so it goes.

I also learned about other things, such as shapefiles (shp), Google Earth Builder, intensity maps with own defined borders and space-time. I have to look into all of it. Exciting times, and indeed thanks to Mano Marks.

Graphic design is a part of system design. Confusing to people that word. Design. It conjures up images of lovey-dovey hippies splashing with purple and orange, or all-in-black guys with hip glasses. Endless austere portfolios in swiss graphics, squares, black, white, red, Helvetica.

Structures, architecture, flexibility in backend and responsive frontend. HTML5, I think, is my new best friend. And the feeling that are going around these days, that we will simply not give a fiddlers fart about Internet-Bloody-Exporer 6 anymore is a huge relief.

I see, we all do, a lot of not quite optimal sites around. Almost-but-not-quite-getting-there. Flash, I have previously mentioned, is now pet-hate number one, after IE6 has been thrown in the rubbish tip of technological shite. Often, I think, they simply lacked someone saying “no”.

Sites with a squillion photos but you can’t share them by copying the URL.
Restaurant menus you cannot download or copy into an email.
Addresses that are images.
Directions you cannot print or forward.

That sort of thing.

Someone should have said no. “Dear client, all your wishes can come true, we can make it blink, dance, shine, jump, slide, glide, bump, sparkle and sing. But you will loose these things…” There is a crack in everything.

I think I know how it happens, and I am sure a lot of well-meaning people are involved. We have too many possibilities and ways of doing things. We want to please. “can you do this?” “of course we can”. We are technological wizards. We will twist the backend into a knot and hack it to make it so. We will squeeze blood from a stone, force the limitations of our technologies to squeal for mercy.

I care about things that works, I will say no.

Websites. it is everything and nothing. Not everyone needs a website. But by god, how much shite is out there – it is baffling; it begs belief.

There are reams, piles and buckets of resources on usability, rules-of-thumb. Endless, boring description of best-practice. And yet, I cannot find the address of the shop. The map on how to get there. The products. It drowns in FLASH, animations. I can hear the customer saying “make something that lives“. Vomit.

So I can’t find the phone number, a simple list of products. Xkcd describes it perfectly in the chart above.

..and of course, there is The Oatmeal’s how a webdesign goes straight to hell

Why this rant now? This is nothing new. In fact, small businesses in USA tends to be the worst. I do not know how it works, if they all have a cousin that “are really good at webdesign” (QUICK! RUN! HIDE!) or whatever. I was simply trying to find a bakery in D.C.

It annoys me that so much time, energy, money and talent goes to waste on making shite. These are simple sites. I want to find a bakery. I wonder what sort of stuff they have. When they are open.

I found a couple of bakeries. But because it is all FLASH, I cannot send links to specific content. I have to send the index url, and then write down all the clicks necessary to find the danish pastry. Do you think I will bother?

To all your FLASHdevelopers out there: fucking stop now! If you cannot do most of it in HTML you are idiots. Stay away from making websites.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

This was a harrowing project. The good mr. Resneck is a freelance journalist not a computer geek, so he was early having a blog, and had not upgraded since WP version 2 from 2005. It sat innocently on his providers server, and it gave me a fright. Software that is more than two years old, let alone six is very scary. Very.

Apart from the appallingly large hacking issues with this version, WP 2 lacked pretty much all of the safety features, backups, revisions and export. Particularly the lack of export was scary and annoying. So, quiet as a mouse, I sat down one day, and very, very carefully upgraded through nine levels or so. That is, you can usually upgrade WP and skip a version maybe two, but there are points in this ascent you should not skip.. and how do you find out which? You know it when you have done it, and it all goes to rat shit.

WP updates the database in this process in some versions, so just climb, carefully… to 3.2. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the version that let me export to xml, at least then I could reinstall WP and start from scratch. So I tiptoed through Getz, Dexter, Breckner, Tyner, Coltrane, Baker and Carmen, breathed a sigh of relief as Thelonious and Reinhardt wizzed by. And if you think they only have one version each, think again.

The good thing is; nothing WordPress, can scare me now.