A Timely Raven, vignette 3

Only one more to go!

He would have reached out, gingerly, testing her, and when he found her wishing to be comforted, would have pulled her into a careful embrace, letting her cry on his shoulder, letting her small body draw strength from his. He was thinking now that her husband should be here, unless he was the one who had done this to her, but he didn’t think so. He’d seen abused wives before. No, not the husband, then. Some other man. Some evil man. And so the husband should be here, should be holding and comforting her, unless he doesn’t know, unless she never told him or anyone…

A Timely Raven, vignette 3.

Enjoy :)

Something Wonderful to Write About

It’s funny how quickly priorities can change.

I’ve been a writer my entire life. When I was a little girl, my mother used to send me and my brother to our grandmother’s house outside of Cleveland for the summer. It was a much anticipated trip, as going away to grandma’s was like going away to another world – and that’s not much of a stretch if you compare Los Angeles to a tiny suburb in Ohio.

One year, the year I decided to write the great American Novel (I must have been all of 9 or 10 years old) I hauled my ancient typewriter with me. It was heavy as all get-out; an all metal monstrosity, painted cerulean blue, that I loved with all my heart. That typewriter, for me, meant creative freedom. I learned to type so that my ideas wouldn’t be hindered by the speed of my pen; I could type almost as fast as I could think, and never again would the perfect line of dialog escape me because my  brain hand run off to bigger and better things while my fingers struggled to keep apace. As strange as it may sound, I loved that typewriter as much as any little girl loved her dolls or imaginary ponies.

That I brought my typewriter with me on my annual trip to Mecca is strange enough. But that action really symbolizes who I am and who I have always been. I never took watercolor paints with me. I never toted crayons, so much more portable, or drawing paper or even pencils. My outlet of choice was writing, and therefore I needed my typewriter.

How, then, did twenty years pass and lead me astray into graphic design? How did that girl who loved writing so much she carried a 20 pound typewriter halfway across the country on summer vacation turn into a woman who, in the course of a workday, might never touch a keyboard in favor of her drawing tablet?

I think the answer lies in one of my core beliefs: I believe the universe gives me interests so that I have something to write about.

Now don’t get me wrong: I enjoy writing fiction. I even love it. But I’m rather lousy at it. I get too caught up in things that don’t matter and at character development I am a hopeless mess. I’m an adequate storyteller, and when I relay events that more or less happened (I am an embellisher, but what writer isn’t?) I can do that with a certain amount of flair and sophistication, but when it comes to making something up from scratch? Well, it comes off that way – self-conscious, trying too hard.

But my real passion and talent is non-fiction. It’s why I performed so well in college, to be honest. I outperformed my peers not because I was smarter or because I had more information then they did. It was because I could write my way into the sweet spot in my professor’s mind every time. It was almost unfair the advantage I had with that single skill.

But in order to write compelling nonfiction, there has to be passion behind it. You have to do more than know your subject, you have to live it. You have to breathe it in, interpret it, internalize it, and breathe it out as something new, changed, different. And that’s what I did with religion and philosophy, and it’s what I do now with design.

I was gifted with a love for design because it gives me something wonderful to write about.

I bring all this up because someone stumbled upon this blog recently and emailed me to say that he enjoyed my writing, and though I didn’t appear to have interest in this blog anymore, he hoped I would return.

I was deeply ashamed, to be honest. And I remain deeply ashamed. I should not have so long neglected this space, no matter how busy I’ve become.

So I will write about design. And I will write about work and life and whatever else needs to be written about. This space needs to be filled.

The prodigal writer returns.

The Interaction Design of Typography

In Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst suggests that thoughtfully designed type and an intelligently designed printed page do more than tell a story: they create “looking room” for the user, luring him into the words, into the page, into the discussion carefully crafted before him. Type, as a language crafted by history’s finest designers, must serve to convey meaning, symbolism, and emotion contained within the words themselves, but it must also touch the heart of the reader, bringing her into the conversation. In order to feel that she is a part of the conversation and not merely a voyeur, she needs open space and room to breathe. The letters are transformed from meaningless representations of sounds and become things themselves, gateways into learning, knowledge, debate, engagement.

When a reader looks upon a beautifully designed page, she is drawn, almost without even thinking about it, to read the words. She takes them in, unfolding the narrative in her mind, and she asks questions about the text, the author, the book itself. This engagement, this interplay between the reader and the words, is beautiful interaction design. An intelligent, caring typographer carefully chooses typefaces, line lengths, margins, etc. that allow the user to enter a conversation with the writer, to engage with the words before her. It is not merely good usability or legibility that the typographer creates; it is an experience. It is dialogue. It is co-creative narrative. Its transparency only underscores its importance: without it, this delicate relationship between reader and writer would be lost. The mystery of this design is that it is so untenable, and yet so very important. It is, in no small way, a cornerstone of our very culture.

The cultural price we pay

Yet in the June, 2007, edition of Communication Arts magazine, John Hudson suggests that the standardization of letterforms via modern typography actually diluted culture by diminishing or even obliterating regional letterforms. He writes, “The greatest reduction is probably in the loss of much regional variation in letterforms, the local dialects of script.” With the introduction of standard letterforms, local scripts died out or became unsophisticated. Eventually they would become altogether illegible by those not reared on the local letterforms. Moreover, one could no longer look at a script and know where it was penned, for writers everywhere used the same letter shapes. Truly, this is an interesting development: I can only imagine how impoverished we would be as a people if we could not enjoy hearing different accents and vocal melodies; the loss of regional scripts must have been, at the time, equally grave.

A designer’s manipulation of a reader’s emotions is intentional.

Of course, along with the cultural richness afforded by the melodic differences in spoken language comes assumptions and prejudices. When we hear someone speaking with a British, Australian, or Southern accent (or indeed, any of their myriad variations, for even these categories are very broad and contain vastly different vocalizations) we form immediate pictures of them, which in turn shape our interaction with them.

Manipulation, design, and interaction

We could lay the same complaint against written letters: before the standardization of typography and letterforms, people might have made determinations about the author based on his penmanship rather than the character of his text; they might assume prejudices against him because of what region his letters identified him as being from. They might allow their visual impressions of a page to sway how they felt about the content.

Of course, that’s the purpose of design. The difference is that a designer’s manipulation of a reader’s emotions is intentional.

Modern, standardized typography does not free us from the pitfalls of prejudice or association: typefaces such as Optima, Helvetica, Bordoni, and Garamond all evoke from us, as designers, writers, and readers, different emotions or reactions. It does not free us from connotations and cultural baggage but instead builds upon them. This is one of the essential functions of a typeface. Writers pore over their word choices, the rhythm of their sentences with careful deliberation, knowing that these elements and the melody they establish will shape the voice of their message, either making or breaking their work. The typeface is chosen with similar care, for the amount of negative space, the curve of the serifs, and the weight of the strokes in combination shape the experience of a typeface.

Typography as shared language

What standardized typography really does for us is establish a visual mythology just like any other set of symbols, allowing us to use a kind of culturally-universal emotional short-hand in order for us to interact with each other via a visual medium. If I use Comic Sans (which I wouldn’t, but let’s just say that I would) I know that my reader will have associations of childishness, playfulness, lack of sophistication, likeablity, approachability, etc. Those experiences and associations have already been encoded for us in our cultural DNA.

Certainly we lose something as a culture with standardization, but we gain something as well. The language of design is enriched by shared, cultural symbols even while the art of written letterforms and the written page is diminished. To my mind, this is a significant difference between art and design. While good art might use symbols with cultural meaning, it does not rely upon them as a vehicle of experience. Art is a private conversation between two people: the artist and the viewer. Art relies upon the ability of individuals to transcend shared, cultural connotations and associations and access something of their private worlds, something perhaps meaningful only to them. Design may do this, but it doesn’t rely upon that ability, and therein lies the key difference.

(I expect to write something more significant sometime soon about the differences between art and craft and where design fits into this picture, but my thoughts are still percolating.)

The Mismeasure of Craftsmen

Yesterday, sitting at my desk reading The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (I’m always reading something different, usually before I finish a previous book; I’m afraid I have something like academic ADD) I came across an interesting story by Socrates. He was recounting a myth he wished to tell his people of their place within the world. He says,

“Some of you have the power to command, and in the composition of these he [the Creator] has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children”

It wasn’t the first time I’d come across the idea of the categorization and subsequent hierarchical value determination of humans; after all, I was in high school during the hey-day of The Bell Curve. But what I did find new life in was the idea of craftsmen — the people who shape the symbols and objects of a culture — being somehow subordinate to those who “rule”.

This morning on the radio I heard a report of the owner of a Chinese toy factory committing suicide after his toys were recalled for containing lead paint. I missed the beginning of the story, and thought it was an American who committed suicide. “Well, he must have been culpable,” I said to my husband, “or he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

“No,” my husband replied, “he was Chinese.”

“Ohhh. Then it was a face thing. He might not have done anything wrong at all.”

Upon saying these words, I started thinking about how something seemingly so universal — suicide — could imply such different histories and personalities depending on culture. But where does culture come from? How is it shaped? How does it evolve? Who is responsible for the values and mythologies of a culture?

I don’t pretend to be able to answer that definitively, for I am no anthropologist. But I do know that the people that determine how we live lend a great deal to how we view the world and each other, and I know that craftsmen determine to a large extent how we live for they create the spaces we live in work in, the chairs we sit upon, the utensils we use, the typefaces we communicate with etc.

Consider the difference between how traditional Asian meals are served versus how Westerns eat. We sit on chairs, we serve ourselves, and we eat in any order we fancy. The Japanese dine kneeling on the floor, and the Chinese have a specific etiquette concerning who eats first, and how much, and when.

I think about the crafts involved in these processes: the different kind of tables required for the different cultures, the different bowls and utensils, different cushions, etc. And I think about the people who made these items, and how they allow us to live our respective cultural paradigms. How different would we be as a society, even as individual people, without the craftsmen who design our way of life?

I recognize that the relationship between objects and culture is reflexive: culture determines how we make and use things, and the things in turn change our culture. Even so, its seems remarkable to me that anyone place the craftsmen beneath the rulers — the policymakers, the kings, the legislators — since the “people of brass and iron” are the people that take our internal dreams and project them into external space.

Years ago, I studied the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with a Jewish friend of mine. The tree of life is a pictograph of God’s creation of the universe, and subsequently of human creation as well (to oversimplify). Embedded within the tree is this idea of “the four worlds”, and material objects only exist in the final world. The way I describe the four worlds is thusly:

1. “I need a place to sit down!” (Problem identified)
2. “I know! I could make something to sit on!” (Abstract solution)
3. “I’ll start drafting the actual requirements for my sitting object! It’ll have three legs…no four!..” (Abstract creation)
4. “Tada! My Lay-Z-Boy is awesome! Next time maybe I’ll make a bench…” (physical creation)

This process of creation is the domain of the craftsman, the designer, the eternal problem-solver, the creator of the things that make my life delightful and easy. And yet someone dares suggest he is beneath the guy that decreed that alcohol shall not be served on Sunday before noon?

I don’t think so.

Designs that Fail

On my way to lunch this afternoon I decided to stop and get some donuts. As I drove by the store, however, I noticed that the OPEN sign was dark, the universal indicator that a store is closed. A moment later, however, I happened to glance back at the store and noticed that the light was lit. It was, in fact, blinking, and I had caught it during one of its “off” moments. By the time I realized this, I was already past the store and couldn’t stop.

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The Heart of Infidelity

In my recent work dealing with the ethics of right relationships, I‘ve been exploring what it means to be faithful, the reasons we are faithful, and what causes us to stray the course once we’ve made a commitment to being faithful. When we enter into right relationships with people, relationships which are built on mutual trust, respect, and support, our commitment to them becomes a personal value. We order our lives in such a way that are able to uphold this value, and ideally, all our other values have to support this value, just as this value must seamlessly enter into the network of our other values. Part of what it means to be faithful to those to whom we are committed is to align the whole self, in a way that does not diminish who we are, toward upholding that relationship.

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