From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 07:23:59 MDT
Some years ago Tufte gave a free presentation at the Computer Literacy
Bookstore in Vienna, VA, within a short walk of where I was working at
the time. I had been intrigued by the ads for his books for some time,
and used this opportunity to buy all three books. Thus my collection is
all signed.
Both the lecture and the books were great, but I hardly ever reviewed
the books again after the initial reading. Somewhere I found a single
sentence from Antoine de Saint-Exupery which (for me) summed up the
essence of Tufte's views:
<<You know you have achieved perfection in design not when you have
nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.>>
One area in which this is quite easily noticable is computer games. I
have dozens, though at the moment they mostly gather dust as I have
little time for them these days. But when I was playing regularly, I
would read comments from other players on newsgroups and web boards, and
many users would be frothing at the mouth for more features, more units,
more explosions, more gore, more more more. Beyond indicating a severe
lack of appreciation at the cost required to implement such, there was
also no sense for the thought that went into what to abstract in the
games. No sense of Saint-Exupery's statement quoted above.
Another area is OS commands. I used to wonder why there wasn't an option
to do exactly what I wanted in a unix command (for example). Then I
learned how to combine options and other commands to get the output I
wanted.
Now my major interest is web sites. I never learned graphic design, so
whenever possible I strive for a simple elegance in the (very few)
circumstances where I've had design authority on a web site. There's
nothing quite so horrifying as retrieving a page from 1996, marveling
first at the simple structure (use of real header tags, for example),
then seeing there's still one image to load, then having the pristine
white background replaced with some psychedelic design that renders the
page unreadable. Thank Opera for the author/user style toggle button.
Many sites assume the user has his or her browser set to a white
background, though most web developers I know set it to gray or
something else so that they can view an image and tell immediately if
the image has a background color or is transparent. Other sites assume
that their rich mainly-nonwhite background image will load as quickly
for modem users as it did for them while developing the site on their
LAN, thus failing to set the background color to the dominant color of
their background image, often making the page unreadable until it loads.
Anyway it's becoming obvious I still haven't learned simple elegance in
sentence structure or composition so I'll just stop here before I rant
more about ponderous web design.
Thanks,
-Mike
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