Great Rant
Brian Weaver's
Grafyte weblog has an excellent rant today.
He hand codes his pages so there isn't a permalink but look for the entry for June 22, 2004:
bq.
Information Design
Information needs design, Did it before TV? Vanity Fair? Movies? The great leveling of intellectual facilities in an anti-intellectual America since the mediation of the senses were mandated by law. What possible meaning could it have to say that design must be placed in front of the information that you are sitting on train tracks and there is a train coming? The freeway signs pointing to another direction need to be re-designed by 20 something ravers who have had to much Extacy than is good for their DNA.
bq. We need to have a new aesthetics dictated by the needs of fashion designers to sell new clothes every season. We need serious information presentation. Serious is the word we use when we get a diagnosis of cancer from the doctor, not a colorful call for action from a bunch of designers who are between jobs and on unemployment, smoking clove cigars and drinking special lattes made from hand picked coffee beans chosen by itinerant farmers in Columbia paid less per day than the coffee costs to buy in the cafe. Read another fashion magazine. Look at pictures of the latest BMW SUV sucking the gas you need to get to the corner store to buy more soy milk for your special dietary needs.
bq. Feel better in a designed information world? Carefully controlled color coordinated access to ideas made from the latest style manuel being sold by vast corporate ecologies built on greed and stupidity run by fawning boot licking toadies bowing and scraping yes yes yes oh yess to the jack boots in front of them that want to be tongue cleaned, but only in an aesthetic manner, nothing crass or unseemly. For information needs to be in a cacoon of design to protect it from the perception that something is seriously wrong and the buzzing you hear isn't really the cognitive dissonance you actually really feel but something else, something else that has nothing to do with you at all.
I'd say 'Heh...' if it wasn't so true...
Posted by DaveH at June 22, 2004 4:20 PM