tb

tb, 1 month ago

@impactology It hasn’t always been the norm, and — unless one is willing to openly argue that Israel should cease to exist — hopefully it won’t always be the norm. There’s a ferocious left in Israel, and I for one hope they’ll gain much more power. That’s why Martin’s flavor of bombast is so counterproductive: she waves away the only viable alternative (which is her explicit raison d’être, of course), then complains there’s no alternative. But what else should we expect from a 9/11 truther? Don’t bother answering — I don’t give people like her any more oxygen than necessary.

tb, 1 month ago

@impactology Not sure where they are now, but they were out in huge numbers in the streets of central Tel Aviv every week for months on end. Or did you forget those demos because you were too busy snarking? But tell me, where are the 👉🏼 49.5% of Israeli Arabs 👈🏼 who, according to this poll, don’t agree with the statement that Israel is using too much firepower? Again, don’t answer that. My view is clear: if we want a better future for people in the region, we need to acknowledge and encourage the people on the ground who are most likely to make it happen. Spreading bombast and picking details out of polls without context do the opposite.

tb, 1 month ago

@impactology When you ask a question then follow with a factoid implying there is no answer, don’t be surprised if you get no answer. In any event, it didn’t really need one: surely you’re aware of the years of anti–Netanyahu protests? If not, https://gprivate.com/6b2lg

tb, 1 month ago

@interfluidity Today is also the deadline for new admits to deposit — or, in plainspeak, it’s when people who applied to a school and were accepted have to sign on the dotted line.

These last weeks leading up to that are crucial: schools do everything they can — most of all, by being really nice — to persuade people to come.

Columbia, in contrast, has spent these weeks exaggerating and escalating the anxieties, fears, tensions, chaos, conflict, confrontations, risks, threats, violence. Their admissions numbers are going to collapse.

And, Groucho Marx–style, I’m not even sure I’d want to go to school with people who want to go there next year. That’s a big deal for be to say: I’m a proud alumnus and a neighbor for thirty years, and CU has been a positive presence in my life, often in a daily basis. But now I’m really, really, REALLY angry.

tb, 1 month ago

@interfluidity 🎯 — every word. Columbia’s toxic tantrum turned a bunch of tents into a national (arguably international) wildcat strike. Another way to say that: huge numbers are drawn to these protests more by solidarity with fellow students than by support for a “free Palestine.” I seriously doubt the hostilities will end by September, so protests will likely resume in the fall in one form or another. That’d make the election much riskier, and if Trump wins he’d escalate wildly. Listening to what undergrads have to say vs seeing fascists launch a nationwide war on academia is not a hard choice. @phillmv

tb, 2 months ago

Related

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology My sense is that the work of Victor (and, crucially, the group he works with) is so strong because, at its core, it rejects those pseudo-disciplinary distinctions.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology Absolutely. The formulation I arrived at (through years of teaching design, running a visual design dept, etc) was: Objects dissolve theory. Re your other note about wasting all that time: you didn’t. And if you do indeed start to study GD (I’m more skeptical that ID is a thing in its own right), you'll quickly see it wasn’t a waste at all. The meta-structures ‘behind’ visual design — typography and lettering, for example — have changed over time, often to keep pace with the materials that dominated the production of tools: wood, lead, stone, synthetics, photo, etc. The fact that ~coding is more ‘virtual’ than wood or lead makes it no less real. Here’s a concrete example from the book I have at hand, Clarence Hornung’s Lettering (my interest in it is very niche, there are many better sources on the subject): you can plainly see how much its geometric language shared with architecture, but it could equally — and/or differently — be expressed in terms of code.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology I’m years into writing a cultural history of what we think information/etc looks like and I haven’t seen anything in their work that moves beyond either — take your pick — (a) standard marketing rhetoric or (b) ideas that are many decades old. That’s not a criticism of their work at all, I’m just skeptical about your assessment.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology I have even worse news for you: there was demand for that kind of specialized nexus before ID (or whatever we want to call it) became a thing as it’s commonly seen now. The post-Tufte articulation of the field — basically, as a generalized form of expertise — is a symptom of the death of specialized areas that were discipline- or context-specific.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology I’d love to see that collection

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology Not really, no, because the field wasn’t really theorized as such. In English the phrase “graphic design” was coined by Dwiggins in 1922, so we shouldn’t expect to see signs of it splintering into subspecialties for decades to come — and its focus was always more practical than philosophical. The larger problem is that Tufte played a towering role in (re)shaping the field, but (a) his central argument is not just wrong but backwards, and (b) he was actively intellectually dishonest. He presented ID in a classicizing light (Playfair, Minard, etc) and complained that it was corrupted by pop influences, but that’s just not how things unfolded.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology If you haven’t studied or taught GD or ID, it’ll be pretty hard to reinvent them. 🌞 And the history of GD in particular is littered with principles, rules, schools, etc.

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology Unsolicited advice: keywords/tags would work better than folders. If your collection is effectively locked ~behind a plugin, it sounds like your data is more like in the form of pointers (e.g., URLs) than files? If so, then extracting them should be easy enough. The next step would be to validate them — I haven’t kept track, but there are lots of tools for that. Next would be bulk DL, ideally chained to OCR + some NLP-ish process to generate provisional tags. If it were me, I’d just use some kitchen-sink tool like Devon Tech’s suite (I’ve used it for years and it’s solid as a rock).

tb, 2 months ago

@impactology It’s got nothing to do with theoretical heft. On the contrary, in my experience, theory was mostly bolted on by people who aren’t primarily practitioners - not a bad thing, just not necssary. It’s really about learning to un/see as a visual designer, and on that basis (a) learning to see how others see and (b) seeing how others learn to see.

tb, 3 months ago

@jamiemccarthy @mattsheffield

This is a top-notch analysis. One additional factor: that voice is part of a larger self-presentation with strict requirements — acceptable subjects, associations / segues, and speed. With strangers, it can take the form of a chipper stream of easy chat about weather, family, gardening, food, etc. Those "lite" sides mask what's going on: you're being probed from a dozen directions to suss out who you are and how you fit in. That’s an aggressively interactive process, but the SotU and response are old-media, so her presentation lost much of its force.