This feeling of alienation is understandable. It is easy to imagine how being immersed in a sea of nondescript faces and cold steel can certainly take a toll on a person.  Something I am interested in is if the nature of the machinery itself, always shown to be large iron constructs running on steam, with burly men in long pants shoveling coal in a fiery mouth, feeding the perpetual turning of massive cogs and gears, has anything to do with these feelings of alienation.  During industrial revolution people became slaves to the large oppressive machinery that was supposed to make their lives better.  However, today there is almost a feeling of connectedness and mutual dependency with machinery, and humans are much more at peace with being surrounded by “progress.”

I feel I must pass judgment on our textbook at this point.  As much as I know that teachers have an emotional attachment to the texts that they assign, this book is pretty awful at explaining most things.  I have read, and reread everything in this book that pertains to the theory of the Gaze, and I still have no idea what they are talking about.  My perception of the Gaze is it is like discourse analysis in a Foucaultian sense (transfer of power), but instead of reading or speaking, one is viewing the exchange.  I would like to set up a hypothetical situation to clear up what I mean.  In an instance of visual discourse there must be an observer (Jim), an observed (a print cologne ad) and a context for the situation in which these two parties converge. Every aspect of the situation must be considered, e.g. Jim’s preconceived notion of the cologne, the desired affect of the ad agency, the periodical in which the advertisement appears, time, place and other facets of the setting, and a slew of other contextual aspects that I simply refuse to go through.  The emotions and desires that are felt by Jim are certainly part of the Gaze, and these emotions and desires are part of the power that the advertisement holds over Jim.

Horton’s Color in Icons is another excellent “applicable use” reading, that outlines some great ways that color can be applied in a real world setting. The 8 uses for color are particularly useful, some of them more than others. While reading through some of his descriptions, I think Horton puts too much emphasis on the colors themselves, as opposed to them in the context.  Aside from a few extremely recognizable colors (Tiffany’s Blue for example) colors often cannot stand on their own, such as in a rankings scale.

One thing I started paying attention, especially driving around in Bloomington-Normal, is fast food restaurant logos.  So many fast food restaurants, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, all have one thing in common; they use yellow in their logo.  Now it has been said that yellow is a food that stimulates hunger, and yet the yellow is in each of those logos (taco bell excluded) use the color as a subtle accent.

It’s also interesting how every major sports league in the nation uses the colors of the United States flag to represent their league.  The National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the National Basketball Association are all based in the US, and yet still have teams located in Canada, and MLB and NHL especially are dominated by foreign talent.

The most interesting thing about the show is looking at ads from “the golden age of advertising” and how it relates the sentiments held by the characters on the show.  It is evident from the very first episode how very different the 1960s were from the modern day.  Bosses calling their secretaries “sweetheart” and the prominent sexism and racism throughout the show are examples of this.  There is one particular advertisment that is features a a stewardess in a skirt that is “just half an inch too short” in order to inject subtle sexuality into an ad for an airline, a service used predominantly by men in the 1960s.

Another interesting section of the text was on the shape of words. I had always just thought of using all caps as method of making things stand out more, but never considered how that actually made words less recognizable.

One thing I found particularly useful was Williams specifically highlighting points about when to do certain things (see When to increase Linespacing).

Combing these to two ideas (readability and artistic design) is important to make truly effective designs.  Something else I’ve found is very useful, not discussed in the text is usability testing.  You may be in a situation where you pick out a font and a color, and then go to print in on a colored paper, or onto a t shirt can yield different results from you had hoped.  Or in the case of a three dimensional sign, it can make letters look like one letter, yielding less than desirable results

The section that shows the different elements of a letter was also very interesting.  The only font related vocabulary I possessed prior this was the difference between serif, and san serif.  Pointing out the various design elements of a font are especially useful, as I would often find myself trying to explain parts of a letter as the “top line” or the “circle part.”

I have really taken a liking to document design,  but most of what I was doing wasn’t really based on any amount of theory, but more on what I thought looked “right.” After getting through much of the philosophy behind white space and linearity (give me a break) I was happy to get into the nuts and bolts of things like kerning, line spacing, alignment, word spacing, and then getting to see them in real world applications. As a future technical writer, I am always looking for ways to increase the readability of a text.

Enter the Nightingale Graph. The first instance of this graph circular graph was developed by its namesake, Florence Nightingale to illustrate the number, and means of deaths in the field hospital she worked in during the Crimean War.  Essentially what the graph is, is a multi-layered bar graph wrapped into a circle to emulate the cyclical nature of the calendar.  There are many issues with this graph, such as no indication of number, the “fanning out” of the representational areas could distort the amount of information, and in today’s culture, when people see circles they are most likely to be looking for percentages .

While the Nightingale Graph is certainly useful in some respects, it is antiquated and very counterintuitive to look at it, not to mention there is no frame of reference for its statistical accuracy.

Tufte’s theories seem more accurate to me.  Calling for less “junk” leads to more usable graphs.My desire is to some day become a technical writer or editor, which is why I find it difficult to appreciate these diagrams. Sure, they are pretty and they offer unique ways of analyzing the information, but they certainly favor form far over function.  Perhaps in a larger format, they would be more readable, but as they are presented in the book, they are far too intricate and complex, not to mention the colors in some are too similar to really discern some differences.