Unclear - just a typo away from oblivion

Discussing ways to simplify consumer contracts recently, the marketing director of a large firm remarked that his firm's contract contained various clauses that they never actually enforce because it would bad for their reputation. He thought they might as well just leave them out. When translated into plain English some contract terms might just seem too toxic to leave in.

It occurs to me that the process of simplification is also a kind of defusing or disarming. The Campaign for Unclear Disarmament, anyone? No, I thought not. That pun will go no further than this blog.

More icons of doom

Thanks to Collin McDougall for this last one.

Icons of doom

Polite notite

People have written 'polite notice' on signs for many years, hoping we'll mistake it for 'police notice' and pay more attention. But the notices themselves are rarely convincing. Which is why this one, seen near Paddington Station, is quite impressive. Using the Transport font, in the right shade of blue, and built like the real thing, it's the best I've seen.

Icon crazy

Andrew Belsey spotted this symbol. It was accompanied by some words, but have a go at interpreting it before clicking here for the answer.

You can't see them but they can see you

I always feel there must be a story behind every informal notice you see stuck up around a building.

Seen at the Royal College of Art.

Laver's law and typefaces

Someone just asked me what's with Cooper Black - nice typeface but mostly seen as the credits roll for Dad's Army.

I remembered some kind of law of fashion cycles, in which our view of a fashion changes as time passes. So just went on 'tinternet and found it is known as Laver's Law

James Laver was a fashion historian at the V&A, and this appears in a 1937 book Taste and fashion.

"The same costume will be:

Indecent: 10 years before its time
Shameless: 5 years before its time
Outré: 1 year before its time
Smart: now
Dowdy: 1 year after its time
Hideous: 10 years after its time
Ridiculous: 20 years after its time
Amusing: 30 years after its time
Quaint: 50 years after its time
Charming: 70 years after its time
Romantic: 100 years after its time
Beautiful: 150 years after its time"

This seems to have worked quite well for flared trousers which have ceased to seem quite so ridiculous, and I feel I can once more share our 1975 wedding photos (merely amusing now, heading towards quaint). And it won't be too long before photos of blokes with their trousers falling down can be used for blackmail purposes.

But I'm not so sure it works so precisely with typefaces. I think Cooper Black is ready for mainstream re-entry, but I'm not ready to dust off Kabel.

Nothing's really new

Martin Andrews puts on frequent displays from the ephemera collection at Reading University. A recent one was of old letterheads - the sort with a picture of the factory, and illustrations of key products. Some of them were so full of pictures that there was very little room for words.

Here's one from my own modest collection (of two). What strikes me about letters like this is how similar they are to modern marketing emails, with a central message surrounded by pictures. And the references to telegrams in the letter reminds us that fast business communications have been around for quite a while.

I bought this example from the wonderful Ken's in Newport Pagnell, when our company was based there. Not just a motorway service stop, NP was also home to Information Design Unit, and William Cowley's parchment works, one of the last left in England.

Typeface test

Do you prefer (a)

or (b)?

Accessible or not

This taped-over access button at Camden Arts Centre looks a little callous until you see it's at the top of a flight of steps. Good luck getting your wheelchair through that door.

My midnight train to Georgia

As I pack away my books, workers outside are putting the finishing touches to a gleaming new office block they’ve spent the last year or more building. As turf is rolled out, the mud and rubble becomes an impeccably striped green lawn, and today they are fitting the street lamps.

Symbolic, I wonder? Three years ago, the moment I moved into this office they started demolishing the buildings next door, a protracted process with delays while they dealt with asbestos, and one that involved a combination of precision disassembling and the grinding brute force of a huge machine that ate all the concrete and bricks and turned them into hardcore for the new building’s foundations. With a six month pause while the banking crisis delayed their progress, the noisy activity has continued for most of the three years. Working to the constant din of reversing dump trucks and fork lifts, generators, cranes and deliveries, the environment didn’t feel as friendly as the cheery memos the builders were careful to send, keeping us neighbours in touch with their progress.

Meanwhile, sitting in an almost unheated office (12 degrees some days, on the thermometers purloined from the kind biologists next door) reading memos from the university urging us to save energy, we realise that some things in universities, those communities of highly intelligent scholars working to create new knowledge for the common good, are not as they may seem.

Anyway, I’m leaving now, leaving behind the disassembling, dissembling and grinding down (I’m speaking of the building site next door, of course).

Yellow Pages shrinks further

The once mighty Yellow Pages is shrinking in the face of internet competition, and now they've literally shrunk the book itself. Ours arrived today and the print is so small I thought it was a contract needing my signature.

Odd thing is that the paper edition is really only useful for people without a PC, many of whom are elderly... who happen to be just that part of the population who struggle with tiny type.

One good thing is that most of the opticians seem to be on to this and have large print ads.

Instant coffee an oxymoron?

Seen in our office coffee room: 'Nescafé Café Parisien: L'experience des cafés français'.

On an unrelated note, who was it who said that when hearing a political speech, one should always ask oneself 'why is this lying liar lying to me?'.

Question 17: Que?

From the Scottish census website

 Well, I've got to question 17 OK.

In praise of Studio Vista, Ken Garland and the good old days

I'm not sure if there is anything around today that is quite like the Studio Vista series of design books published in the 60s. There weren't all that many design books to choose from then, but these were fairly affordable, accessibly written and stocked by our local bookshop - I bought several of them while still at school, and they did a lot to lure me into graphic design.

Here are the ones that survive on my bookshelf - I also remember having Norman Potter's What is a designer, and  John Lewis's Typography: basic principles.

Ken Garland's Graphics handbook was the one that had the most influence on me - it was too early for me to really get the more philosophical books such as Pye or Potter, but Ken's book provided an uncomplicated toolbox, covering everything from semiotics to international paper sizes in just 90-odd pages. And it does have a philosophy, demonstrated through its scope, its timeless layout, and a wonderful preface, which Ken printed in enormous type in the hope it would be read.

I mentioned the influence his book had on me recently to Ken (who I had the immense good fortune to be taught by), and I recalled the photo of him on the back. He pointed out that the book was written so long ago that the little girl he is holding here is now 50.
http://www.kengarland.co.uk
 

Murdoch's firewall. I don't mind paying but I want to be able to share

"A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the “governors” and the “governed” and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project. Or not.

I read that in a paper by Professor David Held, of the London School of Economics, and it may, just possibly, be the wisest observation on politics that I have yet come across. But it also might not be. I can’t be sure because I haven’t got the first clue what the professor is going on about.
...
It is a frustrating feature of much academic political science that reasonably simple points are made in an impossibly complicated way — presumably to make them sound more profound. Straightforward distinctions between people who imprison dissidents and others who think that this is not a very good idea disappear in a mass of verbiage. And everything sounds reasonable. Or not."

So wrote Daniel Finkelstein in a really perceptive column in The Times today entitled "The LSE scandal is intellectual, not financial".

Unfortunately if you follow this link, you won't be allowed in without a subscription, because it's behind Rupert Murdoch's firewall. I don't actually object to paying for news, and contributing to Daniel's salary - I have a subscription. But it's a massive pity not to be able to share gems like this column. So I've torn the article out and shared some of it here.

Marital status a la census

Gay marriage is called civil partnership in the UK, I believe as a compromise to respect religious sensitivities. But, as the 2011 census form shows, it seems we haven't yet evolved words for when it ends.

Whatever the status of the word 'marriage' can we not just stretch the meaning of the words 'divorced' and 'widowed', for goodness sake? Particularly 'widowed'.

Census form arrives - oh joy!

Got the census form - long, intrusive and slightly daft at times. Question 17 is bizarre - presumably there was a question that was deleted, but they couldn't face changing all the other question numbers.

Caps Lock jammed on?

Notice in our local shopping centre car park. I'm trying to imagine the stylesheets they used to design this:
Important stuff
Really important stuff
Vital safety stuff
Important vital stuff
Shouting

Ship graphics

Yesterday's papers carried a story about giant new container ships which have been ordered. Obviously an opportunity for a useful graphic. Well, a graphic, anyway, in the case of The Times.

A few questions: What's the colour coded cargo represent? Can these two larger ships really be more than twice the length of the other big ships shown in grey below? Is the 18,000 container ship really the same size as the 12,000 container ship (the figures supplied suggest they are almost exactly the same size, so how come the apparently smaller one appears to have as many containers on it)?

The Guardian made a better fist of it, although much less ambitious.

The only problem with this one is that the correct unit of account to impress about the size of ships is surely the football pitch (105m) not the London bus. It's got to be something that you think is very big, that the impressive object is much bigger than. Most ships are longer than a London bus.

The greater error, of course, would be to compare it with something much bigger - for example, this ship might be big, but it's nothing like the size of Wales (or Belgium, if you want to go metric). Odd thing is, I can't think of  a unit of measurement that comes between a football pitch and Wales. The Isle of Wight, possibly.

They know where you live

Universities are doing their best to raise funds from alumni and Reading Uni boast internally about their success in this.

Now I've seen them in action and they're formidable. They've tracked down my 91 year old mum to her retirement home in Cornwall. She did part-time art classes in 1938.

I'd thought they were using student helpers, but now I reckon it's Pinkertons.

Sansible choice

Perfect typeface choice for this shop. Thanks to Martin Evans who spotted this.

Surprise apple tarts

Readers of digital newspapers will have noticed that proof-reading's gone out of style along with paper. I love today's recipe in The Times iPad edition.

PS.  I wish I'd thought of the title of this post myself, but I've just changed it following Paul E's brilliant comment.

Dunces and Derrida

About to buy a book on graphic design and reading (I feel the author's identity needs protection) when I noticed this customer review on Amazon:

"In this book, a number of dunces show that they've heard of Derrida, who 'showed that truth is an illusion'. Gosh it's ghastly."

That's what I call deconstruction.

Plain English - does it translate?

The European Union is making a welcome effort to introduce plain language principles, and last year produced a plain language guide, How to write clearly. A recent newsletter 'Languages and translation' refers to the rise of not just English but 'bad English as the Commission’s lingua franca'. It asked a number of translators to reflect on how they adapted the guide to various different EU languages.

We know that the rules of plain English don't directly translate into other languages – for example, English has many expressions for which there are latin and anglo-saxon alternatives - the latter are seen as plainer ('get' instead of 'receive'), but the equivalent vocabulary choice is not an issue in other languages. And we can use noun clusters in a way that just doesn't work in French, so our sentences can often be shorter.

But I found myself wondering if some of the translators' comments were actually about real grammatical differences between languages, or whether they didn't hint at an earlier stage of plain language evolution in those cultures.

It was very noticeable that the recommendation, common in plain English, to use the active voice, met with resistance:

"A chapter on the use of the passive voice was modified as the use of the passive voice in Latvian is not always a bad choice."

"Hint 8 (‘Prefer active verbs to passive’) could well be valid for conversational Lithuanian, but not for legal texts. In fact, the passive often takes precedence over the active here, especially when there is an inanimate subject."

"The over-use of the passive voice may be more of a problem in English than in Portuguese, as the latter favours the impersonal active."

But Plain English also involves the introduction of a more conversational style into legal texts, and met with similar objections many years ago. The point about active sentences is that they specify the doer, and so someone has to take responsibility for an action. Passive sentences avoid commitment. I wonder if that's not the same in Latvian, Lithuanian and Portuguese.

And again:

"The most difficult bit to get around had to do with addressing the reader directly. The English guide suggested using the personal pronoun ‘you’ more often in documents — something which is certainly to be avoided in formal Portuguese. Direct address is acceptable in advertising or in direct information to the public, but in other areas it may be wiser to use impersonal constructions."

Plain English, too, is nearer to an advertising style than was once acceptable. Isn't plain Portuguese also bound to appear less formal than is traditional in official documents?

I'd love to be corrected by someone who knows what they're talking about.

Circles on maps

Last Friday I was at the excellent Design of Understanding conference at St Brides. David McCandless gave a very good presentation of the thinking and process behind his Information is Beautiful website and book.

A common technique used by David McC, and the various newspapers represented at the conference, is to vary the sizes of circles used to represent different quantities. At one point Mark Barratt asked the question on a lot of people's minds: hasn't it been established that circles are a pretty unreliable way to compare quantities? I'm not sure it would be fair to say he was brushed aside - perhaps the background to his question wasn't really understood.

Doubts about circles go all the way back to Willard Brinton's 1916 book Graphic methods for presenting facts. Perhaps further.

Brinton's explanation shows, first, the well-known difference between using diameter and area - diameter hugely exaggerates differences. However, he goes further and condemns even circles that compare areas, pointing out that they have the opposite effect - we tend to underestimate the area of the larger circle. His conclusion: 'Horizontal bars have all the advantages of circles with none of the disadvantages'.

In his 1956 PhD thesis, James Flannery proposed a correction formula, so that the perception of the difference would be correct, even if the actual area of the circles is not. Several other people researched the same issue and came up with similar findings to Flannery's (apparent value = actual value * 0.86).

Unfortunately for seekers after simple solutions, Hans-Joachim Meihofer then showed that individuals varied too much in their judgements for Flannery's formula to be reliable. However, he demonstrated that the whole problem could be solved by using stepped sizes of circle and providing a scale.

The story is well told in Michael Macdonald-Ross's 1977 review 'How numbers are shown'.

Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as that - Patricia Gilmartin went on to demonstrate how important context is when viewing circles of different sizes (demonstrated through the well-known Ebbinghaus illusion). The centre circles are the same size. Oh dear.

My personal view is quite relaxed - I see circles on maps as simply relative and I don't expect to derive actual data from them. I am happy to see them as approximate (tiny vs medium vs huge). However, I have great respect for those who see statistics as sacred, and yearn for integrity in presentation...  which brings us to Michael Blastland's excellent presentation at Design of Understanding. He rendered this whole discussion somewhat irrelevant by questioning the reliability of so much of the data used for apparently simple charts in newspapers. And he reminded us that statistics is as much about probability and uncertainty as about facts - a view enshrined in the title of Howard Wainer's latest book on quantitative graphics: Picturing the uncertain world.

Michael's Go Figure articles on the BBC website should be required reading for information designers.

• Brinton W.C. (1916) Graphic methods of presenting facts. New York: Engineering Magazine
• Flannery J (1971). The relative effectiveness of some common graduated point symbols in the presentation of quantitative data. Canadian Cartographer, 8(2), 96–109.
• Gilmartin, P. P. (1981). Influences of map context on circle perception. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71(2), 253-258.
• Macdonald-Ross, M. (1977). How numbers are shown – a review of research on the presentation of quantitative data in texts. AV Communication Review, 25(4), 359-409.
• Meihoefer, H. J. (1969). The utility of the circle as an effective cartographic symbol. Canadian Cartographer, 6(2), 105-117.
• Wainer, H (2009). Picturing the uncertain world: how to understand, communicate, and control uncertainty through graphical display. Princeton University Press.

Dumped on the beach wet through

I've been going through a pile of old notes, rather alarmed at how little my thoughts have moved on from what was pre-occupying me fifteen or twenty years ago. One note, probably made during a conference presentation, caught my eye. I'm assuming it is something I had just heard someone say, rather than something I made up. It's about the concept of surfing the web, and it points out that surfing is extremely difficult and ends up with everyone being dumped on the beach wet through.

Return of the widow

I am addicted to my iPad, and I particularly enjoy reading newspapers and magazines again, free from annoying links and comments from crazy fellow-readers (otherwise known as Web 2.0). They are starting to restore page layout.

However, you have to get used quite a bit of careless editing - for some reason, more typos than the paper versions, headings that revert to plain type, references to pictures (right) when they are in fact somewhere else. And spectacular widows - particularly in The Times and The Economist (see above... well, OK, below).

Celebrating Rupert's 90th

I have developed a minor obsession with the layout of the Rupert Bear annual, a favourite of my childhood. I've mentioned before the parallel layers that suit different readers (and I have written a short piece for Eye magazine to be published this month). Last year was the ninetieth anniversary of Rupert, and it's been marked by one or two publishing events.

The Life and Works of Alfred Bestall: Illustrator of Rupert Bear is the biography of the longest serving of Rupert's creators, by his god-daughter, Caroline Bott. His archives are going to the Bodleian in Oxford, who recently put some of the work on display. It is very much a biography of the man – very interesting, but Rupert is only part of the story, and little is revealed about the origin of the layout.

More informative about this is The Rupert Companion, by Ian Robinson, one of the last of Rupert's editors. This is a wonderful book, designed by Faye Dennehy in a generous format that allows the illustrations to breathe. It's very readable and takes us through the whole story from Rupert's originator, Mary Tourtel, to Bestall, and more recent editors and illustrators. I hadn't realised that it was the sale of the Daily Express, where the Rupert strip appeared, to Richard Desmond that finally did for Rupert in 2002, although old stories continued to be recycled.

The layout I've been celebrating dates from the Rupert Annual of 1936, and was the responsibility of the Daily Express's children's editor, Stanley Marshall. Mary Tourtel had written four lines of verse under each drawing, but Alfred Bestall found that rather challenging and moved the format of the daily strip to prose. This also meant he could develop better dialogue for the individual characters. But in the annuals Marshall included both prose and verse, now in rhyming couplets.

Venice of the North? Join the queue

Clicking some news links I somehow ended up with a story about the floods in Australia: 'Rocky the Venice of the North'. Overlooking the fact that Rockhampton would surely be the Venice of the South, they need to get in the queue. I've lost count of the cities I've visited that make that claim, but I've yet to see Venice reciprocate, and boast of being the Birmingham of the South. Or Stockholm. Or Amsterdam. Or Bruges.

15 minutes with Google I'll never get back, and here's a list of other contenders.

• Aalborg: Paris of the North
• Abidjan, Paris of West Africa
• Amsterdam: Venice of the North
• Asheville, North Carolina: Paris of the South
• Belfast: Athens of the North? (to be fair, this course at Queens University, Belfast, comes with a question mark)
• Bogotá: Athens of South America
• Boston: Athens of America
• Bourton-on-the-Water: Venice of the Cotswolds
• Buenos Aires: Paris of South America
• Coimbatore, Manchester of South India
• Edinburgh: Athens of the North
• Fort Lauderdale: Venice of America
• Freetown: Athens of West Africa
• Manchester: Venice of North
• Philadelphia: Athens of America.

So we all want to be Athens, Paris or Venice. Except that Coimbatore is keen to be the Manchester of South India. Given Manchester is the Venice of the North... well, you can see where this is heading.

There's a name for everything

User guide to jeans seen in Next.

Graduation 2010

Here are the 2010 MAs doing the hat thing. It was great seeing them back for graduation, and to hear that most have jobs.

In the Simplification Centre we've also spent the last two years piloting a Certificate of Higher Education in Information Design, and the first four students graduated this month. Here are two of them, Preneeta Mann and Anita Nair, with Jenny Waller (who developed the programme) and myself (first time I've worn the academic dressing gown).

60s coffee bar - in more ways than one

Passing this coffee bar in Liskeard, Cornwall, I couldn't help noticing not only that it was called the 60s coffee bar (think nostalgia, Merseybeat, Mary Quant,), but that most of the customers appeared to be in their 60s.And drinking coffee, obviously.

A personalised user guide

My mother is above the average age for mobile phone users, and has just got one for emergencies. A kind carer or possibly grandson has written out these personalised instructions. From the amendments it looks like they've been user-tested.

Affordances: the evidence mounts

Spotted in Milton Keynes shopping centre, another item for the affordances evidence file.

Is it the handle? Just take it off.
Or does it mean push, don't kick?

George III Ill

In the debate about seriffed versus sans serif type, we often mention the confusion between similar characters in sans serif typefaces: the lower case l, the number 1 and the capital I. Which explains why this line from the 1980s Radio 4 show Radio Active works (based on a spoof incompetent local radio station)

"She's seriously one hundred and eleven. (Pause). She's seriously ill."

Rounded corner boxes - I forgive you

When desk-top publishing first came in (remember that term?) it was easy to draw boxes with rounded corners, something that had previously been very difficult to achieve with Rotring pens, CS10 board and french curves (ask a designer over 40 to translate).

Because they were so hard to do, they weren't in the professionals' repertoire, and therefore a sign of an amateur at work.

In this guide to design for DTP commissioned by Monotype in 1991, rounded corner boxes are a feature of this amateur-hour how-not-to example.

I've changed my mind now, although I'm still not keen on long line lengths, floaty headings in upper case, and needless naff shadows.

It was a dark and stormy night

My last post ended with a quotation from Lord Lytton. Like me, you're probably thinking 'who he?'.

Dictionaries of quotations often drop in names,  assuming you know who they are. Now, of course, we have Wikipedia, and can find out in seconds (although don't tell my university colleagues who affect not to use it, at least when students are around).

If you're interested you could look him up yourself (he was a Victorian novelist and politician). But I thought I'd share one thing I learned there.

"Bulwer-Lytton's name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which contestants think up terrible openings for imaginary novels, inspired by the first seven words of his novel Paul_Clifford:

'It was a dark and stormy night'".

From Heap to Skeleton

Going through some of my late father's books, I found a slim textbook, 'On the writing of English' by George Townsend Warner. It is undated, but published by Blackie & Son after his death in 1916. He was a renowned history teacher at Harrow School, and was the father of Sylvia Townsend Warner, the novelist.

It's a masterpiece of simple explanation - aimed at schoolchildren, it explains how to organise your ideas and write good essays.

His technique is to start by writing down all your thoughts: 'write them all down just as they come'.

This is your Heap, which you have to sort into categories that become a Skeleton. Today we might suggest a brainstorming, followed by a card sort to develop your organising principles, and then your  outline.

For abstract concepts he proposes another familiar technique: 'Try this. Say to yourself: What? Where? When? How? Why? and take a piece of paper.' I wonder if he was the first to come up with this formulation.

And he demonstrates how this works for three different essay topics. Looks like a template to me.

He moves on to talk engagingly about style, and rhetoric. His own style has something of a Mr Chips twinkle in its eye. His 'two great merits' are:
'1. To have something to say.
2. To say it neatly.'

And a word for academics: 'Another product of the cowardly mind is the desire to qualify'.

Which all reminds me of something I once found in a dictionary of quotations, ascribed to Lord Lytton:
'Do you want to get at new ideas? Read old books.
Do you want to get at old ideas? Read new books.'

Editors vs designers

Eye magazine's blog features this nice infographic that they in turn credit to Andrew Losowsky of Stack America.