Rite as yu spik

It's always good advice to 'write as you would speak'. Thanks to colleague Uwe Becker for this photo.

Affix affectation affliction

I don't think she'll mind me mentioning this because it was a triumph, but a group of us went to see (colleague and distinguished linguistics expert) Judy Delin's debut in stand-up comedy. She had some fun with the language you encounter on the tube ('Dogs must be carried', 'Use all available doors', 'Alight for the Royal Institute for the Blind').

What is it with railways and the word 'alight'. Do they get off (alight?) on quaint pomposity? And why don't they do the full Russell Brand? Alight from the carriage and perambulate towards the exit portal. Not forgetting to mind the gap and take all your personal belongings with you when you arrive in at the next station stop.

'Alight' has a distant cousin, 'affix'. For some reason, we stick stamps to personal mail, but affix them to business mail.

Octothorpe (you know what I mean)

A colleague’s been debating with a mobile phone company client how to refer to an old-fashioned steam telephone. They want to choose from ‘fixed line’ and ‘land line’, with a preference for the former. She asked for votes from users and ‘land line’ won by a mile. Needless to say, the client wants ‘fixed line’. Actually, a lot of people said ‘none of the above’ and generally refer to ‘home phone’ instead. 

This reminds me of a debate we had with BT a long time back, over what to call the # key when it needs to be spoken out loud in voice menus. 

The international telecommunications standard specifies ‘square’ and BT insist on using that to this day. The debate even went to their usability lab in Martlesham, who backed 'square' ... hmm. We believe 'square' could be there because the standard was translated from another language and the term with it. 

We went out in the street with a phone and as you would expect, no one called that key ‘square’. A lot didn’t know what to call it, but if they had a name it was generally called ‘hash’. Musicians called it the sharp sign, and someone with computing training called it ‘gate’. In the US it is more generally called the ‘pound sign’ or ‘number sign’. 

There is a good Wikipedia entry with further names under the headword Number sign. The most bizarre name for the # sign is Octothorpe. This apparently first appeared in the 60s or 70s, but there is disagreement about its origin. In Elements of Typographic Style (p. 282), Robert Bringhurst says that ‘in cartography, it is also a symbol for village: eight fields around a central square, and this is the source of its name. Octothorp means eight fields.’ 

Really? Type ‘octothorpe’ and ‘cartography’ into Google and all you get is dictionary definitions quoting Robert Bringhurst – nothing from a cartography source. 

Another explanation is given by a retired AT&T engineer, Ralph Carlsen, that he and a colleague made it up, when they needed a word for the # key when developing touchtone phones. I turn out not be the only person puzzled by this bizarre word. Here are just a couple of the various websites chasing its origin: http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm http://www.robertfulford.com/2005-06-14-octothorpe.html 

Octothorpe is a truly bizarre phenomenon – a word that is never ever used for its notional meaning (ie, to refer to a telephone key), that has no real purpose or nuance to add, but that is in the OED (citing the daft ‘fields’ origin as a possibility), and whose origin is much discussed. At least one web dictionary I found claimed that there are variant spellings such as 'Octotherp', as if linguists had toured the country asking gnarled old telephone engineers for the terms that they and their forefathers had used for generations. 

So my plan is to invent a new word for something, and get it in the OED. Any ideas? More seriously, when you research something like this, it reveals the true limitations of the web – with its apparently authoritative websites packed with cut and paste repetitions of unsubstantiated information.

Ranged left vs ragged right

My heading looks like a mistake ('ranged left' and 'ragged right' are synonyms). But although they refer to the same thing, I think they mean something different.

Whether or not justified or unjustified type works best is a perennial question. The term refers to the practice of padding out lines with extra space to achieve a straight right-hand edge.

It’s less of an issue that it used to be – owing largely to thirty years or so of modernist-influenced design education, and the displacement of compositors (printers who used to set metal type) by graphic designers, unjustified type is the default option these days. Newspapers and printed books are the only genres where justified type is still more or less compulsory – at least for certain types of content. Textbooks are more likely to be unjustified than novels, and newspapers use justification as a marker of formality – The Times uses justified type for news stories and the main editorial, but unjustified type for features and commentary.

Defenders of justified type have not found much support in reading research – psychologists looking for an effect on reading speed or accuracy have found it makes little difference. But typography isn’t just about making reading easy, or providing an efficient channel for words to pass from page to brain – it’s also about articulating meaning. It is part of the language resource that we use to communicate relationships between parts of a text. In particular, it is what makes written language more than just a secondary form, a transcription of speech. Looked at in this way, is there a role for justification?

I think there is a clue in the names we use. Unjustified type is often known under other names, ‘ranged left’ and ‘ragged right’ being the most common. The names didn’t just happen, but were a form of spin by modernist designers who were uncomfortable that the term ‘unjustified’ seemed to imply a lack of quality. In linguistic terms, ‘unjustified’ is the marked form that implies it is the exception not the rule, whereas ‘ranged left’ is a simple neutral description of the way the type is set. The very term ‘justified’ implies something correct, and properly finished, and in an age of symmetry and ornament anything else would have been seen as unfinished – like unplaned timber, or a garment with no hem.

As descriptive terms, ‘ranged left’ and ‘ragged right’ do quite different jobs, and the difference is instructive. ‘Ranged left’ refers to what is going on inside the column of type – the letters are ranged evenly from the left-hand margin – and makes no reference to the space outside the column. ‘Ragged right’, though, draws attention to the resulting untidy column edge.

In the ‘ranged left’ world view, then, the even texture of type in the column is the most important thing. The column of type is where reading happens, in isolation from other elements on the page.

‘Ragged right’, on the other hand, focuses us on the column edge and, in my view, the term implies a case for justified type.

Edges are critical in graphic design. Pages are made up of different elements, usually aligned in deliberate ways to contribute to the reading experience, whether through meaning, navigation or a simple sense of visual order. The space to the right of a column of type may have a job to do – a job of separating elements, of framing the text, of linking though the continuity of white space. This job can often be done better by a well defined rectangle.

For example, in multi-column layouts, ragged right is fine, so long as the lefthand columns are straight – too much indented type (of the kind you get with legal text) creates a ragged left effect, and the intercolumn space is a less effective visual element.

Here’s a simple demonstration of what I mean.

 
1: Ranged left is fine so long as you have a straight lefthand column to define the column (most of the time, in fact).

2: Where you have frequent multilevel indention in multicolumn text, it effectively creates a ragged left edge and the intercolumn space no longer forms a clear shape. 

3: Justified type restores the vertical alignment.

This note was inspired by a recent discussion on the Infodesign Café. The most thorough and insightful account of the debate is Paul Stiff's 1996 paper: Stiff P (1996) 'The end of the line: a survey of unjustified typography', Information Design Journal, vol 8: 125-152

Colour, flags and sensitivity

Working recently for a government department whose corporate colour is green (a kind of greyish, dark green, not exactly emerald or shamrock), we proposed a colour-coding system where orange was among the colours used for navigation.

When someone suggested that this would render the document unacceptable in Northern Ireland, my pedantry alarm went off - surely the juxtaposition of two colours in a coding system does not amount to a flag. But I followed up with a call to the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Northern Ireland. After some consultation we turned the orange into orangey-brown.

The DCAL website is in English, Irish and Ulster-Scots. I had no idea that there was an Ulster-Scots language that is still used, but it seems there is, and I followed up the link to the Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch). Predominant colour: orange, so no surprise there.

The Law of the Penultimate Solution (it's always better than the one you end up with)

Someone reminded me yesterday of a talk David Lewis and I gave at one of the Information Design Conferences in the early 90s. We likened the information design process to a lens. 

Information designers take requirements and constraints that were previously uncoordinated and unrelated, from different parts of an organisation, and focus them in a single design solution that is coherent and usable by customers. 

Then, as we consult and amend our perfectly-focused solution, it shifts just slightly out of focus before it's implemented. The final solution is never as good as the penultimate one.  

And finally, there's often a stray photon that arrives from nowhere, completely bypassing our lens. The marketing director's twelve-year old son has drawn a great logo (it's happened); someone has read that italic is always illegible; someone doesn't like green. 

How to operate the shower curtain

Lovers of instructions will appreciate this article in the New Yorker:
How to operate the shower curtain.

And speaking of bathrooms, does anyone know the history of that card you get in hotel rooms worldwide. The one that starts "Dear Guest. Imagine the amount of detergent..." and ends "Towel on the floor means 'change this towel'" .

Even the poshest hotel rooms have this card, which never says "Dear Guest. If you really want to save the planet, take your holiday at home next year".

Money laundering

Eden are an excellent information design consultancy in Amsterdam. They recently came up with new standards for consumer warnings for financial services products (eg, 'investments can go down as well as up'). To simplify the approach, they used washing instructions - a trusted information source - as their inspiration. 2022 note: I've removed the link as it's no longer working.

Force 7 confusion forecast

It would be nice to have a version of the Beaufort scale or Richter scale for information. The Beaufort scale is the one for wind, that starts with '0. Calm. Smoke rises vertically' and ends with '12. Hurricane. Considerable and widespread damage to structures'.

So I've had a go.

0. Calm. Ideas rise vertically from page to mind.
1. Light difficulty. Slower reading. Dictionary pages rustle.
2. Moderate difficulty. Reader lightly swaying; visible perplexity.
3. Difficulty. Head shaking, audible groaning.
4. Severe difficulty. Loud muttering, and music heard from helpline queue.
5. Very severe complexity. Foaming. Abrupt movement about room, with swearing.
6. Storm. Whole documents in motion, from table to floor.
7. Brainstorm. Considerable damage to conceptual structures.
8. Typhoo. Reader flattened in darkened room, with cup of hot sweet tea.

The soft snow of latin words

A nice quote, passed on to me by Abi Searle-Jones, who got it from A Word A Day (http://wordsmith.org/awad/):

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the
outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language
is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared
aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted
idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such
thing as "keeping out of politics". All issues are political issues, and
politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and
schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

Reversed type for headings

Usability research sometimes shows that people are ignoring reversed headings. When reading aloud, they will often just skip the heading as if they haven't noticed it. This is probably an example of the figure-ground illusion (often illustrated using the famous candlestick-faces diagram). You can see this at work in typography when lists are printed this way. I remembering seeing the football league table printed this way – it was very hard to read both the white and black type together. 

Look at the table to see what order Everton, Bolton, Reading and Newcastle are in. But rather than dismiss reversed type as unusable, we should instead see this as a phenomenon we can use wisely to good effect. In fact it is most often used for navigation, where we are designing for a two stage reading process (find it, then read it). 

Here, we don't actually want everyone to read everything, so the figure-ground phenomenon actually supports the ignoring of irrelevant detail until the right section is found. But just in case people do fail to read the headings, it's wise to repeat the content in the text that follows.

If lifts were invented now

I pressed the wrong button in the lift this morning, and realised that there was no undo button. That would be unthinkable in any interface designed today, but lift controls are virtually unchanged since the 30s or whenever they dispensed with lift attendants operating levers.
If lifts were designed now they would have:
• a cancel button
• executive prioritise button (takes boss to boardroom penthouse, then goes back down for the rest)
• themed chat suggestion display (weather, cricket score, office gossip)
• personal login with preprogrammable functions (go to my floor, visit boss, go to staff restaurant)
• replay function (enjoyed that trip to floor 7 - let's go back down and try it again)
• slow speed function (for when that elevator pitch is taking too long)
• wireless network so you don't lose a moment of precious work time
• personalised follow-me musak
• mood lighting for those brief encounters
• virus checker.

Open University ends broadcasting

It was announced on the Today programme this morning that the Open University is to stop broadcasting programmes through the BBC. This was attributed to the growth of new channels such as podcasting and the web. That's true but, actually, broadcasting at the OU was always a lot more prominent in the public eye than it was in students' lives. It may seem incredible now (in fact it was slightly odd then) but in the early years it was decided that a telly was a luxury that not everyone would have. Because students who could not afford a telly were not to be disadvantaged, no exam question could address material that had only been covered in a broadcast. That spelled doom for the TV and radio programmes, as astute students soon realised that to pass the exams, you need not listen or watch, but just read the correspondence material. The heart of an OU education is still reasoned argument presented in book form on paper.

When I first joined the OU there was a committee to look into the replacement of paper by microfiche. Looking back, it was obviously ridiculous to think people would be happy studying sitting at desks staring at machines with small backlit screens.

Stick persons

It's not that often that information design gets into the papers, but you might have seen coverage of the Spanish town of Fuenlabrada that is legislating against sexism in various areas of civic life - including the stick people on pedestrian crossings. Debate has centred on: • whether stick 'men' are actually genderless anyway, and represent both sexes • whether, even if this is the case, it's still sexist, just as using the word 'man' to represent humankind betrays an underlying sexism in the English language (in the sense that 'woman' is a marked form of 'man'). • whether women have to be represented as wearing skirts and pony tails.

This sign outside a gay bar seems to take the view that stick men are in fact men... unless, of course, it is not a gay bar and the stick people are gender neutral.

Brandling

Some perfectly good words go wrong when unintended graphemes leap out at you. For example when TV trailers promise that a programme will repeat 'weeknights at 7', I just can't stop myself reading it as 'wee knights'. It's quite common to hear the word 'biopic' (as in biographical picture) pronounced to rhyme with 'myopic' (as in short sighted, or in practical terms unable to see wee knights in the distance). And the other day I actually heard someone on the radio say 'mizzled' (misled).

So when I saw the expression 'brand-led' broken over two lines:
brand-
led
I reassembled it as 'brandled' (rhymes with 'handled'). A great word - somewhere between branding and footling.

Hi! We're here for your furniture.

We've been helping a bank rewrite their debt collection letters. Like many modern brands, this bank has a tone of voice that's conversational and everyday. Much more so, actually, than most brands - in fact if we were to sincerely apply their brand tone of voice to the debt collection letters, we'd say 'cough up or we'll send the boys round'.

This project had a different approach from previous projects of this kind. Often, marketing departments like to keep the letters friendly at first and turn up the volume later, if the debt is still unpaid. But this can put people in danger of drifting into worse difficulties. Instead, if they are jolted into taking early action, they won't leave it until the debt is out of hand. That's the idea, anyway...

Reading a room

An architect came to our house, and kept using the word 'read' about architectural features – as in "when I came in this room I immediately read its height", or "there are too many beams – they prevent you reading the shape of the roof".

We need a similar way to talk about reading a page. Not reading what the words say, but the fact there are three equal columns, that it's divided into two sections, that a diagram relates to a panel with a caption on it.

Nigel Holmes's wordless diagrams

At some point when I wasn't looking, people starting wearing their scarves a different way. I always wound mine round my head, or perhaps tied a half hitch. But now people do it differently, and luckily I don't have to describe how because I've just found this diagram in Nigel Holmes's brilliant book of Wordless Diagrams. This one is entitled 'How to wear a scarf European-style'. 

It also contains masterpieces such as 'How to conduct an orchestra', 'How to wave like a royal', 'How to make sure your coq au vin does not come out rubbery' and many others. Wordless Diagrams is published by Duckworth, in 2005, and the ISBN is 0 7156 3395 3. Here's a link so you can buy it from Amazon: Wordless Diagrams 

Diagram reproduced with Nigel's permission.

Moore's law for razors

 

I expect this one is much blogged, but I can't resist this diagram from The Economist on the occasion of Gillette launching a five-blade razor, the Fusion. 

The story is at http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5624861. Thanks to Mike Williams for pointing me to this.

A new excuse for not taking enough exercise

Try this:

"Start by lying face down on the floor with your hands by your shoulders, the palm of your hands flat on the floor. Your feet should be about a foot (30cm) apart and when you push up to the top of the position you should keep your head in line with your body; it's easier to maintain this position by looking down. As you execute the push-up, pull your tummy button towards your back and squeeze your bottom muscles. Then lower down, about two inches (5cm) off the floor. This is the basic push-up. If, however, you are coming at this with no experience, you should do the push-up resting on your knees instead of your feet. Apply the same technique and keep your head in line with your back. To increase the difficulty of the exercise change the position of your hands. By moving your hands closer together, you'll feel the effort in the back of your arms as well as your chest. Or turn the palms of your hands on the floor so your fingers are facing each other; this will place greater emphasis on your chest muscles. Alternatively, if you really want to increase the intensity ask someone to apply a light pressure on your back. The added resistance will make the move harder and will develop the toning even quicker."

It's from a recent article in The Times by Gabby Logan (10.06.06).

A long time ago, spelling and punctuation were unstandardised. Now we're regarded as uneducated if we can't get it right. It would be nice to think that one day people will be writing to The Times about pieces like this one:

"Sir: I was dismayed to read the article on push-ups in yesterday's Times. As every schoolboy knows, procedural instructions should always be presented in numbered steps, with informative headings and a diagram."

Completeness vs clarity

[image gone missing... cartoon of door knob with ridiculously verbose instruction about how to turn it...]

We're working for a government department which is frequently lobbied to include extra information in guidance they give the public about their eligibility for money. It seems that every time advisers are asked by a member of the public about a situation that isn't in the guidance, they insist that it be added. As a result, the guidance is now overlong, hugely complex, and virtually unread by the people it's intended for. So it's no longer usable by the people it's for, who end up asking for advice... A few years ago I copied this cartoon from somewhere - possibly Private Eye. Makes the point very well, I think. (apologies if reproducing it here breaks a copyright rule - if the owner asks, I'll take it off).

Off we go then

When I used to edit Information Design Journal, many years ago, we would only publish an issue when we had enough good stuff, and the time to put it all together. That's what I imagine this blog will be. I imagine it'll be much like our photo album - a roll of film for day one of our son's life, another roll for week one, then month one, then the next six months... now he's 15, it's a photo a year if he's lucky.