Data.driven()

Today I am reading Designing Visual Interfaces: communication oriented techniques by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano.

Here are some gems

Visual Design attempts to solve communication problems in a way that is at once functionally effective and aesthetically pleasing. (p1)

By communication, we mean the full process by which the behaviour of one goal-seeking entity comes to be affected by that of another through the reciprocal exchange of messages or signs over some mediating physical channel.p1

The goal of communcation-oriented design is to develop a message that can be accuratley transmitted and correctly interpreted, and which will produce the desired bhavioral outcome after it have been understood by its recipient.p2

We refer frequently to a visual language, by which we mean the visual characteristics (shape, size, position, orientation, color, texture, etc.) of a particular set of design elements (point, line, plane, volume, etc.) and the away they are related to one another (balance, thythm, structure, proportion, etc) in solving a particular problem. Any language system defines both a universe of possible signs and a set of rules for using them. Every visual language thus has a formal vocabulary containing the basic design elements from which higher-level representations are assembled, and a visual syntax describing how elements may be combined within that system.
p2

In the context of GUI toolkits, “…most toolkits impose unnecessary design restrictions as a side effect of their own implementation or internal structure.”p4

Basic principles of visual organisation developed through centuries of experience with print media have rarely been applied to the on-screen media, and communication has suffered as a result. p5

I’m just starting to read On The Origin Of Objects by Brian Cantwell Smith for my PhD. My god! What a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense! The guy is talking about simple stuff (ontology, objects, properties), yet he uses the most convoluted language and metaphors ever. If I ever start writing like that, shoot me! Please. I have refraining from reading overly academic nonsense thus far for my PhD. Really! I don’t agree that you need to adhere to silly academic prose to get your point across. And it really makes me wonder why people make very interesting ideas completely inaccessible. I’m sure that Smith knows what he is talking about, but really! There is no need for this kind of unintelligible garbage:

“… a way to feed our undiminished yarning for foundations and grounding, while at the same time avoiding the reductionism and ideological fundamentalism that have so bedevilled prior fundamentalist approaches.” (p4)

“Bedevilled”? pelase! Anyway, now that I have vented I feel better. If I don’t end up throwing the book out the window in a fit of unintelligible rage, then I will move progressively review each chapter over the next three months. Pease note that I am not the only one that bitches about the complexity of this book, simply do a search for the book title, or look on Amazon, and you will see that I am not alone.

This entry is basically notes I took while reading from Jesse James Garrett’s book Elements of User Experience.We all know Jesse as the guy that gaves us the most inaccurate accronym in all of computing history (yes, I am talking about AJAX ). However, his book is pretty cool yet some what overly simplistic. Then again, the intended audience is anyone, so that makes the content it very accessible to just about anyone. If I had some rating stars, I would sprinkle 3 or 4 liberally.

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I just finished reading Håkon Wium Lie thesis, Cascading Style Sheets; Håkon, apart from being the CTO of Opera, is one of the main contributors, and a vocal proponent, of the CSS effort at W3C. Håkon and Bert Boss co-authored the CSS1 specification and (some of) CSS 2.1 specification. His thesis is, in many ways, an important historical account of how Cascading Style Sheets came to fruition - the thesis traces significant historical moments, including significant discussions in W3C’s style mainling list, that brought about the CSS specifications. It also covers other relavant stylesheet proposals that influenced that current CSS specifications. In addition, his thesis outlines some of the important differences between print-centric style sheets and screen-centric style sheets, as well as the specific requirements that a style sheet language needs to be suitable for the web. The rest of the entry tries summarise Håkon’s thesis and how it relates to rich application development.

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