As it assumes the form of nonverbal knowing, of a thinking outside of language, what begins as a seemingly scientific, because denotative, act, in spite—or perhaps because—of its ambition to discern and record (thought) objectively, ends up rejoining the literary and artistic forces of modernity to become an exercise in esotericism, in which objectivity seems indistinguishable from solipsism, from the arcaneness of intransitive (because self-referential) speech. Offering the semblance of positivity and universality, the graphs and diagrams are simultaneously cryptic and enigmatic, their readily visible forms impenetrable even to sophisticated readers, who are typically at a loss as to what they mean without detailed explanations, without a careful reconsideration of the words.''
The coexistence of such polarities of meaning making suggests that diagrammatic denotation—or, more precisely, the diagram as denotation—needs to be rethought as an epistemic conundrum, one in which the ongoing modernist sense of a crisis of language continues to play itself out in the form of a collective fantasy. This is the fantasy that language is somehow disposable, that if we could simply find a way to get to the bottom of things—geometrically, algebraically, statistically, or however—we ought to be able to arrive at that utopian, evicted state of not needing language altogether. Beyond the dots, the lines, the curves, the circles, the squares, the numbers, and other figures on the page, there persist a wish and a demand that bestow on diagrammatic denotation the import of something excessive, something obscene.
To put it differently, when graphs and diagrams are used in theoretical writings in the literary humanities and interpretative social sciences, they serve in effect as little theaters where the unresolved relationship between words and things repeatedly stages itself as a spectacle, calling attention to what Franco Moretti calls a “total heterogeneity of problem and solution.”'* Side by side with the words, the diagrams appear as something like a language, albeit one that dreams of being without language; something like writing, albeit one that dreams of doing without writing. In their proximity to words, the graphs and diagrams yearn, as though with a kind of mimetic desire, to take language’s place, to usurp writing’s hold on abstraction by becoming the preferred native informants of thought.
Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present [emphasis added]
Give it the flick When using certain typefaces in all-cap settings, make sure you give them sufficient letterspacing. Some letters can appear confusing when set too tightly. We also disapprove of the electronic condensing in the lower text, though it is spaced to be more legible.
I am begging you not to use tiny fonts in your designs, comics, gifsets, and posts. Please especially do not hard-set font sizes with code. I don’t even have THAT severe of eye issues and my vision is 20/20 with glasses but tiny font causes eyestrain no matter what.
I go to your blogs to read a fic and have to adjust the font size manually in order to read the damn thing; if I see a gifset with tiny font I just pass it over, don’t even try to read it, and don’t reblog because fuck you, I’m not giving myself a headache no matter how pretty the gifs are.
And some of you purposely make the font in your main posts smaller on purpose too!! STOP DOING THIS.
Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context Available at www.draw-down.com Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context explains key ways of understanding and interpreting the graphic design we see all around us, in advertising, branding, packaging, and fashion by situating these designs in their cultural and social contexts. #designgenres #designhistorians #GraceLeesMaffei #NicolasPMaffei #semiotics #postmodernism #globalization #legibility #wordandimage #gender #identity #design #Nike https://www.instagram.com/p/CBs0rSlHKVT/?igshid=1saj3fhrjq2ao
Logistics and legibility are hard, a small case study
“Small case study” sounds so much better than “anecdote”, doesn’t it? ;-)
Boss at work: Since our IT company is currently bereft of orders, I encourage employees to look at the initiatives on ActionAgainstCorona dot org and see if there’s any software initiative projects you want to assist on company time that can help pad your resume and our PR.
ActionAgainstCorona dot org: Quality control? Spam removal? You really think someone would do that, just go on the Internet and tell lies?
LET’S END COVID-19 THROUGH AWARENESS TRAINING
MISSION STATEMENT
The goal of the project is to implement awareness development training which will end the Covid-19 , other contagious diseases , global conflict, mobilize & transform society and boost global organization visions.
The project engages association, private and public organization and people in a diverse & global welcoming community. The project is the definitive source for ideas, information and learning resources, tools, and inspiring transformation for a new world.
it’s like someone piled up every buzzword and optimistic goal faintly related to Covid-19 for their AAC post
AGRICULTURE OUTCOME
The agriculture development succeeded through the achievement of piping network of distributions system to water all the inhabitants’ plantations and gardens.
– This improved the community plantations and creates all the food productions.
-Reduced poverty, hungers and malnutrition within the populations.
-Ended robberies of harvest from each other and crimes.
-Created mobilization of work and a vibrant community.
and then they began piling up things that weren’t even related to Covid-19, and it just goes on and on like that. Both this posting and the AAC site as a whole.
There’s also an ad for a pest control company in Medina, and a Nigerian scammer who wants more funds for “expansion, acquire equipment and some other needs“ among the blatantly dishonest ones.
Then there’s entries which look merely garbled, like an organization providing food to needy families in Andhra Pradesh. I would guess they ran the site through Google Translate and clicked on a few likely-looking buttons to indicate they want help.
Someone(s?) at turntheyoutharound has posted two ads. The first for COVID-19 Ethnic Education,
Due to the health disparities in the managing of the COVID-19 crisis among ethnic minorities education is critical
and the second for COVID-19 Ethnic Education,
Due to the uneven distribution of Covid-19 cases among people of color educational initiatives are needed
The “Eternal-ism” movement provides a website link to eternal-ism.org that 404s, and a description which sounds less like a Google Translate product and more like a GPT3 product:
Initiated on the bases of humanitarian journalism, with peace and international solidarity is the least we can own those who suffer the most from injustice, war, outbreak and hardship circumstances the vulnerable communicates and individual needs and deserve at least the compassion and assistance for faith in humanity to be restored and sustainable development goals can be fulfilled or as great as a child smile that we need to protect for brighter future
This movement would like support with anything and everything.
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The most reasonable-looking one I’ve seen so far, with a narrow goal that’s clearly communicated, is ‘Crew Change Now!’, a well-established English charity trying to connect ship-stuck sailors with mental health resources during corona quarantine, and trying to Raise Awareness for this predicament of sailors.
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So the first problem here is logistics.
Your helpful AAC website trying to helpfully connect helpers with people who need help during COVID-19 will suffer a deluge of spammers, scammers and garbled ads.
Before one can even begin helping, someone (whether me or AAC) has to sort through the ads to find the legitimate ones, and then sort through the legitimate ones to find the helpable ones. And if every user like me has to sort through them, that’s a lot of duplicated effort, as well as an unknown amount of people whose heuristics will reasonably say that this site is so full of spam you should concentrate your effort elsewhere.
But the second problem that comes up if AAC tries sorting centrally is legibility.
There’s no sharp, objective line between garbled incoherent spam postings, and postings by an impoverished ESL speaker relying on Google Translate and no proofreader.
And the more leeway you give to the unintelligible, the more space you also open for scammers to put a few words vaguely related to coronavirus before requesting money, and they’ll get a patina of legitimacy from being posted on the AAC site rather than sent by direct email. Furthermore, where many users sorting through the junkpile might individually recognize personally familiar phrases or known Google Translate corruptions or obscure signs of legitimacy, AAC has will no doubt miss a lot of those when trying to toss out junk posts.
But the possibility of AAC doing detailed investigation into each entry posted drives you right back into the problem of logistics.
In his seminal book Seeing Like a State, James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists:” lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a more centralized, orderly fashion. Scott argues that high modernists end up optimizing for a system’s legibility from their perspective, at the expense of its performance from that of the user.
Indeed, that love of order is above all else about appearances. Streets arranged in grids, people waiting in clean lines, cars running at the same speed… But everything that looks good doesn’t necessarily work well. In fact, those two traits are opposed more often than not: efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient.
This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together.
The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up – Florent Crivello
Fall 2018. A client came to ask to redesign their original logo. The top photo are the four designs that keep the elements that the client wanted. The bottom the original logo.
