Desert Stars: Designing Abu Dhabi Edition

The great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright built a house in my home state of Virginia called the Pope Leighy house. It is small and wood and you enter through a low door into a dark narrow hallway with cabinets and drawers in the walls. Then you see some stone stairs that go down into a tall living room, windowed on all sides with a huge fireplace in the middle, large and welcoming. Stepping into it—from cramped into wide, from dark into light—gives you a feeling of finally breathing. It makes you want to stay in that room forever.

Walking into the Pope Leighy house was the first time I was ever aware of how careful design can change your life. Wright wanted the family to spend time together in the living room, so he made the other spaces of the house vaguely uncomfortable in contrast with it. He didn’t want the couple to spend time reading in bed, so he built a shelf on the wall behind the bed sticking out right into the small of your back. He didn’t want the kitchen to be the gathering spot, so he made it tall and narrow with no floor space. He wanted them to go outside, so he made giant glass doors. He dictated their lifestyle through his design.

That tour absolutely opened my eyes to the possibilities of purposeful, intentional design. I moved through that small house in a daze of wonder, seeing how every detail together built a certain way of living. I started to think about the lifestyle that my own house encouraged, whether intentionally or not. I began to be aware of the intention behind buildings and spaces, and was somewhat dismayed at how easily I fell for the tricks.

But I never realized that I fell for the biggest trick of all: that everything I interact with has been designed. Everything (minus the few unspoiled landscapes) that I use, that I see, that I eat, that I pick up and that I pay for, everything has had some kind of human thought behind it. The fingerprints of hundreds of people are left on everything I touch. These strangers—these designers—control much of the way I see and experience my universe.

Taking this class, Designing Abu Dhabi, has been like walking thorough the Pope Leighy house of the entire world. I came out of that house with an aspiration to be an architect and change the way people live through my buildings. I have come through this class with a similar deep desire: to be among those who shape the world and the way we think about it—to be a designer. I’ll still fall for the narrow hallway and framing tricks, but maybe eventually, I’ll be able to create them.

Jan 16

Gentium

The Latin word “gentium” means “of the nations”, and it is the appropriate name for a beautiful serif font that I found by happy accident and have used obsessively over the past week. Designed ten years ago by Victor Gaultney, this font is meant to provide a readable font that is comprensive and consistently styled across three alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek. In Latin alone it has an incredible capacity to be clear at small point sizes and yet appreciably well-drawn at large sizes. In Cyrillic and Greek it has the same qualities, and in a document with all three, the styling switch is nonexistent. Even the extended characters are beautifully and thoughtfully designed.

It’s an unexpectedly versatile font: I keep using it in powerpoints and documents and images and it looks good every time. Gentium has well-sized serifs and a good line weight; it has a balance of letter spacing and despite being optimized to fit more text in a smaller space, the letters do not feel distorted or condensed.

On the website, the mission of Gentium is quoted to be “designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications…in a wide range of Latin- and Cyrillic-based alphabets. The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use.”

Although Gaultney doesn’t appear to have any plans to extend the purpose and the design of Gentium to other systems, I think that it should be applied to Arabic, Hebrew, and all other alphabets in the world. I really love the idea of making a linguistically comprehensive font that is also well-designed and beautiful—and free to download and use! Universal in all possible ways. I will continue to support the Gentium project by using and publicizing the font.

Jan 15

Learning Photoshop: Clone Tool

In a reprint of my collage (see Expectation & Aspiration below) on high quality photo paper, I reevaluated my design and realized some mistakes:

A horrible water line

Some floating bikini women who were messing up the perceived scale of the photo

A floating palm tree head.

Luckily, I have people around who are more expert at Photoshop than me, and they told me that all these problems could be fixed with one single, magical tool: the Clone Tool!

Which, to use, you simply select a brush size

hold the alt (Mac) or option (PC) key over the area you like and want to see more of, and then click over top of the area you want removed. It’s like a really fast and effective way of cutting out a selection and copying it over top of an unwanted image (which I have done ineffectively, before). It takes a little finesse, but magic:

The awkward line is pretty much gone!

So is palm tree head!

And thank God, bikini women are gone too.

Awkward evidence of clone tool is still there in most of them, but I think that as I keep practicing (and choosing less complex photos to manipulate), overall this will turn out to be a timesaver and lifesaver. Updated collage in the next post.

Jan 14

ATLAS Fail

Recently, during a globally televised address to the most brilliant, well-respected physicists in the world, researchers from the ATLAS experiment presented their most recent (and fairly groundbreaking) results from something that uses the most advanced technology in the world, that could make or break the theory of standard model physics. It was hyped up in the media and watched by so many that their live stream repeatedly crashed. And this is how the data was presented:

It makes me so angry. No one, not even my physics professor who does these projects, could understand what they were trying to communicate. Just to list the top five of many wrongs in this, the first slide presented in the lecture:

1. Comic Sans all the way through. Probably the most inappropriate use I’ve ever seen. These are high-level physicists, not children.

2. Confusing, overly intense colors that have very little symbolism—even opposite in the case of the final sentence, whose red-and-white combination clearly says STOP when it actually means GO.

3. The use of empty checkboxes as bullets, which suggests that none of these things are completed when the point actually is that they are.

I can’t argue much about the textual content, since I don’t understand particle physics too well, but I can argue that the design of these slides—probably meant to seem approachable and friendly—actually generates revulsion, confusion, and a sense that you will never be able to understand this stuff. So I redesigned this one, keeping the same limits that they probably had (minimal changes to text and the use of Powerpoint only), and here’s what I came up with:

Here, the key information is very clearly key, the content organization matches the visual organization, the color scheme is calming and familiar rather than jarring and disorienting, the font (Gill Sans) is clear and professional, the branding is consistent with the actual brand, and although it looks kind of boring and corporate, the communication is there. You understand what they want you to understand with this slide, even with all the details: Higgs boson searches are important and worth doing.

Of course, if tasked with creating the presentation, I would start from square one with something completely different. But for a lab that has so many brilliant people and so much money, this kind of design being in a high-profile, public presentation is inexcusable, especially when so many obvious tools are available! If anyone from CERN sees this, yes, I will volunteer to make these slides next time so that this kind of atrocity never happens again.

Expectation & Aspiration

The way that good design frames things fascinates me. A design can convince people, can make them understand, can make them stand in awe. Good design is transparent: it communicates its message rather than drawing attention to itself.

This is my aspiration for design: to frame things worth communicating in a way that is so clear and perfect that you don’t even notice. One of these things that (as a scientist) I want to communicate, is wonder at the incredible design of the world itself. So one aspiration is to be able to communicate that. My expectation is that getting to to this point will be messy, but altogether beautiful. So this design explains all these things—not in a perfectly transparent way, I still have to write all this narration. But I’m getting there.