Voice from the past

Today, the internet showed me a WordPress blog called Eighteenth-Century Reading Room.

The pieces posted there were at once inaccessible and intriguing because of word choices, strange spellings and grammar inconsistent with our current form of the English language. Reading these texts is like coming out of a time machine and then trying to make sense of your surroundings. The sense of voice is incredible – the writings seem clearly personal. Imagine if some of our correspondences of today’s world were written with even a smidgen of that respectability and personality!

Checking e-mail would be like diving into a mystery novel, reading the news would be personal and simple. Maybe chatspeak would have never evolved! Perhaps bloggers would still capitalize the letter “I” when referring to themselves!

Most importantly, love letters would be more than quick notes – they would surely use a remarkable vocabulary and be more pleasant to read for it!

Letter writing is one of those arts that some people consider while others push to the wayside. The excerpts on the Reading Room blog show some of the talent engaged in letter-writing, or talent that used to be shown in a good letter, and even though I am not a scholar of such material, I found the reading quite pleasant.

It might be a nice experiment to write a long-copy ad in this style. The personal voice and eloquent word choice seem to appeal to a very specific type of customer.

Ohmigosh A post a month?

That seems to be my usual average for longer posts in this blog. Hopefully that’s about to change!

Merry Christmas!

Subjective Terms in Design

Lately, I’ve been getting assignments that turn out ugly. I don’t like doing ugly work because it’s frustrating and a bit demeaning, but sometimes it’s necessary because of design-by-committee, a micro-managing person or two, or someone deciding to project their personal preferences not in the form of suggestions, but in the form of orders. I accept this as a fact of life, but I don’t like it at all.

The only thing I dislike more than ugly work is a project that’s “jazzy” or “cool” or “neat.” Equal with those are the projects that use my “great eye for design.”

But why? What’s wrong with jazziness, coolness or using your eyes?

What’s wrong with them is the fact that none of them are real or concrete. They’re all subjective, based on someone else’s experience (or lack thereof) with color, type and other elements. These comments are doubly dangerous because they can come in the form of orders as well as complements or criticisms. When someone says “Jazz this up” or “This needs to be designed,” they really mean something very ambiguous akin to the one I’ve heard recently word-for-word: “Make it pretty.” Something like “make this so that I like it.”

Subjective terms are dangerous for oh-so-many reasons. Here are my top 5 toxic comments, unique to my own situation and perception: