By Amanda

Despite frequent claims that nobody knows how to write anymore, I think it’s still true that we place a lot of value on writing ability when we judge people’s arguments.

Natalia Ilyin writes:

For years I have heard stirring arguments about how designers need “a place at the table” around which important systemic decisions are made. And still that place at the table is not an assured place. Why are designers still not really a part of things? Why are they not an assumed voice in high-level decision-making? Even today, when innovation and sustainability and green are the newest corporate cliches, it is rare to see a designer in the boardroom.

“And why is this?” I asked myself, walking back from teaching tonight. The answer came to me, borne on feathered wings, somewhere between Nordstrom’s and the ferry.

The reason that designers have only a feeble grip on that chair at the table is not because design is not respected, it is because most designers cannot write. I don’t mean they can’t write like Faulkner. I don’t mean they don’t have a discernable prose style. I mean they cannot WRITE. They do not know where to put a subject and a verb and a capital and a period. They are functionally illiterate.

via Design Observer

By Amanda

Al Gore is dedicated to changing the world for the better in more ways than one:

Last summer, I received a phone call from Michael, a designer from mgmtdesign in Brooklyn, New York. After the initial how-do-you-do’s, he explained that they were designing a new book for Al Gore, Our Choice, the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

“Great project”, I said.

And it got even better. They had chosen Brioni, one of our typefaces, for the body text.

“And this is why I am calling now”, said Michael, his voice dropping a level. “You see, Al is really involved with the project and we spend a lot of time working together in the publisher’s office. When he was reviewing the proofs, he had a comment about the typeface.”

I took a deep breath and asked what the comment was.

“Basically, he wants you to change the numeral one.”

Find out what happened next…

By Amanda

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” — William Morris

This year, my New Year’s resolution is that everything in my house must be either useful, beautiful, or both. If successful, I will waste less money and leave a smaller eco-footprint, simply by cutting out unnecessary spending on unnecessary products.

But I’ll be honest: while those are two goals that I very much aspire to, the only reason I am confident of keeping to it is because of a third reason, which is the joy I get from having things that I love, and the relief I feel once I finally rid myself of things that I don’t love. It’s a strategy that usually works well for me. I don’t do well with being told what to do, even when I’m the one doing the telling. So I’ve given up doing that, and instead look for better, more enjoyable alternatives. Rather than force myself to eat less dessert, for example, I buy better, more satisfying desserts that don’t leave me wanting more when I’m done.

Christmas is of course an excellent time to do this, providing an immediate source of both good and bad examples. The satisfaction that comes from a genuinely useful or beautiful item compared with the disappointment of taking home something that you neither want nor need has provided the necessary motivation.

Read more »

By Amanda

Dr. Cat’s post on women and Tony Abbott is a must-read. She really nails one of the problems I’ve had with the general coverage about Abbott’s “women problem”. So go and read it now. I’ll wait.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Read more »

By Amanda

Pringle of Scotland were last year closing factories, but now they’ve reinvented themselves for this year’s London Fashion Week.

I love this dress:

By Amanda

John Howard:

[A Bill of Rights would transfer] decision-making authority to unelected judges accountable to nobody in the barest theoretical sense.

…

I’ve always held the classical view that the public elects members of parliament, who pass laws hopefully in the public interest and those laws are in turn interpreted and enforced by courts.

That sentiment is at the very heart of my unconditional objection to a bill of rights.

…

It would deprive Australians of their current right to decide issues of great importance.

PJ O’Rourke:

That all our public freedoms and democratic rights depend on a secret and autocratic institution is an irony, if you’re stupid enough to think so. Life is full of ironies for the stupid. And you’d have to be fairly stupid to believe democracy could be preserved by democratic means: “In the final D-day invasion results, Normandy was a decisive winner, with 54% of the votes, while 43% of American soldiers thought we should re-invade North Africa and only 4% favored a massive land, sea and air attack on the folks back home.” There wouldn’t even be any democracy to defend if our every national whim were put into law. We’d sacrifice the whole Constitution for those lost kids on milk cartons one week, and the next week we’d toss the Rights of Man out the window to help victims of date rape. That’s why we-and the solicitor general and William Kunstler-have to take this guff from the Supreme Court.

By Amanda

THE WA Supreme Court has ruled that a quadriplegic man can request to stop being tube-fed so he can die.

Chief Justice Wayne Martin said the Brightwater Care Group would not be criminally responsible by ceasing nutrition and hydration through a tube to the stomach of Christian Rossiter, a 49-year-old in their care.

Chief Justice Martin also said any person providing palliative care to Mr Rossiter would not be criminally responsible.

He said it was clear Mr Rossiter had the right to direct his treatment and nutrition and hydration “should not be administered against his wishes.”

A win for the principle that rational adults should be the ones to make decisions about their own bodies. But a loss for the idea that rational adults should be the ones to make decisions about their own bodies.

I’m glad that the court has ruled that he should not be force fed against his will, and more importantly I’m pleased that it has been made clear that no other person will be held responsible for not over-ruling his decision.

But at the same time, it needs to be recognised that starving to death is not a good way to die. It is not fair that Mr Rossiter sees this as his best option.

At the end of the reading of the statement Ms Black asked Mr Rossiter if he had anything further to say.

There was a long pause until he replied, “I want to say that the pain killers would make me drowsy and I would like to be made drowsy in my final moments so that time could pass more quickly.”

“And I would like to watch Foxtel on the television to pass the time.”

I hope that Mr Rossiter’s final moments are as quick and pain-free as possible, and I hope that our governments stop allowing a few arrogant loudmouths to make end-of-life decisions for the rest of us.

By Amanda

Last week I got a call from my mobile phone provider (it was from the company that sold me the phone, rather than the service provider). They were calling to offer me, for no extra charge, an extra $10 worth of calls as a reward for my loyalty - no extra expense, no extension to my contract, nothing…

Except that I had to “re-sign” my contract and go through all my details and sign up for something that they swear wasn’t binding in any way.

So why not just give me the extra credit and send me a nice letter telling me they’d done it? Because they needed to know that it was really me who was getting the credit, apparently.

They called me, they were making the offer as an extension of an already existing contract but they wouldn’t really know it was me until I gave them all of my details again over the phone?

I don’t think so.

I got two more calls within the next few days making the same offer. Each time I explained that until they told me what they were gaining from spending all this time and effort trying to get me to re-sign a non-binding contract, I wasn’t interested. (During one of these conversations the woman told me I was stupid and hung up on me - a whole other story about bad customer service!)

They already have me on a non-binding monthly contract that so far I haven’t cancelled. Sending me a surprise boost to my credit would have given me further encouragement to stay with them. Begging me to sign up for it makes me suspicious.

I went to an advertising seminar once where they told a (probably fictional) story about a company trying to sell blocks of land by the riverside for a few hundred dollars. They couldn’t sell them, probably because people assumed that they would be purchasing a nightmare scenario - nuclear waste that they’d be responsible for clearing up, perhaps? When they decided to explain to potential customers that it was cheap because the law prevented it from being developed for 100 years, the blocks were quickly snapped up. Who wouldn’t pay a few hundred dollars to give your great-grandchild a chance at a riverside home?

Maybe this was a genuine offer and I’ve missed out on some free calls. The suspicion that they’ve created now has me seriously considering changing service providers.

The lesson? If you’re trying to make a deal with a customer, be upfront about what you’re gaining from the deal. People are generally happy with a deal in which both parties benefit. If you are honest about how you benefit, then your customer will feel more comfortable. If they can’t see what you’re gaining, they’ll assume it’s there’s a reason you’re hiding it.

By Amanda

You may know it as the default typeface in Microsoft Word, but its history is one of intrigue and mystery. Who created Times New Roman?

In typography, there is no greater insult than the accusation of plagiarism. When Parker began circulating his theory about the origins of Times New Roman, he was howled down by a chorus of critics. British author Nicolas Barker, Morison’s biographer, labelled it “a misguided attempt to adjust history”. “It’s the creation of Mike Parker, who did it partly as a practical joke, and partly to help his friend Gerald Giampa,” Barker says. “Giampa was the potential beneficiary. Had he been able to demonstrate that the design had predated the UK version, there was the possibility to establish a patentable right to the designs, at least in the USA. That’s the only logical reason I can see for them wanting to produce this otherwise rather childish joke.” Parker responds that Barker is a “friend of Monotype” who has written many books and articles about Morison.

Barker and others say Parker has failed to produce any conclusive proof of his theory, but only colourful speculation based on unseen documents. Other critics include Jim Rimmer, a Canadian type craftsman based near Vancouver, who labelled Giampa a “pathological liar”. Rimmer said he had known Giampa for 35 years and called him a “prankster” who created the Burgess story “as a way of making himself look important”.

Matthew Carter, designer of the fonts Georgia and Verdana, is among those who believe the Burgess theory is “very plausible”. He has strong memories of Stanley Morison, a man he believes would stoop to such levels of deception. “I knew Morison and the company [British Monotype], and they were the most arrogant organisation in their heyday,” Carter says. “Morison was a very complex character. He liked playing jokes. He was interested in power, and he liked working behind the scenes. I can believe – though I still don’t know the truth – that he would have enjoyed taking part in a ruse like this.”

So that’s what politics in the design world can look like. So how does design in the political world fare?

Considering that government bureaucracy is the opposite of design — metastatic, inelegant, inefficient — the design professor Elizabeth Tunstall has given herself a nearly impossible task. Sensing the possibilities of a new presidency, Tunstall is trying to persuade the U.S. federal government to enact a national “design policy.” The set of edicts she’s got in mind would compel the government to treat various forms of design as essential to our national life, much as it does money or the food supply, and much as countries such as India, Brazil, South Korea and Finland support their design industries already. The feds would themselves become model design clients but also promote design and innovation as ardently as they protect the homeland.

Like reforming health care, it’s a marvelous idea, but pulling off something so radical yet sensible is like trying to hog-tie a whale. Where on earth do you start? Tunstall has started almost from scratch. It is hard not to applaud her optimism. It is even harder when you learn that she began by rubbing two sticks together in early 2008, before it was clear that the new presidency would be Barack Obama’s. His administration’s interest level is not known, though it’s probably safe to call it a multiple of what John McCain’s (or Mitt Romney’s or Mike Huckabee’s) interest level would have been.

Tunstall seized on the idea of a national design policy after having served as a director of Design for Democracy, a flank of the AIGA founded in response to the chaos of the 2000 election to help set national design guidelines for ballots and polling places (which have actually begun to make headway among some election officials). At first, Tunstall told me, her research was theoretical, focused on ways that design influences civic participation. She was investigating the notion of a design policy “from an intellectual, comparative perspective,” she said. “What would be a prototype? How would you structure it?” Then she began mobilizing others around the project.

By Amanda

A “stunt” that involves questioning a 14 year old girl about her sex life live on breakfast radio cannot really be said to “backfire”.

There really isn’t any possible scenario in which it could have gone well, is there?