Designs on you
Dec. 19th, 2016 05:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supergeeIn 2009 the British Royal Post issued a set of ten stamps to honor classics of British design. One of those was the original Penguin paperback: two broad orange stripes surrounding a white stripe, with the title and author in clear, readable text: elegant simplicity.
But design is an autoantonym, like oversight and sanction. It means clear thinking made visible, as Edward Tufte would say, but it also means what other designers like, with mere users not getting a vote.
Penguin is now looking back at the good old days and came up with two new kinds of Penguin Classics. One takes the original orange design and adds little things crawling around on it, which I guess is appropriate for the Lovecraft reprint but not the others. The other is worse: one fantasy and five sf books. The fantasy, The Once and Future King, merely violates the rule that Olde Englishe and all-caps don’t go together. The sf books look futuristic, if not readable, with the sort of approach that feels letters would be much better design elements if only they didn’t have to mean anything. Perhaps the best part is that the title of Frank Herbert’s interminable adventure classic looks like DUNG.
But design is an autoantonym, like oversight and sanction. It means clear thinking made visible, as Edward Tufte would say, but it also means what other designers like, with mere users not getting a vote.
Penguin is now looking back at the good old days and came up with two new kinds of Penguin Classics. One takes the original orange design and adds little things crawling around on it, which I guess is appropriate for the Lovecraft reprint but not the others. The other is worse: one fantasy and five sf books. The fantasy, The Once and Future King, merely violates the rule that Olde Englishe and all-caps don’t go together. The sf books look futuristic, if not readable, with the sort of approach that feels letters would be much better design elements if only they didn’t have to mean anything. Perhaps the best part is that the title of Frank Herbert’s interminable adventure classic looks like DUNG.
