I’ve been having a fair number of problems with a client’s website. One of them was speed related, and the other was an issue of broken images.

The client wanted to host the site at their location, and their IT department would setup the server…

The speed was easy to address. The site would run just fine (speed wise) when I ran it locally, but would sputter and take forever on site (even when only one browser was accessing it). This turned out to be a problem with MySQL on the server. If I had the server use a different MySQL host (say, my powerbook) everything was very fast and stable.

Eventually was moved the website offsite (to Dreamhost) and the speed issue was resolved. The broken images however, were not. Broken images only happened in IE on windows. No other browser was effected.

They would also get progressively worse the longer the user would browse the site. I could not reproduce this on my PC at home (Windows NT 4 running IE 5.5). All of the client’s PCs exhibited this behavior. I falsely thought this was a virus problem on site. (Since while I was watching IE spiral down and crash and burn, Safari and Firefox wouldn’t have any issues at all).

It turns out that the copy of ImageMagik on the client’s server (that was used to produce all the images on the site) was producing slightly corrupted jpegs. I suppose this would cause IE on Windows (except my copy, for some reason) to slowly go down the drain until it just stopped showing any images at all.

The moral of the story, even if your sysadmin claims he can setup a server and compile stuff like MySQL and ImageMagik, well, um… maybe not. And bad jpegs can make IE/Win very cranky.

I’m still in disbelief, and still rather numb. This has to be the most significant devastation an American city has seen in my lifetime. I hope it will the most significant devastation any city will see in my lifetime.

I’m at a loss for words.

B

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Okay, if you walk out of Walk The LIne and don’t feel like going home and playing all your Johnny Cash CDs loud enough to annoy your neighbors, then there’s something mighty wrong with you. And if you don’t own any Johnny Cash CDs… well, ah, you best get yer ass to the movies ‘cause you might be itch’n to buy some afterwards.

I have a hard time coming to terms with the new aesthetic being peddled in the corporate identity market. There is trend away from the mono-chromatic, simple and witty icons of the 19th century and towards a more slick, conceptually vacant and multi-color mark of the 90’s internet boom.

Assigning a logo assignment in school has always been about a)clarity of message and b)designing within strict limitations. Yes, this is quickly becoming an old-fashion way of looking at a logo, but I truly feel something is being lost. And that, that is being lost is metaphoric of what is being lost in graphic design in general.

The 1980’s AT&T logo (designed by the amazing Saul Bass) is a classic example of wonderful design. You can imagine the design brief from the client stating that they wanted a mark that communicated that they are a “global communications company.” If you take away the text the mark still works. It references the global nature of the company by it’s circular shape and the lines in-force this (latitude lines) and at the same time makes the viewer think about satellites and data. The mechanical nature of the rendering connotes precision and competence.

Wonderful. A tremendous amount of clarity in a small package. And it works just as well in black and white—which means the client can save money on things like bills and invoices where printing in color would cost more money. Plus they’ll look great when they send out faxes and when their logo gets photocopied. Boo-ya!

Now, take our new logo. Take away the type and what do we have? Okay, now imagine this mark in 5, 10 years when the memory of the old logo is now longer with us. What do we have?

In my mind the reality in which this mark is rendered leaves little to the imagination. While I had no problem suspending my perception of scale with the old mark, with this one I am inclined to view it (and that also means interpret it) as a small mark. It looks to me like a rubber ball I’d by from a machine at the grocery store for 25 cents. The blue transparency has a lot to do with that perception as well. Rarely do I see perfectly translucent globes in scales larger than a couple inches.

So without the suspension of my perception of scale, this mark connotes playfulness, simple, classic and affordability and at the same time, once I’m thinking in these terms I also believe the mark means ‘easily losable’, childish, and cheap. The strips do not look mechanically precise anymore. They communicate a random, organic and in-precise manufacturing process. Does this mental frame communicate AT&T? I think not. Does this mark survive a trip through the fax machine or photocopier?

This new mark is all style and no thinking. It looses whatever thought went into it in a couple years. It’s what design has become. This way of thinking about design is not sustainable. If the internet has taught us anything it’s once we put the tools to create in the hands of everyone, everyone decides what is acceptable. And anyone can create style; you don’t need a fancy design degree for that.

Not everyone can create the old AT&T mark. That requires talent, and a fancy design degree can help bring out that talent. Design should be just as much about how something functions, or solves a client’s problem as it is about making something visually pleasing. The visually pleasing part is getting way too much attention, and other professions are taking away the ‘making things work’ part of design.

The every expanding and interesting visual complexity linked to my Website Traffic Map today. Sadly I haven’t had the time in the last 2 years to do further work on it. (But I have a notebook full of ideas on it). I no longer have access to the equipment I used to make them 2 years ago either. The maps were fairly quick to make (less than a minute), as long as the MySQL server didn’t hit swap space—then all bets were off.

I really want to pull out the code and start working on them again. Maybe sometime this winter, after the new year.

Work at frog is great, but working a full week plus teaching 2 classes at Pratt ussually causes me to work about 60 hours in a week (not counting weekends). I sleep on the weekends; for the past couple weeks I’ve been sick. I get better over the weekend only to be sick again on Friday. (I’m happy to say I’m fairly healthy today, which is a Friday).

My time constraints should get better, I’m dropping down to a single classs next semester. Most of my sophomore typography students were a bit upset when they found out. (Maybe it’s just because they were going to have to re-work thier schedules).

The last couple weeks in type I am focusing in on display typography. (Headlines and such). I gave them a dozen or so quotes to typeset, and one in particular that I found particularly profound:

“I never let my schooling interfere with my education”—Mark Twain