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An illness in the family totally buggered up last week, hence the lengthy gap. Well, this isn’t the main thing I do so it has to get fitted in when it can — I’ve never made a secret of that. I’ll try to get this back on a regular basis now, though.

Friday 1st February

Well, bugger! So much for getting back to regular updates. This one was just about ready for upload when a slight hardware problem made that impossible. On top of that, I’ve had to remove an item because the page referred to has already vanished. Anyway, here’s the upload that should have taken place a few days ago, on the first. I’m make no promises now — might as well go shooting albatrosses…

I’ve heard of the term bloatware before, almost always with Microsoft somewhere else in the sentence, but you really know you’re dealing with bloatware when a security patch weighs in at 17Mb.

"Don’t blame us!" — the Government apparently thinks the public should not automatically blame the government when things go wrong. Ah, yes, in exactly the way Labour didn’t blame the Tories when things went wrong before the Second Coming 1997 election, I suppose? What part of being in charge don’t they understand?

And talking of blame where blame is due, a report by a Commons committee shows that the Government did not handle the Millennium Dome properly, with particular reference to the guarantee against any losses offered those running the Dome. Well, what a surprise. The Government still aren’t willing to admit what a white elephant the whole thing was: a Culture Department spokesman said We should bear in mind that 6.5 million visitors enjoyed their time at the Dome.

Oh, you have signed statements, then, from 6.5 million people saying "I enjoyed my visit" — or do you just mean 6.5 million people went through the doors? (And remember, that would not equal 6.5 million paying visitors.) In any case, that still shows what flop the thing was: 6.5 million is well short of both the 12 million visitors (sorry, 12 million admission-paying visitors) the Dome organisers had as their target and the 8 million target which had been recommended as the basis of planning.

Just as well there’s nothing else around that the Government desperately needs to spend money on…

Wednesday 30th January

It used to be said that, whatever one might think of its politics, the Telegraph was a damn good newspaper. I’m not sure that’s as true as it used to be, and I’m certainly not generally in tune with its political views, but the first line of its main leader today neatly sums up at least part of what I think about one of the current main news stories:

After the way in which Labour pilloried the Conservatives for their supposed sleaze, it is hard not to smile at ministers’ palpable unease over the revelations concerning their own dealings with the failed American energy giant Enron.

So you think you’re a designer, huh? Why do people who call themselves designers want to talk about anything but design? That’s the starting point for Adam Greenfield’s article for A List Apart, The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes:

I’m one of those poor souls who likes to indulge myself in the fiction that there’s something called "the online design community." And (in what is probably a still greater admission of my own naivete) I believe in both the possibility and the worth of associating with this diverse and international scatter of people on message boards.

I do this because, well, I love design. More to the point, I crave design talk: who’s influenced who, what tools do you use, what trends do you observe, what rocks your world, and so forth.

I get a lot out of this discourse. The signal-to-noise ratio of this particular subset of the Internet has always tilted strongly towards meaning.

Until fairly recently, that is, when I started to notice a new feeling creeping into the sites I frequented. In what were nominally gathering places to discuss and celebrate online design, design seemed to be just about the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Why should this be?

Finally, someone on one of the sites—unfortunately, someone I’m unable to identify, otherwise I would give credit where it is so richly due—twigged to the single most significant reason why this should be. This wise person pointed out the simple fact that the majority of the people who were posting to this board are not designers, in any strict sense, nor are they interested in design per se.

Occasionally you come across a piece of writing which not only provokes thought, it brings a realisation of the precise nature of something which had been troubling you in a nebulous way; that’s what Greenfield’s article did for me.

I’ve been surfing the Net and designing Web sites for a few years now. I wouldn’t claim to be the best web designer around, but I will say two things about my sites: they are not ugly, and they do work. I wish I could say the same for most of the sites I visit. A lot of the ones which work are not particularly attractive, and many of the prettiest don’t really work, unless you happen to have the particular OS/browser/scripting/plugin combination with which some "designer" (whose name I’m sure is Dick) is in love. I get the impression things are a bit better than they were a year or two ago, but I could be wrong.

The biggest problem is sites designed to look stunning, to be, in effect, works of art. If you want to do that, it’s up to you, but if you don’t also make the site usable, you’re not really doing anything which can be called design. As Greenfield says:

I think there’s a common misperception, especially among the younger cohort online, that design is an endeavor that concerns the decoration of a surface in an attempt to achieve aesthetic distinction or beauty…

I believe that success in design strongly implies a satisfying the requirements of a user. This is what distinguishes it from art or self-expression…

Absolutely, and when it comes to Web site design, sites which fail (errors excepted) almost always do so because the requirements of the user have been ignored. Greenfield argues that much of what is called design is in fact styling. This is not a put-down: as he says, Styling is as crucial to good branding work as design, and maybe more so, but it’s not a replacement for it. He makes a good case for recognising the distinction:

For, as my mentor Jon Olson always reminds me, the practice of design necessarily involves solving problems. Further, these problems present constraints; whether these originate in the client’s budget, the target audience’s availability, or in the technical limitations of the medium is immaterial.

The important part of this idea is that the task of the designer is to present the client with a solution within an ambit circumscribed by factors beyond his or her control, factors that limit the ability to unrestrainedly impose personal taste.

Styling, on the other hand, is not circumscribed by anything:

Exercises in pure styling like A Bathing Ape … fail this test. A Bathing Ape addresses no issue, solves no problem, admits no constraints. It’s about nothing but itself, a blank screen onto which the customer can project any desired attribute: all of which makes it the ultimate antibrand for a headlong-rushing, amnesiac culture like Japan, but a piss-poor example of design.

As to why people would rather be designers than stylists, I suspect Greenfield gets it about right when he says, it has a vaguely contemporary sexiness to it, whereas stylist sounds like someone named Marcel you might find working at a hair salon. But he makes a good argument that both styling and design matter, and the distinction is an important one, and by no means just in the realm of Web design. If you’re remotely interested in design, read the article.

It seems the BBC is happy to be the lap dog of the Dark Lord of Redmond: the Beeb has banned staff from using non-Microsoft PDAs. This is supposedly because of the security risks of non-Microsoft OSes (please, no laughing at the back) — the speciousness of this is nicely exposed by The Register. Somehow I don’t think Palm and Psion users are going to be mollified by this reassuring paragraph:

Palm & Psion owners need not panic! There is no plan to prohibit your devices overnight. Instead, there will be an extended period of amnesty (probably 18 months or so), during which connections will be permitted given certain agreements between users and their technology support provider, acting on behalf of Technology Direction. In general terms, the advice is simple — If you intend to connect your PDA to the BBC desktop, you should buy a PDA which is running Pocket PC-2002. The brand and model you choose is not especially important, although Compaq & Toshiba are clear product leaders. Psion and Palm-OS based devices (Palm, Handspring, Sony) will not run Pocket PC-2002 and therefore cannot be properly secured. Therefore, these are not recommended if you intend to connect. (They are still outstanding products!)

Interesting that Compaq and Toshiba are noted as being clear product leaders and Psion and Palm are thoroughly dissed as being insecure and likely to increase the risk of transmitting viruses in a message which begins with the assurance, It is important to note that this is not a critique of individual products or brands.

Oh, yes: the little teaser I set a couple of weeks ago. The author was Terry Pratchett, the book Eric. The title of the supposed magical tome is a reference to MS-DOS, in case you didn’t spot that.