Charlie Park

Faking It

jackcheng:

viafrank:

“How do you get those uneven edges in your illustrations?”
“I draw them, unevenly.”

“What’s the best way to get this to look like it’s cut out of paper?”
“Cut it out of paper.”

“What typeface are you using? It looks so much like handwriting.”
“That’s my handwriting.”

These are all real questions I’ve been asked by folks. At lectures, in class, over email. It makes me feel like I’m in the business of serving up plain, glaring answers.

“Care to shed some enlightenment, Frank?”
“Hm, I don’t know. How about a big pile of obvious?”

Sorry folks, the most evident way of doing something is typically the way that I do it. No secret labs, no special tools, no computer gee-whizzery.

Disappointing, isn’t it? I’m not surprised that these people are asking these questions. I think everyone wants a peek into someone else’s process. What surprises me is that they infer there isn’t an easy, obvious answer to their questions. There’s a digital silver bullet somewhere, and damned if they aren’t going to find it. But still, surely people still know that handwriting something and scanning it in is an option, rather than using a typeface?

What’s interesting to me is that these questions are being raised because some peoples’ default states are to “fake it.” Maybe that’s a natural response to being constantly presented with things that aren’t real. Maybe it’s from working with tools whose reach is so wide, it’s difficult to grasp where their edges truly lie. The issue is that I think that faking it is turning an awful lot of creative processes that have the potential to be deep oceans into shallow puddles. It’s weakening our physical connection to our work.

Our audiences have lower standards too. It’s unusual for them to be confronted with authenticity. When confronted with it, they’re startled by it. They don’t want to believe it and their first response is generally to scream “fake!” But, no green screen. No movie special effects. No camera tricks. Nothing that’s kind of like this other real thing but isn’t quite it. It is what it is. And it really happened. I hadn’t really realized it until recently, but authenticity is special now. Authenticity is special now.

“Wait, are you telling me they really released all of these bouncy balls down this big hill?” Yes I am. And if you have the choice, I think you should do it that way too.

From Rands’s Nerd Handbook:

Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast. … This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor as another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

The following comes from a comment at Unclutterer, on a post titled “The fictional extreme-minimalist future”. The larger post is about the austerity present in most sci-fi (which, I’ve heard in the past, is to be contrasted with the mathoms and clutter that’s everpresent in fantasy (imagine the home of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, or the Hobbits in Tolkien’s universe). The question comes up: “is a future without ‘stuff’ a future without ‘memories’?” I thought the comment below (made by Bill Barry) adroitly cut to the heart of the matter:

The problem with sentimentality manifested in a collection of physical things is at least two-fold:

– It is a largely manufactured, rather than humanly innate, desire. The more vehemently we cling to this confusion, the more stuff we are likely to buy and accumulate.

– In as much as sentimentality itself is natural, we have always found a way to express it. For most of human history, that way has been through a rich oral tradition and meaningful ceremony. As we lose touch with that history, we also lose a significant part of what makes us human.

A future in which physical excess has been re-considered and largely eliminated, both for sustainable and aesthetic reasons, does not have to be one without sentiment, as long as we can re-discover the art of tradition and culture building which now lies supplanted by consumerism and neurotic hording.

What good words.

I love how Cooper divides their interaction design teams into two classes: Generation and Synthesis, and how each team is made up of one of each.

Kind of like ad agencies having a copywriter and an art director working side-by-side.

I’d love to talk with someone who’s worked there, to see how it played out in situ.