Comprehensive.
Twenty books in the stack, which is unprecedented and more than a little daunting - four almost done, one re-reading, two fiction, one a reference text, two completed by friends, one telling me nothing I don’t already know, and Explorations in Typography, which resets the same passage over and over and over, changing typefaces, indents, exdents, weights, sizes, overall layout, little bits of flair. The text hovers between 7 and 8 pt, and the paper is 9.25”x12”, which makes the page:text proportion completely suited to print and heinously suited to interactive, but that’s okay because the layout tweaks are afforded tremendous freedom, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of mental effort to say “okay, this is kind of the same mental process that I work through every time I prototype, wireframe, nudge, etc.” Which all sort of takes me back to when I was 18 years old and redesigning my personal site and thinking really hard about whether I should bold the word “about” in an otherwise undifferentiated list of links.
And this reminds me a little of the 892 ways, which made me super enamored (for, like, twenty minutes) with the whole idea of programmatically explaining all sorts of permutations of a specific layout, which I’m imagining only works very well for very simple layouts, with very simple constraints, so that the permutations don’t scientific notation up the joint. But that’s really interesting, right? I think there’s a (somewhat romantic?) notion of applying math to something as squishy and emotional and coming-from-the-art-world-but-only-sort-of field as design, and to do it so neatly and completely is doubly so. Bosshard on steroids. He might approve.
I spent the evening thinking about all that, and drinking Lion’s Pride, and winnowing down the stack so it hits the teens by the weekend.
