Aesthetics

Then it struck me: the flair of filing was still here in Records Management—but it was in the implied aesthetic nature of the filing enterprise: in the alignment of tabs and arrangement of drawers. That pizzazz was to be found, too, in the style of the book itself—in its liberal use of diagrams and illustrations and photographs of state-of-the-art office equipment and fashionably dressed, well-coiffed office ladies. I figured, why not read Records Management against the grain, focusing less on the staid instruction and more on the aesthetic and even ludic nature of filing work? Why not read this textbook as a toy catalogue, or as a set of rules for a Monopoly-esque administrative game?

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Watts observes that elements of the natural world – clouds, foam on water, the stars, human beings – are not messes, though the nature of their order remains inscrutable, and Watts doesn’t try to pin down its precise nature. Mess seems to be somehow a property perceptible only in the presence of human artifacts. Is this the result of some kind of aesthetic original sin on the part of humans, uncanny beings severed from the holiness of Nature? I hope not. “Humans are bad” is a boring answer.

Programmers are often skeptical of aesthetics because they frequently associate it with veneering. ...But discarding the value of aesthetic on behalf of cheap imitations is a mistake.

Not just because truly beautiful objects and concepts inevitably reveal a deeper and designed experience. ...No, the primary reason I appreciate aesthetics so much is its power to motivate. And motivation is the rare fuel that powers all the big leaps I've ever taken in my career and with my projects and products. It's not time, it's not even attention. It's motivation. And I've found that nothing quite motivates me like using and creating beautiful things.

...It's in the context of this age that I labor for programmers to rediscover beauty. Beautiful code, beautiful patterns, beautiful tools. Not to create a single, monoculture of aesthetics. That's never going to happen. But to elevate the work of making things look not just good, but sublime. To revel in it, to celebrate it.

And beauty isn't binary. It's the journey of a thousand little decisions and investments in making something marginally prettier than it was before. To resist the urge to just make it work, and not stop until you make it shine. Not for anyone else, even, although others will undoubtedly appreciate your care. But for yourself, your own motivation, and your own mission.

I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.

The lesson is simply: consider power dynamics.

Consider “ARRANGEMENT” or discordance not just to be “individual”, but about communication that some spaces are JUST YOURS.

Never allow your furniture to dominate you, but equally, ensure it is not simply generic: personalization is crucial, as a humanization tactic. (We admit we didn’t really get into that.)

Understand that control can be nice for you to feel some sense of authority in this wild world, and the EXECUTIVE WORLD has honed this approach for decades.

‘Often the most appropriate frame is the most invisible frame,’ says Peter Schade, head of framing at the National Gallery in London. The sentiment points to a paradox: the more Schade excels at his work, the less people will notice it. It’s only when tastes run counter to his own that we are reminded that how paintings are framed is always a choice, not an inevitability.

To get to our interview, I’m escorted through a discreet door in a gallery café into corridors rather like a hospital’s and then into a windowless workshop. Here, with the rumble of tube trains passing underneath, Schade creates, repairs and fits the frames that will protect masterpieces while also colouring our perceptions, whether we notice their effect or not.

...This work is a delicate balance of art and craft: the skill to create a perfect imitation of a carved baroque cherub, for example, and the aesthetic sensitivity to anticipate what effect it will have on an artwork.

Nothing could be more boring [than train tickets]—nowadays they’re little more than a barcode or QR symbol. Sometime the entire ticket disappears, replaced by a phone app.

...But check out these vintage Japanese train tickets. They convey a sense of wonder and enchantment.

The train is no longer just a functional means of transportation, but instead takes on a magical quality. Even before you begin your journey, the ticket itself has captivated you.

This is more than just a matter of beauty—the ticket also conveys caring, in the Heideggerian sense. You have more trust in the train and the people operating it, merely because of the care that went into the ticket.

Japanese culture is full of these examples of care and aesthetic contemplation. But even a boring utilitarian society like the US once had glamorous tickets.

...Not long ago, these small acts of beauty and care were pervasive in daily life.

“White” is not a book about colors. It is rather Kenya Haras attempt to explore the essence of “White,” which he sees as being closely related to the origin of Japanese aesthetics – symbolizing simplicity and subtlety. The central concepts discussed by Kenya Hara in this publication are emptiness and the absolute void. Kenya Hara also sees his work as a designer as a form of communication. Good communication has the distinction of being able to listen to each other, rather than to press one’s opinion onto the opponent. Kenya Hara compares this form of communication with an “empty container”. In visual communication, there are equally signals whose signification is limited, as well as signals or symbols such as the cross or the red circle on the Japanese flag, which – like an “empty container” – permit every signification and do not limit imagination. Not alone the fact that the Japanese character for white forms a radical of the character for emptiness has prompted him the closely associate the color white with emptiness.

Companies including TikTok, Google, Netflix and Airbnb have trumpeted “new,” bespoke fonts that are essentially Proxima Nova, with a few token changes. Even Cordova, of “fonts hanging out” fame, might struggle to invent distinct personalities for lookalikes like Airbnb’s Cereal and Google’s Product Sans.

This phenomenon — which one writer dubbed (Garamond voice) “aesthetic consolidation” — isn’t limited to typefaces or fonts. Many designers and critics have griped that a wave of overwhelming sameness has also overtaken mainstream web design and visual culture writ large. 

In 2020, a fascinating study by researchers at Indiana University analyzed the color, layout and style of 10,000 websites and concluded that they’d become markedly more similar since 2010. Logos, web illustrations and product designs also increasingly look the same, as do buildings, cars, home interiors and residential paint choices. Last year, the brand strategist Alex Murrell rounded many of these examples up in a visual essay called “The Age of Average,” which I think about … almost every day. 

“From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché,” Murrell wrote. “Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.

In his more than 40 years at Braun, Dieter Rams established himself as one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century.
True to the principle of “less but better” his elegantly clear visual language not only defined product design for generations, but also our fundamental understanding of what design is and what it can and should do.

Less and More offers boundless inspiration for anyone interested in the aesthetic and functional aspects of applied design.

According to a 1996 study, the psychological state of the BACHELOR is: staunch independence and self-reliance; emotional detachment; interpersonal passivity; and idiosyncratic thinking. The décor results are notably barren (emotionally and sometimes literally) and focused on “EPHEMERAL PLEASURE”, with ideally some quirk.

THE APPEAL: It’s a cold and lonely world; consider what it might be like to embrace this

And, despite the connotations, “BACHELOR” does not necessarily mean sleazy and depraved.

The archaeological quality of this section of exposed wall provides an example of the aesthetic potential of that which is flawed or broken.

Something was wrong, according to Raymond Loewy, who admitted that, "with few exceptions, the [competitors'] products were good." He was "disappointed and amazed at their poor physical appearance, their clumsiness, and...their design vulgarity." He found "quality and ugliness combined," and wondered about "such an unholy alliance."

...Loewy was also "shocked by the fact that most preeminent engineers, executive geniuses, and financial titans seemed to live in an aesthetic vacuum," and he believed that he could "add something to the field." But, not surprisingly, the people he approached were "rough, antagonistic, often resentful."

I’m trying off and on to develop a juiciness theory of software aesthetics where programs are judged by how well they create or strengthen a sense of juiciness.

Juiciness relates to fruits and berries, these miraculous objects that emerge from the soil with firm boundaries, beautiful contours, cohesive juicy alluring wholenesses that are intrinsically desirable.

...It also relates to Christopher Alexander’s theory of centers being self-coherent nexuses that strengthen the surrounding overall field generated by other nested centers.

...Juice itself is less juicy when it’s extracted to a smooth clear liquid. Maximal juiciness is like a grapefruit or blackberry, because the essence of juiciness involves liquid being contained in a crisp cellular packet.

We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.

It's such a tactile delight. The clicks and friction and spinning disk and toggles and tilts and materiality. The tiny dotted LED display, subtle drops of color. The tight tolerances. The quirky UI. The depth of "oh, I can do THAT with THIS?" discoveries. The feeling of something esoteric being fun to master. The few-too-many controls at first glance that eventually feel right at home.

Yes it's pricey, and yes there are plenty of alternatives for far less coin, but for me, the inspiration is priceless. And supporting people doing unusual, high-quality, high-design things is worth it. I just like playing with the damn thing. I like looking at the damn thing. It gives me all sorts of ideas for my own work.

I just adore functional objects like this. Incredible imagination, incredible work.

There are two kinds of dark mode.

On one side, you have what we like to call the “performative dark mode.” You’ve seen a couple of your users say they desperately want dark mode but haven’t really dug into why that is. After all, it’s trendy. This kind usually involves flipping the colors and writing a blog post about it so you can get some eyeballs on the update. You will get cheered on social media and get some “FINALLY!! 🔥🔥” replies.

The other one, which we see as the better option, is making dark mode one piece of an accessible and readable UI/UX that presents your features well to all your users. Not to say you can’t write a blog post about your new dark theme or high-contrast UI. You should, because it’s true, people love a refresh. Especially when it’s well thought out, mindfully executed, and part of a real commitment to good UI/UX.

These two takes are similar to how people perceive UI versus UX. While aesthetics and visuals are extremely important and can be a great hook, long-term value can only be created when the overall experience (how your product feels) matches how your product looks.

Dark mode is now everywhere (this blog has it). It’s both accessibility-driven and aesthetically pleasing. But it often isn’t the highest benefit feature (and rarely, if ever, a feature that leads to product-market-fit).

...After you nail the core features, you can build things that further delight users (marginal benefit > 0). Sometimes the details can be differentiating. Perfectly crafted products make a difference (but never forget the core value proposition).

When their expected readership is boomers, books emphasize the decline of respectable centrist media institutions and the rise of “extremism.” When the expected readership is yuppie millennials, well, you get disquisitions on Instagram photos of Iceland, taxonomies of third-wave coffee shops, and nostalgic paeans to … CD binders.

...None of this is wrong, of course. Physical media is wonderful, and Spotify is evil. But it does nothing to deter my suspicion that the alternate, algorithm-free dimension to which “Filterland” is being compared isn’t a possible future utopia toward which we might work, but instead a hazy millennial ‘90s to which our generation of imperfect shoppers wants to return.

Of course this 'sheen of antiquity' of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. If indeed 'elegance is frigid', it can as well be described as filthy.

Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").

The informing idea of functionalism is what is called elegance by engineers and scientists—the notion that the best solution to a problem (whether applied to a mathematical proof, a machine, or an organizational diagram) is the most succinct. This conceit collapses the technical, the ethical, and the aesthetic, which powers the idea exponentially.

Now that the DALL-E has been successfully midjourneyfied, it is becoming apparent that instead of simulating all possible ›styles‹, AI is fostering the emergence of a distinct visual style, born out of popular aesthetic preferences dominating platforms like DeviantArt.

Mac(os)talgia is exploring my 2020 work-from-home routine with an added touch of nostalgia. How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.

Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

I like this metaphor [from James G] for personal websites and not just “digital gardens” because there are so many styles* and approaches to gardening, and everyone’s working with different constraints of weather and water and soil. I feel like we’ve gone through the formal garden equivalent of personal websites in the form of lookalike portfolio websites, and now we’re ready for the more naturalistic Piet Oudalf style (my aesthetic preference 😉).

The modern computer, with its generic styling and overloaded activity, creates a cognitive environment defined by urgent, bland, Sisyphean widget cranking — work as endless Slack and email and Zoom and “jumping on” calls, in which there is always too much to do, but no real sense of much of importance actually being accomplished.

In McNamara’s construction we find an alternative understanding of work, built now on beauty, craftsmanship, and focus. Replacing everyone’s MacBook with custom-carved hardwood, of course, is not enough on its own to transform how we think about out jobs, as these issues have deeper roots. But the Mythic is a useful reminder that the rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

Perhaps more directly than with the Braun products, my furniture arose from a belief in how the world should be ‘furnished’ and how man should live in this artificial environment. In this respect, each piece of furniture is also a design for a certain kind of world and way of living, they reflect a specific vision of mankind.

Intuition is the basis of my aesthetic judgment. The more you allow intuition to speak to you the closer you are to the truth, and the origins of the universe. I feel I’ve given up a lot of ways of thinking about certain things in order to be closer to intuition.

Usability and aesthetics usually go hand in hand. In fact, there is even what we call the “Aesthetic Usability Effect”: users perceive beautiful interfaces as easier to use and cut them more slack when it comes to minor usability issues.

Unfortunately, sometimes usability and aesthetics can be at odds, also known as “form over function”.

[Rachel Tashjian writes in Real Fashion For the Era of Fake Trends],

“Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century—relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis—but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices.”

In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void. Mireille Silcoff argued recently that online aesthetics and microtrends provide a source of ersatz community, filling the vacuum created by the decline of physically grounded youth subcultures. That may be a stretch, but the practice does seem oriented toward meeting a deeper need.

...Rather than being part of a mass culture that we can either participate in or rebel against, like the punks of yore, our online selves are unique data profiles that are aggregated or disaggregated as different contexts require. Being part of a hive mind has its drawbacks, but isolation is not one of them.

I just hate watching the modern NBA, where teams have made the correct tactical decision to just launch and launch and launch three-pointers and in so doing made the project frequently unwatchable. A three-heavy offense is inherently a decision to trade shooting percentage for overall efficiency; coaches and GMs expect misses, even welcome misses, so long as the team is constantly shooting from behind the line. Again, to be clear, I’m not doubting that this is a good strategy. I am doubting that it’s any fun to watch.

...Objectively, this is all very effective. Aesthetically, it’s a mess.

1. Generally speaking, SINGLE-COLOR interiors are a true delight; WE SHALL EXAMINE WHY THEY CAN WORK and WHY POO-BEIGE IS A (CURRENT) EXCEPTION
2. Particularly speaking, we shall investigate THE COLOR RED, for the reason that it has the LONGEST WAVELENGTH OF HUMAN-VISIBLE LIGHT i.e. expends the least energy in getting places, which is an approach to existence we currently APPRECIATE

Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.

My chief aim is simply to describe and explain the technological fabric of society, not to judge whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. And yet I would not argue that technology is neutral or value-free. Quite the contrary: I suggest that the signs of human presence are the only elements of the landscape that have and moral or aesthetic significance at all. In nature undisturbed, a desert is not better or worse than a forest or a swamp; there is simply no scale on which to rank such things unless it is a human scale of utility or beauty. Only when people intervene in nature is there any question of right or wrong, better or worse.

Everything that we can see, everything that we can understand, is related to structure, and, as the gestalt psychologists have so beautifully shown, perception itself is in patterns, not fragments. All awareness or mental activity seems to involve the comparison of a sense or thought pattern with a preexisting one, a pattern formed in the brain’s physical structure by biological inheritance and the imprint of experience. Could it be that aesthetic enjoyment is the formation of a kind of moiré pattern between a newly sensed experience and the old; between the different parts of a sensed pattern transposed in space and in orientation and with variations in scale and time by the marvelous properties of the brain?

It is what is left over when what is expected has been canceled out.

“For that’s the trouble with this picture business,” Chuck added, “there is so little satisfaction in it! You are always beset with the haunting thought that every picture could be improved, if not by you, then by someone, sometime; so you end up traveling in a circle, periodically returning to do a better, or at least a different, interpretation of the subject. Perfection, of course, is the goal.”

In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worth of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good.

Behind this distinctive claim lay another astonishing belief: that of an equivalence between the visual and ethical realms.

It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.

All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.

There is something about the aesthetics of NFTs — not a sameness, exactly, but a particular deficiency of which they all partake, such that even though they look different, they all manage to suck in the same way. It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.

The mathematical physicist must simplify in order to get a manageable model, and although his concepts are of great beauty, they are austere in the extreme, and the more complicated crystal patterns observed by the metallurgist or geologist, being based on partly imperfect reality, often have a richer aesthetic content. Those who are concerned with structure on a super atomic scale find that there is more significance and interest in the imperfections in crystals than in the monotonous perfection of the crystal lattice itself.

"To me," writes Smullyan, "Taoism means a state of inner serenity combined with an intense aesthetic awareness. Neither alone is adequate; a purely passive serenity is kind of dull, and an anxiety-ridden awareness is not very appealing."

This is more than a book on Chinese philosophy. It is a series of ideas inspired by Taoism that treats a wide variety of subjects about life in general. Smullyan sees the Taoist as "one who is not so much in search of something he hasn't, but who is enjoying what he has."

Readers will be charmed and inspired by this witty, sophisticated, yet deeply religious author, whether he is discussing gardening, dogs, the art of napping, or computers who dream that they're human.

During the 1960s and 1970s, light became the primary medium for a loosely affiliated group of artists working in Greater Los Angeles who were more intrigued by questions of perception than by the notion of crafting discrete objects.

...Often with modest means (a bolt of scrim, a sheet of glass, a bucket of resin, an open window) these artists engaged in a kind of aesthetic palate cleansing, shaking off the art-historical weight and heavy impasto of midcentury painting as it had been influentially practiced in New York and San Francisco.

We should note that all of these places of thermal extremes (Finnish saunas, Japanese hot baths, American beaches and mountains) have their opposites close at hand. There are possibly two reasons for having the extremes right next to each other.

The first is physiological: the availability of extremes ensures that we can move from one to the other to maintain a thermal balance.

The second might be termed aesthetic: the experience of each extreme is made more acute by contrast to the other.

It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders.

Another kind of random variation involves the interaction of the craftsman’s skill and the texture of materials. The letterforms of Griffo and Colines were cut with immense care. But the letters they cut were struck by hand in copper or brass, then cast and dressed and set by hand, inked by hand with handmade ink and printed by hand in a handmade wooden press on handmade paper. Every step along with way introduced small variations planned by no one. In the world of the finely honed machine, those human-scale textures are erased. A sterile sameness supervenes.

The computer is, on the face of it, an ideal device for reviving the old luxury of random variations at the threshold of perception (quite a different thing from chaos). But conventional typesetting software and hardware focuses instead on the unsustainable ideal of absolute control – and has been hamstrung in the past by the idea of a single glyph per character. There have been several recent attempts to introduce a layer of random variation, but all have had to work against the grain of technological development.

Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.