STUCK ON AMBER

Distilling Text: The Art of Making it Short

Short and efficient statements are difficult to write. If your care about being understood, it takes longer to write short things than long ones. And yes, we should spend more time on writing less.

Examples

Documentation around the Caml programming language is one of the best examples I've seen. Every sentence is designed to go straight to the point, without lacking precision. Faithful to the philosophy of the language: compact, clear, non-redundant, yet expressive:

 

John Valentine introducing his game Zenith keeps it super short. The game is quite unusual, so better give you the big picture first:

 

The classic book Universal Principles of Design introduces design rules whilst remarkably applying them to itself. You read, you get it. You even hardly notice the book actually has a design. You just see what the book has to tell:

The list goes on, but let's keep it short. Your time is precious and you already got the point.

I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

– Jason Fried, founder of 37signals

 

Yang Liu's Symbols Explain Cultural Differences

I like the works of Yang Liu, a young Chinese graphic designer educated and based in Germany. In 2009 she published a funny and smart little book called East meets West, where she uses strong metaphors to highlight differences between the chinese society (red pages) and the german one (blue pages).

For most topics, the german version applies to the western culture in general. Except for the one where Yang Liu suggests that Chinese people are less sharp on time than the Germans. Maybe, but not true anymore when compared to the French! 

Particularly striking are illustrations for topics "Me", "Sunday on the street", "Boss", "Travel" (an eye for Germans and a camera for Chinese) and "Dealing with problems" (picture above).

Yang Liu also designs beautiful posters.

Via Brain Pickings

Trust Your Luck

This picture was taken in 2004 in Beijing with a basic Sony Ericsson phone. I had the Solarize option on, and I just stuck the device to the mosquito net hanged at my window. No Photoshop processing or anything. In this mode, the camera would shuffle colors dramatically at your slightest movement. Art for the lazy! So what?

In his book The Art of Looking Sideways, graphic designer Alan Fletcher says: "For myself I bank on bricolage. The bricole was a medieval military machine for throwing stones. Nowadays the term refers to a shot in billiards which doesn't turn out as intended but is nevertheless successful. Luck, say those who know, is a talent."