lovehistory.net

Watching Hans Rosling’s TED Talk, Debunking Third-World Myths, the first thing I thought was, “Wow, all that data and the way it’s displayed is wonderful. I’m so glad there are other people out there who want to do things like that, because I sure don’t.” Then his lecture ended with a bit on how actually, no one wants to compile, display, and analyze data the way he does. Actually, what he didn’t make clear, at least to me, was whether or not this impediment is caused by those who keep the data in regards to monetary concerns – they simply don’t want to fund it? They don’t want to  release it without making a profit?

And so what was the point, really, of his talk? That we need not only people willing to do this kind of statistical analysis (which I think he proved is completely possible) but that we also need  freedom of access to the information and between those working on the data? I found myself far more interested in the very large among of time he spent using the statistical analysis/data to deconstruct his students’ (and perhaps our own) notions about the way the world looks in terms of its economic flatness. It reminded me of the First World Problems Meme:

Making jokes about having “first world problems” I think began as a way for those of us in the “first world” to acknowledge how truly, truly trivial some of the things that vex us can be. It’s ostensibly meant to be mocking of ourselves. But this meme, and these kind of jokes, have quite rightly come under fire for being, well, racist may be the right word, and if not certainly ignorant, in assuming that just because someone lives in the “third world” they wouldn’t have problems with things like takeout menus or cellphones not working properly or wifi being slow because we flatten the “Third World” and forget or aren’t even aware that these technologies and the ridiculous vexations that come along with them are also globally available. Another, more explicitly race-coded term for these jokes is “white people problems.” Naming the meme is this way makes its problematic title that more clear.

Seeing the data Rosling displayed really drove home to me how valid the criticisms of this meme are – when Rosling displayed as world flattened by the internet he was raising an interesting point that I wish he’d spent a bit more time on. Designing for a web audience means that we are designing for a world wide audience, and this means we must redefine our understanding of audience. This audience may speak a different language but have the same literacy skills and face the same kinds of challenges we do, and also have the same interests and curiosities we do. We cannot, must not, look at the internet as a first world problem.

The second TED Talk, Lawrence Lessig’s How Creativity is Being Strangled, also spoke, much more directly than Rosling, to the ways in which the old system of information and cultural creation and dissemination (read culture) refuses to cede ground to the re-emergence of read-write culture. I though a lot about his notion that presenting the established paradigm with competition is the best way to disable or shift it, and I think he’s right. I wonder just how powerful these new technologies are. The simple expectation of new users that the right to remix (and it is seen as a right) be available to them (us) suggests to me that those in control are fighting a losing battle.

Even before watching Lessig’s video, I wanted to share this website with you all. In it, Kevin Weir has gone into the Library of Congress’s digital archive of historical images and animated many of them. Some of them are ghostly reimaginings of what the photo might look like brought to life:

But wait, who’s that in the background? Surely it’s not H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu! Still, consciously intended or not, this image communicates a sense of looming dread over the evils of warfare, whether or not you know who Cthulhu is. The image of a dark monster peering out through drifting smoke, peering down at the bombed out ruins of a town is quite evocative. Indeed, many of the animations are much less subtle and border on the absurd; many are almost Monty Pythonesque.

Perhaps we scholars wouldn’t use images like these with such artistic license, but it made me think about our ongoing debates in class about what it means to alter an image, when it’s appropriate. Sometimes, even, and perhaps especially in their caricature, these animations capture the way we in the present might imagine the historical mood of the image:

These images also represent the way that, through remix culture, we might be able to bring historical images to life. Image you’re staring at a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and he blinks at you. How does that alter not only the users experience, but our own narrative?

Edit: So far this week I have commented on Sheri’s blog, as well as Richard’s.

I really enjoyed this week’s assigned text, Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations. First, it’s different from all the other monographs we endlessly read as graduate students. The book is an interesting exploration of visual literacy, a skill that is often let fall by the wayside, even at the highest levels of education. Tufte’s approach is interesting not just because he wants to teach his readers how to read visual information, but because he is also interested in teaching his readers how to present information visually. Beyond the educational text of the book, it is pleasingly interactive and beautiful to look at, two important components of presenting information that content creators often ignore. I’m reminded of the times I found myself unable to read certain books simply because I found the font choice to be so jarring and poor. Visual disruption can interfere with our willingness or ability to interact with information in astounding and sublime ways.

I found myself particularly taken by the musical streams-of-story presented on pages 90-91. It reminded me a great deal of this wonderful poster by Ward Shelly visually documenting the history of science fiction:

I bought a copy and it’s currently hanging on my wall. The fact that you can only really take in all this information when it’s blown up to a gigantic size says something about the way the information is being presented. The larger size is still problematic – the image expands outside your field of view instead of being too dense to process, or disjointed because it won’t fit in a browser window when blown up. Still, larger is better.  Because the image is organized chronologically from left to right, it is easier to follow the flow of information when you still can see the entire image, even peripherally. Being trapped by the box of a browser window is jarring and unsatisfying.

When I first bought it I sat in front of it and stared at it for what seemed like forever. Initially I found myself captivated simply by the shape and colorization of the image – how did the artist choose such a design, what thought went into the color selection? Does it look like an octopus on purpose? They are both alien and incredibly intelligent creatures, a seemingly fitting choice for a visual representation of science fiction.

This poster arranges information both temporally and categorically, but as I read through the flow chart I also found myself questioning why certain authors/genres had been placed in certain areas, why certain authors and genres are featured over others, among many other questions. I agree with some of the choices and disagree with others. Tufte might say that all of this information has been removed from its context. As an academic I long for footnotes and the more familiar text that explains the artist’s decisions. Somewhere I read Shelly cite Thomas Disch’s book The Dream’s Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. That book is so horrible, biased, and outrageously sexist that I couldn’t finish it, and Shelly’s chart appears to be about one hundred times more intelligent, thoughtful, well-researched, an unbiased than Disch’s pithy attempt. So where is the disconnect? As a fan of science fiction and as a historian, I want breadcrumbs to lead me to the information that helped create this wonderful poster. I want the context. But how would we connect this image to its context? It seems plunking the chart down in the middle of a carefully researched monograph might create the difficulties with correspondence that Tufte reiterates through various examples. How can we explain and justify an image like this?

Tufte’s is a great book to read as we approach the creation of our own informational websites. I want to work with videos, a medium I’ve never tried to present online before, so I’m facing the challenge of how to link that visual content to whatever information I choose to present to my reader. I would love for Tufte to write an updated edition of this book with a chapter on the internet, though I will say that it’s quite remarkable how well his argument holds up over time. Even the spare bits on computers don’t really feel dated. That fact may say just as much about the way humans create and process visual information as it does about Tufte’s insights.

Speaking of visuals, we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of color. Getting color right, both in my webdesign and simply in my life is something that I find to be incredibly important. Society and history load color with meaning, so that we react to color intellectually and emotionally, more often that not without even noticing the way we’re being influenced. The right color scheme on your webpage can not only effect the readability of the site, but create mood and provide subtle context for your content. I’ve found the Color Scheme Designer to be one of the most useful tools there is in selecting colors for my sites. At the very least I can be assured that my color scheme doesn’t clash with itself, which is one step toward producing a successful site. The flexibility of this tool also means that I can go right to selecting the colors I envision, or I can play around and discover new and delightful combinations if I’m having trouble coming up with a design scheme on my own.

So far I have commented on Geoff’s blog.

Here’s my image assignment!

As I’ve mentioned before, I have some experience in fixing up photographs with Photoshop:

This is a picture of my friends’ daughter, Baby C, that I took while visiting them over winter break in California. The kid is a born model. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. Anyway, I was taking pictures in terrible light in my typical amateurish fashion, and without Photoshop I wouldn’t have been willing to show the results to anybody, let alone her parents. But now I think she can start building a portfolio. Eat your heart out, Tyra Banks.

The Photoshop work above does not represent any sort of serious departure from the original RAW image. As you can see from above, my adjustments came down to correcting the lighting and making the colors pop. That little girl did the rest of it on her own. In a way then, our assignment this week was a great departure from erasing the dust on my sensor from the picture and making the best of a terrible flash.

This is the first assignment that at times left me feeling quite defeated. I still can’t get the coloring right on my main lady’s face – she looks like someone attacked her with foundation then left her to die, such is the terror in her eyes and skin tone. I tried so many ways to make it look natural and failed quite miserably.

Also, interestingly, I ended up finding a color version of my photograph in a book after I’d started coloring. I detail my response to that discovery and how it influenced my work in my image assignment, but even knowing what the colored photo looked like and striving to emulate it, my picture still ended up looking radically different. If I had been able to make the tones look a bit more naturalistic, I could probably start a whole kurfluffle as to which photograph is correct. Luckily for the history community, I am not that skilled. My coloring of the photo vs. the coloring in the photograph I found presents two radically different meanings, something I’m still thinking about.

I did enjoy the assignment, though as I noted in my narrative, Photoshop is a lot more fun when you are free to meander through  your image manipulation without structure. This was the first time I had guidelines and requirements from outside being imposed upon my work. Actually, interestingly enough, my brother’s girlfriend asked me to take some head shots of her this weekend. It marked the first time I’d ever shot and edited head shots for professional use, and I actually used a lot of the techniques I learned in this class to edit her photos, most helpfully burn and dodge. Being on familiar ground, working with photographs I’ve taken, I felt more comfortable and, in fact, I also felt frustrated because I had too few guidelines to work with for the head shots. I’m still not sure I produced an adequate finished product.

There’s a key lesson: research and ask for help. I spent so long trying to get the vignetting to work and so far I’ve failed miserably to recreate our exercise in class. Now I am going to ask for help! I take solace in knowing that I can create transparent backgrounds without crying most of the time. Now I will stand and and wait for my trial by fire. Well, not wait exactly. I’m sure I’ll change the vignette and my lady’s face about 4 million times between now and then.

That reminds me! One of the greatest skills you’ll ever learn in Photoshop is when to stop and let an image be finished. It’s a lot like writing in that way, actually.

Edit: So far this week I have commented on David’s post.

Points if you can see the person.

I truly loved the Errol Morris article that we read for class today. I remember last semester in CLIO I discussing how schools don’t really teach visual literacy – I know I didn’t begin learning how to read visual sources until I entered college, and then only in certain courses. These articles are deep visual literacy – Morris and his interviewees not only read the images as presented but investigate the history of the creation of the images and the changing meaning/uses/understanding of the images over time. This approach is deeply historical and should go far to prove that images are valid historical sources. And, just like any print source, they are biased, their creation is complicated and perhaps unknowable, and their legacies are unique, changing, and completely their own. Even their creators lose control over them.

Reading the article I initially had to laugh because my first reaction was, “Have these people ever known a photographer?” Anyone who’s ever known or been a photographer knows what a strange business making images is (and what quirky and dedicated people it attracts to do it well). The camera is an extension of the eye, and therefore it comes with all its same limitations and biases. I do a lot of nature photography, which initially to me seemed a pretty objective subject. But I also remember the day that I realized in order to take a good picture you don’t look through the camera and photograph what you see, you have to see the shot first, then look through the camera and try to recreate it that way. This in and of itself is a manipulation. What about that stretch of coastline do I want to capture? How to you manipulate the framing of the image, the focus, to convey that meaning? Should I include the little purple flower in the shot, or does leaving it in the frame add a bit too much life? Including it or not means moving the lens an inch, but its a different photograph either way. But I’m not manipulating the scenery. What if I include it in the shot but crop it out in post? What if? What if? Which picture is the “real” one?

In my own photography I found I liked desolation – huge sweeping landscapes dominated by overwhelming natural features, devoid of people. Most of my photography looks this way, but I was photographing at national parks, often crowded ones, though you’d never know it from the images I shot. The Pacific Ocean made me feel small, so I wanted my photographs of it to do the same – when people appear it’s one lone person photographed from a far distance to emphasize the isolation.

North Shore at The Great Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore, Point Reyes, CA. This image has been altered.

And that brings me to the issue of test shots. Dr. Petrik said it last class – don’t keep 500 pictures of seals when you only have 8 good ones. It’s so easy, especially now, to take a million pictures and pull out the 3 the hit capture that you wanted. The idea of a man moving around a skull a bit and playing with light and exposure doesn’t bother me. Because that’s what photographers so. I’m an amateur, but my friends who are professionals, dear god it can be tedious to be around them even when they’re not shooting in a studio. They’re not working for the FSA, but they’re mind’s eyes is equally active trying to document the world around them. A photograph is a memory of “physical reality,” but it’s also a memory of a mood.

At the end of the day “getting to the bottom of it” can become just as muddy as with any other source. Photographs are not objective representations of the truth, just as print is not. But this difficulty does not disqualify visual sources. Instead, it makes them deeper, richer, because as we explore their meaning, their construction, the change in that meaning over time, the way we remember them, we learn even more about history. Every step of the way teaches us something. We just have to learn to do the leg work.

<strong>I commented on Margaret’s blog this week.</strong>

I’ll admit to struggling a bit with this week’s videos. I’ve been using Photoshop for many, many years, and if there is one thing I know for certain it’s that there is pretty much nothing about that program that is intuitive. Everything I do using that program is self-taught and probably not at all the way one is “supposed” to do it. I learned more about the Save to Web box in 6 minutes and 46 seconds than in the 2 years I’ve been futzing with CS5 on my own. So many things I didn’t know how to do! I feel so uneducated! So far these videos (and I’ll admit I’m only about halfway through) are a mix of overview and surprising new information tucked away in functions I’ve already used with what I wrongly thought was thoroughness. I find these videos to be a lot less hands on, at least at the point I’ve reached, and as I usually use Photoshop to edit photography meant to be displayed at full optimization, all the time spent on making images lighter and smaller seems baffling. But I’m glad to finally be getting some guided learning about this very sophisticated program that goes beyond editing in RAW and manipulating light and color. And to my classmates that have never encountered Photoshop before: it can be just as frustrating of a time suck as coding, but once you get trapped it’s actually very fun. And there are ways to simplify the process too once you’ve bumbled through the first round of editing to find something that works.

As for The Non-Designer’s Photoshop Book, I’m similarly thrilled and baffled. Shadows and Highlights, where have you been all my life? Only a few months ago I was bemoaning the fact that my skills with the self-healing brush failed at removing phone lines from a photograph and low and behold, I only had to read 28 pages to find the solution to that vexing problem. But again, a word of caution. The solutions presented are really great, but just because you follow the steps to the letter doesn’t mean things will turn out the way you want them too the first time. Sometime execution is easier said than done, and sometimes you just have to futz with it for a while. Tools don’t always work right, settings need to be changed, and each image is its own beast. They have individual personalities and will require individual attention. One reason our videos this week are so tedious is because our teacher is demonstrating the amount of tinkering necessary to get what you want. In fact, she’s probably cut down on the amount of tinkering and sheer frustration that can sometimes go into making images look and behave as you want them to. That said, layers are your friend! And yes, Photoshop can be just as fun as it can be challenging. Try to keep that in mind too. Look at it as a toy box that just happens to be full of sophisticated equipment.

As for our color sites, the short articles were very helpful, and I’m glad to have the list of tools designed to help us select colors. I am always wary of colors because I know how hard selecting the right ones can be. I’d like to share a link to a color choosing tool that I really, really like: The Color Scheme Designer. This page offers an amazing variety of functions that helps you design whole color schemes. It’s also just fun to play with. I highly suggest you give it a look.

Oh! I’ve also made some changes to my type page. Still not perfectly happy with it, but I think there is some improvement, and I have addressed some, if not all, criticisms, hopefully with a certain degree of success.

Edit: This week I have comment on Geoff and Richard’s blogs.

Edit: My type page design is now mostly polished and done, complete with my executed plan to included Courier New in the design. It’s very spartan – I am realizing that I am perhaps too much of a minimalist – but I think it’s a good first start, especially considering how frustrating the design process was at times. Those footnotes! I still can’t figure out how to italicize the titles, but I have to step away for a while or I’m going to pull out my hair. /Edit

Here is my type project as it stands so far. It is not finished in so far as meeting the requirements (no endnotes yet, for example), but I didn’t feel I could discuss it in my blog without posting a link, and it’s finished enough to discuss my font choices.

I am not happy with it. Well, I’m not completely happy with it. I found my biggest challenge for this project was selecting a set of different fonts that went well together and also matched my historic time period.

The text of the page comes from an old paper I wrote as an undergrad on civil defense, which I examined through the lens of a short story by Philip K. Dick (the king of science fiction) entitled “Foster, You’re Dead.” Because this is a web format, I tried to grab a few key paragraphs from the much longer essay and break them up using sub-headings so that the flow of the text would be logical and easy to read on the web, without being TOO texty. You know, so as to keep the attention of those roving eyes. I’ve chosen this specific topic because it fascinates me, and I’m considering trying to do something concerning the civil defense program for my final project. The image I’ve chosen to include is actually taken from the National Archives’ website (if you click it, you will be taken to the image’s specific page in their catalog), and at this stage I’m pondering how I might make use of their digital and physical archives to help my own project.

Anyway, more specifically about the type. I decided to host all my own fonts, partially because I thought for this exercise it would be easiest and cleanest in my code if I began by working only with @font-face. I think this decision must have made my life about 100% easier in terms of building, because I had zero trouble getting my fonts to work (at least as far as I can see).

I’ve mentioned before that I have a weakness for grunge fonts, and I was pleased to discover that I could actually sneak one into my header, HVD Peace. The design of my page is supposed to evoke the feel of a fallout shelter sign (hence the color scheme) – one that is worn, a relic. HVD Peace, despite its name, has a military and perhaps more appropriately utilitarian appearance to it. It mimics a worn, graffiti stencil, giving it the sense of being aged that I wanted. I actually built a second grunge font, Gesso, into my stack. I really like Gesso, and it was just a bit too modern for this project, but if for some reason HVD Peace doesn’t show up for some, Gesso still presents the aged look, but it casts a more sci-fi feel to the project, especially as a serif. I think that’s actually okay – my paper does discuss science fiction, after all.

So the logo font was the easy part. It’s the body I struggled with and that I’m still not happy with. I really like my sans-serif, Gentium, which I’ve used in various weights and styles for my headers, caption, footer text, and (unfinished) navigational menu. I had a lot of trouble finding a serif that I liked, probably because I just have my heart set on Futura. That font is so perfect for the time period, especially something attempting to mimic the appearance of instructional text. I think it would’ve looked great. But, it’s not an option – it’s not a webfont. So after much back and forth I went with Roboto. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I may still change it.

One thing I do want to do between now and Monday is actually work with some Courier New. Those basic fonts can work for us too! I want to use it as a stylized text. I hope to add another header in between by “subtitle” and my first “subsection” explaining very briefly that the text is an excerpt. This little bit will be in a larger size. I also want to style my pull quote in Courier New, if not Gentium. My thinking with Courier New is that the font will give my page a sort of “typed,” look, as it the text were being pulled from an old military report. If it doesn’t work, maybe I’ll post screenshots just to show the difference, or to demonstrate visually what I was thinking.

All in all it was a fun exercise, but I found trying to make the page period appropriate to be most difficult. In my case, my content speaks to both a military theme and also a cultural, science fiction theme. Most graphic design I see around Civil Defense spins the biazzaro, Philip K. Dick, angle of it. I went the other way. But my choices were also dictated by my images. I don’t hold the copyright to any pictures of families sitting in their shelters in front of mountains of canned goods, smiling like they’re not prepared for the nuclear apocalypse. Copyright, I’m anticipating, is going to be my biggest problem. So goes the life of a 20th century cultural historian.

Edit: This week I commented on Megan and Jeri’s blogs.

To those of my classmates who chose not to pay for the exercise files that accompany the lynda.com videos, I highly suggest you invest the extra $12. I found myself zonking out on a lot of the videos this week, as many were basically filmed PowerPoint presentations, but when we finally got into the code, being able to work along with the instructor helped me focus my attention. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, working along in the exercise files makes learning and understanding the coding about 100 times easier, at least in my opinion. It certainly helped make Dreamweaver feel manageable after after that first set of videos. It’s the difference between learning and doing. We’re all poor, I know, but if you’re struggling with building I suggest you at least try out the exercise files.

I found this week’s videos helpful in explaining how to integrate web fonts into our own pages. It seemed that, in a way, this series was a little bit of a retread of what we watched last week, minus the strong emphasis on design principles. That is okay with me, though. The focus and reiteration of these lessons helped reinforce the technical aspects of selecting and using web fonts on our pages. Integrating good design technique is what I suspect will be the difficult part. The sheer amount of fonts in and of itself is overwhelming, and I’m glad for all the websites this instructor showed us to help us work to build font stacks and work with fonts in browser.

At this point I don’t really have anything profound to say about Stunning CSS. It’s more technical manual, more stunning than gripping, however, I did sit up and say “Ahh,” several times, particularly when reading about how to cheat bots when using header images as backgrounds. I am both anxious and excited to try that trip. I suspect this book will become more useful when we begin to apply the knowledge we attempted to absorb this week, a handbook whipped out every time a building problem rattles nuggets of memory. And if all else fails, we can use the index.

I have commented on David’s blog this week.

Where to start this week?

I’ve always enjoyed working with fonts – I have a special weakness for grunge fonts, unfortunately – but I’m not sure I’ve ever been very good at it. Therefore I found this week’s readings, the film Helvetica, and the lynda.com tutorial Typography for Web Designers to be very helpful in understanding why designers make the decisions they do concerning fonts. It is scientific and mathematical as opposed to simply artistic, and it is also historical. Without a basic understanding of all of these elements, it is much more difficult to use fonts properly.

I tried to put some of the principles into practice when I worked on designing my portfolio project – I’d never thought closely about using fonts to establish visual hierarchies as well as meaning on the page – to me hierarchy had to do with placement of elements and the way fonts looked was incidental – a decision based on gut feeling more than anything else. I’d also never thought about how variation within the same font is just as important and powerful as variation between fonts. As is such, I kept my font selections simple in my initial design for my portfolio site and instead played with italics, sizes, and weights to create visual difference on my page (and to direct visual flow, as discussed in White Space is Not Your Enemy). I watched the lynda.com videos on embedding fonts and found them to be very exciting, but I have not yet tried this technique on my own site.

One thing I struggled with was the logo. I know it is best to have not only text-based navigation, but a text-based header. A properly chosen and stylized font can give the same appearance of an image. And I know at this point that logos created in Photoshop must be viewed as blueprints. But at this stage I was unable to figure out using Dreamweaver how to layer text over my image, which I know is possible using CSS. So I uploaded the JPEG logo with text as a placeholder of sorts to demonstrate my planned intention.

To explain the logo: I chose the font Neuva STD because I think it looks right for the 1950s period of the image, and I chose to italicize the text and add an exclamation mark to mimic the ebullient advertising copy of the day. The image itself I purchased from iStockphoto.com. I’m not sure yet what my CLIO II personal project will be, but I’m hoping it will have something to do with domesticity in America in the 1950s (my areas of study are more thoroughly explained on my About Me page), so I selected an image representative of that time period. The color scheme on the page is also meant to reflect the time period. The yellow reminds me of the color of the refrigerator we had while I was growing up. Even if my CLIO II project ends up having to do with a different time period (as it very well might due to copyright restrictions), I can still use this image and concept at a later date. To me this future usability justified both purchasing the image and building a design around the related concept.

The size of the text in the body is 1em, which I know might feel “horsey” in terms of design, but I’d like to leave it for now. I tried designing with a smaller font and didn’t quite like the look. I think the larger font almost gives the page a more playful feel, in line with the aesthetic I was trying to convey in the image. Also, I get migraines reading small text on computers, so it was just easier for me to work with the larger font. I’m biased, I admit it. The navigation, in contrast, is smaller and italicized, a visual contrast I liked. I also chose to right align my validation badges in the footer to balance all the elements that are on the right side of the page at the top. Adding simple borders between the header, footer, and body served to break up the content without creating distracting chunks of color. I tried designing with different background colors and found I preferred the simple, clean look of a uniform background.

Wow! I did not intend to spend so much time in my blog talking about my design process but it took up a lot of frustrating and fascinating time. And what was most interesting to me was that I couldn’t move forward with other elements of the design until I was happy with the fonts, especially after the deluge of information about them. I scrapped my page three times before getting it right, and that third time the first thing I did was figure out the fonts. After that everything else seemed to flow into place.

Coincidentally, by that time I was much further along in the lynda.com tutorial. What I learned more than anything else from those videos is the importance of working with your fonts as design elements and not as text. Viewing the tutor using the fonts in word processing software to test them out PRIOR to putting them into her code blew my mind. It reminded me of how I sometimes “draw” websites in Photoshop before I try to code them (like the logo I made for this one). Visualizing fonts in this way really helped me when I went back to recode my own page. I love working with Photoshop – drawing there makes things much easier. In the future I will try to draw with fonts as well.

I found Thinking with Type to be most useful in terms not only of the way it historicized fonts and types, but in all the visual examples it provided of type in action. Simply looking at other uses of type helped me understand again that type is not just text, it is a design element. And it also helped my own thinking to see the many, many different ways people use type, and the many different kinds they use.

That thought brings me to Helvetica. I have nothing against Helvetica the font, but as I watched the film I found myself most identifying with the designers who hate Helvetica and search for other ways to use type. Then again, as I said, I love a good grunge font. But the longer the film went on, the more static and ubiquitous Helvetica became. I knew it was popular and beloved but I didn’t know just how pervasive it is. It also made me think of my own experiences with Helvetica. I’ve never been able to use it my own design (here I am mostly referring to images and text together) and have it look right. Here it is, this clean and simple font, and I am usually very minimalist in my own photography, and I just can’t make it work. It always look wrong. It could have to do with other things, like the way I am styling the text with effects like drop shadow or playing with the fill settings, or even the words I am trying to use with the image. But it’s really not always as easy as it might look to design with Helvetica and have it turn out as satisfying as it can be. Then again, my favorite sans-serif is Futura, so maybe I’m biased.

In any case, I’m looking forward to actually trying font embedding in my own site, and to figuring out a way to perfect my logo. All and all an interesting week.

Edit: This week I have commented on Sheri and Richard’s blogs.

I’ll admit to being pretty captivated by White Space is Not Your Enemy. Whether I’m good at it or not, I love design, and the book had me so keyed up I kept having to put it down move to my computer so that I could test out the ideas contained in its pages (the font chapter, in particular, proved a huge distraction). In other words, I couldn’t wait to start drawing.

I have never thought of myself as a visual artist. I can barely draw a recognizable stick figure with pen and paper (or cursor and MS Paint). And I am guilty of making webpages decorated with squirming gifs, colored scroll bars, and cursors trailing glitter. Then again, it was the 90s and I was 15. Lucky for me somewhere along the line I aged, the 90s ended, and I fell in with some graphic designers who taught me about white space and simplicity. The challenge of designing websites and graphics that adhered to rules of usability focused and motivated me in a way that I still find to be surprising.

I was already aware of many of the amateur errors listed in Chapter 4 and sometimes choose to ignore them when I’m playing around, as the slap-dash (soon-to-be-redone) design of historiclove.com’s index page clearly demonstrates (see: justified text, a background image, questionable header design choices), but knowing the rules and being able to implement them are two different things. Web design and the execution of that design are very time consuming, difficult, and often frustrating things. Every time I sit down, no matter how simple the visual I have in my head, I find myself still tinkering hours later. But it’s so incredibly rewarding when you finally get it just right. For example, finding that perfect font.

Having read this book and also the design requirements built into our course’s syllabus, I’m excited to meld Golombisky and Hagen’s design guidelines with our assignments. I will be paying much more conscious attention to the way my design elements direct visual flow. I’m particularly interested in the idea of matching the design of our projects to the design aesthetic of the time period that our projects will focus on. I’m a true believer that subtle (or not-so-subtle) visual cues make an incredible difference in design experience, especially on web pages, which are active, interactive experiences, as opposed to passive ones. The course readings this week suggest useful ways for us to facilitate and guide our users’ experience of our sites. And thankfully programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver (which I am also excited to finally learn) make constructing such visual creations possible for people like me. Now I just have to figure out the content I’m going to be drawing about!

I have commented on Martha’s blog this week.

The fact that I am a cultural historian of the 20th century is beginning to make me feel a bit weird in comparing myself to my classmates, though I’m sure the gulf is nowhere near as great as it sometimes feels. Because I’m doing a combined masters/PhD, I don’t yet have a dissertation topic, so in more than one way I’m still trying to figure out the specifics of what I want to do. I do know that I feel incredibly compelled when I interact with mass media texts, particularly television, but my focus on 20th century history means I have an almost unbelievable scope of sources to choose from. Back as an undergrad, it was finding pictures of fallout shelters on the internet that hooked me into my chosen methodology and field of focus. It was picking apart images of radical feminists and reading television, film, and science fiction into my work that reinforced my decision. And it was the internet that facilitated my exploration – without it, my most important research project, a study of radical feminists, would never have happened. The internet seemed so integral a part of the process that at the time I didn’t even stop to think how it facilitated research that otherwise would have been impossible. I was lucky to have it so easily at my disposable.

I’m currently in the middle of a lecture sequence for my History 100 students, the first time I’ve ever had a chance to instruct, and I realized as I pondered the question above that researching and preparing my presentation took place almost exclusively online. The only exceptions were the books and articles I read in paper form, but, I still found all these resources online through databases and catalogs and searches on Amazon. My lectures focus on the domestic ideal in the 1950s, but really exploring the nuances of that decade from a cultural standpoint and demonstrating them to students would have been extremely difficult without new media. I’m showing them a bunch of clips from cartoons and t.v. shows, all of which I found on YouTube, and all of the advertising copy and other images and print material I’m using also came from online searches. Very few of them came from databases geared specifically to historians. In fact, many came from simple Google image searches (which may raise questions of credibility for some, but I didn’t find them too troubling when I evaluated my findings). The internet also put my in contact with past instructors who recommended relevant sources.

I even managed to work Beyonce into my lecture (which I am probably unhealthily proud of), and it was at that point in the slideshow that I could tell I’d won converts. These kids may not be “digitally born,” but they did grow up surrounded by new media, and have learned to speak its language to a certain degree. It was easier for them to hook into the new media components of my lectures, and connecting Beyonce to the ideal of a homemaker made what I was telling them immediately relevant to their current lives. It validated their experiences from a historical standpoint. I would have even found that image or thought of that approach without the happy accidents that often accompany Google keyword searches. By teaching them about subtext, I’m also instructing them on how to become more active participants in evaluating the new media they interact with every day.

To me new media seems to be an extension of what we already do. Digital history at this point seems most useful in making sources available to historians. It also provides useful tools. Showing this website to my students, which allows you to evaluate if you would survive an atomic attack, was another visual way for me to make all the graphic images I showed them of nuclear attacks seem relevant to their lives. And while scholars are still grappling with how to use the internet to disseminate analysis, it seems to me that sites like Wikipedia move in the right direction toward not only getting people excited about history, but creating a space for them to actually participate in what is in many cases a closed system.

So new media will change nothing, new media will change everything. New media is a tool for information sharing and information gathering. New media is a way to force the doors of the academy open, new media is a way to allow scholars to prove the academy’s usefulness. New media is a way to get a class full of college freshman to connect history to their everyday lives, new media puts historical sources in the hands of these same students, new media makes history real in a way that erases the disconnect between our audiences and the historical materials we deal with. New media allows a wider audience of people to see life in these distant, dusty things. New media, barring some apocalyptic meltdown, is most likely here to stay.