Two things come to mind on this topic:
Tower of Babel
Uncanny Valley
(I hope my indentation, use of Case and parenthesis didn't throw anyone
off too far!)
When the Web was young, Print Designers went simply *apeshit* over this
new HTML thing, in both senses of the term. Some had a great good time
playing with all the possibilities but most just got surly about losing
the precise control they had come to expect from print. Designers used
to *literally* attend a press check to make sure that what they specced
into the camera and typographic work *was* exactly what they wanted...
and sometimes there would be modest changes made on the spot while the
presses idled in the background.
I remember it being a perq of the job, though not without it's own
stress, and a good "closure". A trip to Denver or San Francisco or New
York at the end of a finished job, and once the press-check was done and
the presses started rolling, you didn't have to worry about someone
saying... "oh.. one more thing!". The client was usually at the press
check too, so if they saw something *after* the print run was done, they
just got tight lipped and held their tongue. I think the apparent ease
and convenience of making changes was the BANE of designers once WYSIWIG
got rolling. An excuse for clients to apply "late binding" to
content... run their own deadline right up to the press deadline and
leave it to the designers to incorporate last minute changes hours
before it went to press. I think it was *this*, not the challenges of
learning newfangled computers, that drove many old school print
designers out of the Biz.
As for WYSIWIS... this has been a problem with *color* forever, and
myriad strategies have been adopted to mitigate it, from the Pantone(tm)
color specification system to elaborate attempts to resolve the
mechanical/optical as well as *perceptual* differences between
reflective (print) and emissive (computer screens) and between additive
and subtractive color. And referencing the "uncanny valley"... getting
it "almost right" can be more disturbing than merely "in the ballpark".
It is a bit humorous: the "What You See Is What I See" idea .. and its
little brother WYSIWYG, but there is also an interesting point to be
made. It seems to be _hard_ to obtain!
This is one of the reasons, IMHO, that twitter is so popular. I've
started using it quite a bit simply because it _is_ so readable and
very fast to do so. And it definitely has the greatest info content
per sq. in. of any media I'm aware of.
On thinking more about it, the chief problem I have with formatting in
email is that our various machines and their apps have absurdly
different ways of setting these things.
So when I use GMail's web-mail system, it allows four text sizes, tiny
to huge. I have absolutely no idea how these translate to your
screen. I've resorted to creating images of email, sending it to the
sender, and asking "is this what you meant me to see"? and gotten a
horrified, Gawd No response.
What I find is Silos of Usage: i.e. folks on Windows running Exchange
will agree between themselves. GMail-ers ditto. Mac mail.app-ers
too. Oh, and naturally Twitter folk. And naturally the Unformatted
Text folk, bless them.
Maybe we should have an agreed upon style that we all share and a few
Windows, Mac, Linux hipsters transmit instructions on how to obtain
that style with each of the Silos?
-- Owen
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