Week 27 – Goodbye College!
Saying goodbye, exploring whether you could live in oblivion, intuition as a designer, optimum line length & a typography index.
[Life] Saying goodbye on my own terms
Yesterday, I graduated from the Indian Institute of Art & Design.
Although I left the college environment a year ago, unresolved goodbyes always occupied space in my mind. I always had things left to say, to people who probably did not expect a word from me. No matter how much you try and distract the human mind, it will always come back to the things that you have not managed to let go of.
I tried for a year and failed. I knew I had to let them out during the convocation, one last time when every one is bound to be in the same space again.
At 1:30 am on the night before my convocation, my bag contained 60 postcards that I had gotten printed back in Mumbai. One side contained a unique visual generated algorithmically and the other remained blank, filled with space for my inaudible words that I never found the time to write.
I remember lying down and seeing two possibilities of how my convocation could turn out. One was where I slept soundly, considering that I had slept for a total of 10 minutes the night before. The second was where I would get up, write till I had nothing left to lock away and have a chance of being spared from future regret.
It wasn’t even a choice.
I wrote from 2 to 3:30 am. I thanked every single person who graced my life with their presence at IIAD. I laid down all of my regrets, from being a terrible friend, classmate, partner, student, to not spending enough time, being incapable of meeting human expectations and not learning where I could have. I laid out everything neatly on tiny 4x6’ postcards. I felt like I was in the movie Fitoor.
After the ceremony, I found myself running around in a postcard distribution frenzy. I did not manage to stand and hold a conversation with anyone for more than 5 minutes, until that moment when I distributed all of my 37 postcards.
Alina looked at me when I was done. I breathed a sigh of relief. She asked me, “how does it feel?”. I replied promptly, “relieved. It feels like someone has taken a huge weight off my chest”.
College, for me, was finally done. I now look forward to the future with open arms.
[Conversations] Why you cannot possibly live in oblivion
For the past 3 weeks, we have been fostering a cat at TinkerLabs. About 3-4 of us take care of the little thing, with Meru & Sakina being the primary parents.
Sakina has had to let go of 3 pets because of different reasons. I too have had one similar experience. During my last day in Mumbai, I knew that I won’t be seeing the cat again and Sakina & I found ourselves in a familiar situation again.
We talked & wondered what it would be like if we had never known what it means to fall in love with an animal. If we had never known the joy & pride that caring for an animal would bring us, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this painful spot again. This thought then explored every other painful experience that we had felt in our lives.
What if you had never entered a painful experience in your life; remained indifferent to it and never committed because you did not have the capacity to anticipate the joy (and pain) that it would subsequently bring you?
Alas, life cannot be lived in perpetual oblivion simply because of the design of it all. You function in an independent world, driven by needs that require you to break your bubble over the course of life. Fundamentally, as human beings, you are bound to chase impermanent things that offer you great joy and bring you great pain.
Such is the nature of life. Over time, as you experience more, maybe you become a tad bit better at handling it. Or maybe you become numb.
I don’t know for sure.
[Conversations] Intuition as a designer
Before I left for New Delhi, I found myself in super-long meetings as we discussed the extent of ‘calls’ that a designer should take in a particular project.
No human-centric design outcome is 100% ‘by-the-people’. For example, right now we are in a project where we have about 50 different ideas that we must test in a span of 3 days. There is no way that we can test all 50 of them optimally.
As we discussed prioritisation, I quickly got agitated because we were taking calls that we shouldn’t. Deprioritise this because of ‘x’ and take ‘a’ instead of ‘b’ because of ‘y’. The logic makes sense because the reasons are backed by theory, but the approach then doesn’t because as human-centered designers, you’re supposed to let the humans take that call.
I found myself torn between theoretical knowledge, practicality and my fixation on human-centeredness. Which one do you choose?
Devanshi said something then that I now think makes a lot of sense.
As a designer, you go out with certain assumptions and then test those assumptions. The point still remains, you’re going out with certain things that you intuitively feel / theoretically know / can presume because of the analysis that you have done.
You will always be working with your intuition as a designer. Call it experience, call it knowledge, call it creative intuition … you will always be taking calls that you think make sense. I always felt like this was a certain strand of anthropocentrism or the feeling that human beings are superior.
The point is that I think with every decision, you will always be taking risks of being wrong. You might be so wrong that you ship out a catastrophic product and you could never have known along the way.
I don’t know how to feel about this actually. Is there a way to guarantee 100% objectivity in the creative problem-solving process? Can creative problem-solving be standardised like math?
Or is this one of those classic cases of objectivity & subjectivity just being a degree and there’s just a very high degree of subjectivity in the creative problem-solving process?
Haven’t resolved this one yet.
[Learnings] Optimum line length
Read a wonderful article by Xtian Miller who attempts to radically break traditional web typography standards with his article, Your Body Text Is Too Small.
It’s a wonderful read but something I picked up from his article was this:
According to The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst states that the optimal line length, or number of characters per line (CPL) in typography is around 55 to 75. A long line of text causes fatigue because readers will have to scan further from side to side, searching for the beginning of the next line. If a line is too short, there are words or phrases that are broken up which are meant to be a unit.
As you might know already, I’ve been working on developing a new website for myself. When I read this article, I wondered whether grid systems should be driven by line length. Why should you fixate on a computer generated / popularly recommended 12-column grid with fixed column & gutter widths? What is that starting point to determine everything about your website?
This thought process has led me to start things from scratch again. I wonder if this is that point in my life where I have the fear of being imperfect, or going ‘wrong’, and that is hindering my progress.
Challenging project this one and I can’t wait to see where it takes me.
[Resources] Typography Index
Typography has long been a subject with just too many fancy terms to describe tiny parts of a letter.
This incredible resource has a well-articulated typography index with simple, crisp language.
A good space to brush up on your knowledge of the different kinds of counters on a letter ;)