“serendipity”

Been obsessed with this six-megapixels of Santorini^WP all day. Obsessed like one obsesses about a dream.

A better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card.

It all started because my 48-year-old mom, blessed her, can’t read small type very well. She has trouble using little calendar cards because the day numerals are so small and last time she complained I paused and empathized with her travail. The problem, it was suddenly obvious, was not only the marketing debris that encroaches upon every poor card but rather the quite wasteful scheme we use for representing a year—the same table with the same thirty-something numbers over and over.

Take a fancy flight, don’t assume anything, not even numbers, as long as you keep these things in mind:

• The bigger the type size (or meaningful features) the better.
• The smaller the design the better. The original goal was for it to fit comfortably (you can use both sides of the paper) within 86 by 54 millimeters (3.370 by 2.125 in) of paper (your standard business card^WP) but something slightly bigger could be just as useful. We are going for useful. (Thanks Dave Pawson!)
• Immediately understandable (or pretty darn close).
• Should span an entire year.
• On any given “date” of the year, be able to easily tell what its name, its month, and its month number is.
• Instant: The less steps you need to know before knowing a date’s data the better.
• Contextual: You should be able to easily “walk” from a date to another one close by, thereby counting the days between them. People do this all the time.
• Markable: You should be able to easily mark (circle, cross, check) holidays and special dates.

Yes, I know mom could carry some sort of foldable large-type calendar, 12 calendar cards with a month each, or simply start wearing her prescribed glasses (nigh impossible), but that’s off the point right now. Let that true story be our convenient pretext for innovation.

Also note that though the idea arose out of accessibility concerns, everyone would benefit with it, just as we all grip the helping handles in hotel bathtubs.

I think the best existing metaphor for what we would like to accomplish here are modern statistical innovations like the boxplot^WP or the stem-and-leaf plot^WP—proof that novel, almost magical displays of breathtaking elegance are just around the corner. IBM’s thread arcs is a recent example.

Another good metaphor might be the Roman number system^WP vs. the Hindu-Arabic one^WP. For some five thousand millennia the best humanity could produce in its oldest art, reckoning, was the crude, procrustean Roman system—so primitive that it made even multiplication specialists’ labor. Then in a flight of fancy some unknown Hindu stumbled upon the (graphical!) principle of position—it was as far-reaching a discovery as can be imagined, allowing for the development of simple, clear-cut arithmetical rules that became the cornerstone for algebra, itself the cornerstone of modern mathematics. (If the topic interests you, do read Tobias Dantzig’s classic account, Number^AM)

More down-to-earth, the calendar and clock pedias are obvious and essential starting points—history is as good a source of what could be as it is of what has been. Information Aesthetics’ Creative Calendar Design showcase should get your creative designs flowing, and so should a quick search through the site for clocks. Tokyoflash has some interesting interfaces for telling time.

Also, dad showed me an old planner of his that had something called a perpetual calendar^WP: a 5-page calendar that tells you what day it was between 1821 to 2080. Here’s a scanning of it. Perhaps it could help to find useful patterns in the Gregorian calendar^WP.

Finally, don’t let constraints paralyze you. Don’t think a proposal has to be “perfect” or “right” to submit it, the tiniest improvement could turn out to be crucial.

Anyone can submit a proposal. A proposal consists of a picture mock up. To submit a proposal comment this post with your name and a link to your mockup (we’ll put the picture up here in the post in the Submissions section). Submit as many proposals as you wish. Submit in parallel to the Information Aesthetics post on the challenge for extra promotion to your work.

Though you submit proposals through the comments that doesn’t mean your comments need limit to proposals. Not at all. Please share ideas, point to inspirational sources, suggest evaluation criteria, ask, answer, pick your favorites, praise, mock, and critique proposals. Warning, mini calendar making is highly addictive!

I’ll consider today, Monday January 22, 2007, the challenge’s start date. It will be open for a month (we have to give the unconscious time to do its magic), closing Tuesday February 22, 2007. My biotech friend Zamantha, my mom, and me will be the judges. I’ll announce the winner Monday February 26, 2007—my birthday—here in this post.

The challenge will still end by Feb. 22, 2007, but since I’m participating I don’t know who should be the judge or whether there’ll be a judge at all—or even a “winner”. Perhaps we should call this a cooperation instead of a competition?

The judge has spoken (congrats to Adam Sporka!) but the challenge ain’t over friends. Please keep the submissions flowing! Take our breath away with an evolutionary/revolutionary design!

The journey. Of course. ;)

Just imagine if your design works. It would make for an unbeatable showcase to scream your mindboggling information design talent to the world everywhere you go: by definition, it’d be universally useful, universally impressive, portable, and easy to explain (even to your mother!). It would be (literally) the perfect presentation card. People would use your creation many times every year and mutter praise to your name every single time. The eternal gratitude of the presbyope^WP kind would be yours (and with most people over 40 afflicted to some degree, that’s a substantial percent of the global population). Even more far-reachingly, people who use your calendar would mentally represent and understand the year through your design—you would have created a new metaphor for time. Just think about that.

(Plus! It’s still early in the year, The year’s almost over, what better gift for friends and family than a 2007 2008 pocket calendar of your own making?)

I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.

For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).

And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)

Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.

Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.

Do you know more?

Milton Friedman ^{WP, E} died 9 days ago, November 16, and though I wanted to write about it that day, I dared not. I had mostly read only about him, his life, his reputation, and reverberations of his arguments; I had bought but not yet read two of his books^ELZR; treasured a sentence (“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”) found in the only thing I had read from him (the prologue to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom^AM ); and deeply admired his son, David Friedman^ELZR. In other words, I could only lay claim to love the idea of the idea of the man (2^nd degree platonic love, common personal affliction). I knew I’d fall in love with him, I only needed time, and so I didn’t dare write an obituary that Thursday—but I’m gonna.

I’ve downloaded Friedman’s Free to Choose series (also available as a free stream) to watch as I read the sametitled book^AM and the first episode has already confirmed Friedman as a most worthwhile man. Far as I can gather from a sample of 1, the series consists of a brief, excellent documentary narrated by Friedman, followed by lively debate with a group of economists, politicians, and businessmen. As much as I’m lately having serious misgivings about arguing in general, it’s a pleasure to watch him passionately refute and belie his often downright frightening partners in debate (“It’s demagoguery, if you’ll pardon me, Michael Harrington…”).

Seeing those suited men from the seventies I couldn’t help but think of what future debates on the subject will be like. One of the intriguing things about Milton Friedman is how his ideas have been carried on by his children. Himself the greatest XX^th century defender of capitalism, he still didn’t dare (?) take the leap to anarchism (he couldn’t have put it more bluntly at the debate from Free To Choose’s first episode: “I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government.”). His son, David Friedman ^ELZR, is on the other hand the most prominent anarchocapitalist alive, and David Friedman’s son, Googler Patri Friedman, wants to homestead the oceans in turn.

One can only wonder what little Tovar Miles Friedman will come up with.

A movie on death, by Darren Aronofsky^WP (!), spanning a millennium, ending in 2505 A.D, opening November 22. Damn, I’m gonna be waiting.

I’ve been staring at this strip all day, pasted it on my wall, read all the strips from its parent webcomic (xkcd) —and still it dazzles me. It has got to be among the best I’ve ever read. Quirky, sexy, naive, upbeat—makes me happy every time.

Oh boy, I really love this strip. I’m going to be pasting it everywhere… :)

Dreams comes close after it; Pong, Donald Knuth, M.C. Hammer Slide, Words that end in gry, and Moral Relativity are also keepers; and both Escher Bracelet and Sudoku are almost single-panel-ly perfect in their simplicity.

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)

As far as blog-intros go, Rondam Ramblings’s is one of my favorites—both because I happen to agree with much of it (and thus, of course, think highly of such a sound writer) and because it honors the blog’s name from digressive paragraph 1. Here four clips: