Splat | WiseTome.com

I must have been in my sixth grade when my dad got me a computer. It was a 386 DX 66 MHz assemble PC, which came with DOS 6.2. It had 512 MB hard disk and 4 MB ram. I know, it is quite lowly specifications - but it was a novelty to have PC in those days, and I was the only kid in the block to have a computer at home.

I look back at the time, more than a decade before from today, and the thing that strikes me the most, is the command line Operating System that I have gotten quite used to. I still use it today at my job, albeit on a Unix terminal, and I find it quite useful.

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This would not be some thing about vulgar design in spite of the title. On the other hand this would be the first post in a series that deals with some of the basic principles that can be applied while designing just about any written material - be it on the web or offline documents, or printed documents.

Before I continue, I would give the due credit to Robin Williams. It was her book, The Non-designer’s Design Book that got me into the designing of quite a few things. It has helped me create better documents and web pages both in my job and elsewhere. It has helped me study other great works of design by others and see these underlying principles involved. Also, it is noteworthy that I picked up the above mnemonic in the title - CRAP - from that book where Robin hints at it quite subtly.

The mnemonic stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. We will be going through each of them in a bit of in depth manner, though in the reverse order, in this series I have dubbed as CRAP Design Series.

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I open my Thunderbird client today morning, and there was something there that made it feel like a history recap. It was about the choice between education and blogs.

It was a post by Amit Agarwal on his blog ‘Digital Inspiration’, which was followed up by some others. It took me some time reading through some of the comments left at his blog, to actually grasp the situation that the dramatization of the whole blogging phenomena has brought to today’s young people. It has been a choice of going ‘pro-blogger’, against the choice of obtaining education, against the choice of getting into jobs that run the world.

Before I utter anything else elaborately, I should make my self clear. It is an unintelligent choice to take blogging over education and other works.

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Splat went through a bit of restructuring a couple of days back, and its primary aim was to improve the flow of information - conversation - between websites and blogs.

Websites have long become a place where the mode of information exchange is two-way in nature and not a traditional broadcast mode. People visit website, consume information and leave back their comments. If they find the given piece of information interesting enough, they would pass the link to their friends and acquaintances. There are even websites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl and many more that have the sole purpose of letting the people share the information they have found on the different websites and blogs.

The blogs themselves have formed a group where conversations take place through commenting, trackbacks and pingbacks.

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I came to know of an alarming bill that was submitted in the US legislation through this post at Public Knowledge. I say it is an alarming bill because if the bill passes the houses and becomes a law then all the works of artists who reside outside United States, and in some cases even with in, would find themselves at loss.

The bill was introduced on May 22nd, 2006 in the Houses of Representatives, United States. It seeks to amend the Title 17 of United States Code that would allow for remedies in case the copyright owner cannot be found. The particular code gives the people the rights over their intellectual works.

After some research and opinions I have heard from others, I feel that it has profound implications, and that it would allow people to steal works of artists, musicians, and the like - and hide behind the clause that the intellectual work was an orphan work.

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How beautiful can it get? How melodious can it be with its screeches and tweets all at the same time? How disciplined can it be during the creation and destruction process? How mysterious can its ways be? How can it bring together things seemingly so far fetched and totally unrelated as into one single entity?

Yes! You guessed it right. I’m referring ‘it’, to Nature- its ways and means that has held us spellbound for centuries and will hold us in awe for many a generation to come. And facilitating our awing experiences are the diehard nature lovers, conservationists and cinematographers, who make it possible for us to see the Spring Bucks of the Savannah, the burly Siberian Tigers of the freezing northern Russia, the majestic Elephants of the tropical Western Ghats of India, the Mountain Lions of the spring time North Americas, the Dingoes of the dry and arid Australian down under, the stealthy Leopards of the thick and lush green Amazonian South America, and the highly sensitive Barn Owls of the chilly Europe, all at the click of a simple TV remote button while sitting some place far from real action and yet so close to the breath taking actions of the “wild world” through modern electronics. This post is in toast to those brave hearts and wildlife aficionados who go to the ends of the earth for our “pleasure and awes”.

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