A well respected, very talented colleague of mine, Marien van Os, has decided to quit being my colleague and start freelancing (if you need a highly skilled front-end developer with over ten years of experience, you just found him). One of the ideas we had for a farewell present was a book with pictures around the theme One … a day: Marien also runs the website One Picture A Day. I consider books to be awkward gadgets, a bit broken, too static, so I decided to make a website for him, a website to remind him of the fact that doing nothing is a good thing, that Nothing can be beautiful!

On this site, every day, Nothing will be posted.

I couldn’t wait to write that sentence. Every night at midnight (Amsterdam time) the word Nothing is automatically posted with a pseudo-random color and a pseudo-random font*, based on the date and time. I might be the only one who gets excited about nonsense like this but since I made this site, the first thing I do in the morning is check what Nothing looks like today. It’s the closest I get to doing nothing, I’m way too busy lately.

So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, and especially Marien van Os: One Nothing A Day! A site that celebrates idleness, that reminds us of the fact that Nothing is a good thing and that freelancing should be relaxing. You can click, tap or swipe to the previous Nothing and if you have a device that supports it you can shake it for a random Nothing! (And yes, of course the site has its own extremely useful, automated twitter account that tweets Nothing right after Nothing’s been posted. For those of you who don’t like twitter there’s an rss feed that updates Nothing too, every day.)

* ifttt is used to post Nothing to a wordpress blog. The last six numbers of Unix Epoch time are used to generate the color and fonts are served with Google Webfonts, randomized by date (I handpicked 93 fonts).

There are a few things I want to do with a remote control for a DVD player: skip unskippable trailers, go to the menu, and play the damn movie, finally. You’d think that three buttons would be sufficient. Mine has 33.

Conventions

A few conventions emerged in the world of DVD remote controls and button placement in general: (1) the Enter button is surrounded by four arrows, (2) the 0 is placed directly below the 8, and (3) play and pause are one and the same button. I do agree that conventions must be challenged every now and then and that they have to be replaced if we come up with something better.

Creativity vs originality

Some designers believe they have to reinvent the wheel every time they design something, even if the thing they created is an oval without an axis. I see that a lot in the web design world where people come up with an alternative way to navigate or an unconventional way to scroll. They think it’s brilliant and original because they’ve never seen it before, but the reason they haven’t seen it before is not because they’re the first to make it up, other people did so before them and found out that it just doesn’t work. Removing the Enter Button from the center and placing it somewhere else is a good example of misplaced originality.

Numbers

I never understood why you’d want numbers on your DVD remote. Apparently you can use them to quickly set the time. A rather obscure function for a DVD player, definitely not worth one third of the space. A good designer would have removed all numbers from the remote, but this bad designer decided that the 0 should be placed below the 7.

Internals

The first thing I do when I start a DVD is press the Menu button (which for some odd reason is not allowed, most of the time). When I press the Menu button I want to be taken to the menu where I can choose to play the damn movie, finally, or choose some useful settings like language or subtitles. I never want to be taken to a different menu. On my new remote there are three menu buttons. I’m sure there’s a rule with a name that describes the following: if you’re not sure which button to press, the correct option is always the last one.

Do you know the difference between the Menu, the Home Menu, and the Top Menu? Me neither. These are internal functions, probably, they are the bowels of you DVD player. We need bowels, without knowing we use them all the time, but only surgeons need to see them in extreme cases, normal people should not have access to them. Well, not too much anyways… So, just give me one Menu button and don’t confuse me.

Random WTF

On my computer there is no difference between Return and Enter, both words are printed on the same button. “Hit Return” or “hit Enter” have exactly the same meaning for most people. Obviously not for DVD remote designers.

Is the DVD/USB button the most important one on the whole remote? Is Stop unrelated to Play? What’s an Angle? What’s Zoom for? And Display? Clear?

The only thing they actually did right on this thing is labeling Prev and Next, I always confuse them with Fast Forward (see the law I defined above). The problem is that it’s not clear if the label is placed below or above the corresponding button, some simple Gestalt theory would have helped here.

Priorities

Sure, DVD players are definitely not the top prioritiy for hardware giants like Pioneer, other crappy systems like Blu-Ray are taking over its place. So I understand that you don’t hire a world class designer to design your remote. What I don’t understand though is that you hire a designer at all. Just copy a remote that already works!

Whenever I cook pasta the only thing I really want to know is the cooking time. Sometimes it’s eight minutes, sometimes it’s fourteen, but whatever it is, the exact number is hidden somewhere in a big pile of useless information. Who designs these things?

A better design

For years now I’ve been walking around with this idea of what a pack of pasta should look like and today I decided to just make it. It’s based on these ideas:

1. I don’t care what the pasta is called: fanfare, sporgersi or sciocchezza, I don’t want to know its name, I just want pasta. If the shapes look right I’ll buy it, I never picked a pasta because of the name.
2. I immediately want to see the cooking time without having to look for it.
3. Some people need the basic pasta cooking instructions.

The result

If it’s up to me from now on the front of all packs of pasta will look like this.* Marketing departments, historians and lawyers can fill the back of every pack with all the balderdash they want as long as the front looks like this.**

So if you are a pasta package designer or you know one, please steal this idea and improve my kitchen life. And if you are a designer, please improve my design and let me know so I can update this post, I am not a designer, not at all.

*Yes I know, the word Pasta is not needed but remember the name of this site? Some nonsense should be in there, it’s not called Love Function.
**This version is made with HTML and CSS and should look just fine when you print it on a pack of ten centimeters wide.

I created just a few disclaimers in my professional career as a web developer. I made one for the Dutch McDonalds website a long, long time ago which contained a lot of ridiculous bullshit about copyright, liability and security. I copied that disclaimer word for word for a disclaimer on a site of mine – even though the original disclaimer clearly stated that all forms of reproduction are strictly prohibited.

Of course I replaced all occurrences of the word McDonalds with the name of my own site, Trash Chique. But I did another thing, a thing that nobody ever saw (until now): I replaced every word in the disclaimer with the word bla, but only when you print that page.

I believe the quality of that joke lies mostly in the fact that nobody ever saw it. So by writing about it I probably managed to get some readers to giggle a bit but at the same time I spoiled the joke, forever. I have been in doubt about publishing this post, as you can understand, but keeping a joke a secret and not publishing this text, which I already wrote, is just too nonsensical, even for me.

My opinion about advertising is not that interesting. What is interesting though is the conversation I had on Twitter with Marrije Schaake about it in which a quote from Banksy resulted in the following ideas: a way for users to easily make art from ads, a script that automatically draws moustaches on people in ads, and a script to automatically replace all ads with pictures of works of art. That last idea should exist, and really, it’s not that hard to make it: all we need is (1) a nerd (who can actually build a thing like that (with a like and dislike button, please, so people get to see art they actually want to see)) and (2) an enormous, perfectly structured database filled with high quality pictures of art, with unlimited bandwidth and a clever, open API. Just two things!

I’m not sure about the name yet. Art-blocker (wrong in every way, I guess), ceci n’est pas une annonce, artvertisements, or behavioral artgeting. You can probably make up a better name. And you probably know a nerd or the owner of said database. Just tell them they’re free to build the thing, as long as they let me know when they’re done.

This project raises an interesting question about beauty. De Pijp is a neighborhood in Amsterdam which was built in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to accommodate the working class. The houses were not meant to be beautiful and back then they probably weren’t. If you ask people today if they like De Pijp most will say it’s beautiful though. Will people ever like this building? (I work there. When people ask me where I work I tell them I work in the ugliest building in Amsterdam).

A lot of architecture – and art too – is considered ugly at first but gains value throughout the years. Graphic design on the other hand – just like fashion – looses value rather quickly: every few years we redesign our websites and most companies change or update their branding on a regular basis. What’s so interesting about this 10,000 lakes project is that it will become a great overview of contemporary taste in logo design, if it continues and if the URL still exists in 27 years.

There’s one question that keeps popping up in my mind though: what happens when in five years time Avenue Lake (which I think is an incredible logo, by the way) thinks its logo is outdated? Will Nicole Meyer make a new one? That would mean that in five years she will have to start to make two logos a day, in ten years three logos, four in fifteen and by the time she completed all of them she will be producing more than 6 logos a day. This will amount to a total of more than 30,000! I can’t wait to see the result, is it 2039 yet?

Update:

Good logos are not outdated in five years. Paul Martens and Ron Kersic rightly pointed me in the direction – in a rather funny who-has-the-biggest converstation – of logo’s that last much longer than five years: 40 years, 125 years, 150 years and, of course, this 2000 year old logo. Paul and Ron, thanks for turning my article into a random pile of nonsensical letters!

Now that I’m on the subject of religion (a subject I try to avoid, it’s just too easy), there is this incredibly funny meme about a bully Jesus Christ. There seem to circulate these drawings of a hippy in a dress who somehow supports ordinary people in their daily life. I think they are intended to remember that this illusory friend is always with you. With just a small addition of some well chosen words these drawings get quite a different meaning. And I love all the waste of time this meme caused: everybody who contributed wasted some time, everybody who looked at them wasted some time but the artist who drew the original drawings, and who certainly didn’t think he was wasting his time when he was working on them, he thought that he was spreading his believe, this artist actually wasted his time by instead creating a huge heap of heretical pamphlets.