Two articles from Design Observer up this week.

Most recently, Michael Bierut discusses The New Ugly, the reemergence of ugly design that, if nothing else, definitely provokes a response. The question is from where is this trend emerging?

Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, if history is a guide, once the game is afoot, scores of designers will be eager to get with the program. Obviously, doing ugly work isn’t difficult. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but rather as evidence of one’s attunement with the zeitgeist.

Bierut cites UK magazine Super Super as one approach to The New Ugly. Creative director Steve Slocombe lacks any formal design training, which “has left him unencumbered by the profession’s history and therefore more able to seek out new forms of expression.” Ignorance is bliss, eh?

Ultimately, Bierut takes a wait-and-see stance on The New Ugly, but (at least concerning the “Ignorance is bliss” crowd) Jessica Helfand would probably disagree. No doubt having looked into her crystal ball and presaging Bierut’s article, Helfand wrote four days earlier on the importance of historical context in design. She admits that enjoyment is the likely catalyst for all design, but argues that “I just kind of liked it” should not be the end-all-be-all decision. Later decisions should consider more than at-a-glance enjoyment. Unfortunately, inadequate design school curricula fail to impart upon students the fundamentals of design history, disabling them from considering the context of their designs.

But Helfand would certainly love the second possible source of The New Ugly. While some designs eschew history and “rules”, charting their own ground, some acknowledge what has come before and present their new ugly as reactionary design.

If you can’t ignore the rules, break them. “We have created something original in a world where it is increasingly difficult to make something different,” announced Wolff Olins chairman Brian Boylan in the midst of the brouhaha surrounding the London 2012 launch.

The practical differences between design that exists for lack of context and design that exists for want of distinction may be difficult to see, but I am sure Helfand would appreciate the theoretical differences.

Of course, some (web) designers have no concern for typography at all, ugly or beautiful. Indeed, the art seems outdated, stuck to the confines of a millennium old medium. However, as long as words remain the most widely used ways of disseminating information, typography will reign supreme. Web designers would do well to learn the fundamentals of “shaping written information” considering web design is 95% typography.

Because nothing else is more important: Ze Frank is back. No telling if the video is a one-off thing, or the opening volley of a continuous attack on our senses, but we shall all bow down regardless.

I mean, how can we not love a man who shows us, yet again, how absolutely ridiculous Japanese television is?

Silverstripe has lengthy coverage of An Event Apart, a web design conference put on by A List Apart. The article (covering both days) is an immense grab bag of design inspiration, so definitely check it out. The An Event Apart page has the slides for the San Francisco events, as well as the other 2007 events (Boston, Chicago, and Seattle respectively).

The History of Visual Communication is a comprehensive walk through, well, the history of visual communication. The trail begins 40,000 years ago, and ends roughly a decade ago.

Anyone who has played Super Mario Bros. 2 knows it is a very different beast than the rest of the Super Mario Bros. family. In actuality, the game was hardly a Super Mario Bros. game at all, but an appropriation of Doki Doki Panic. The real Super Mario Bros. 2 was deemed too hard, and never released in America. Nintendo finally caved in and the game is now available through the Wii’s Virtual Console. After watching the YouTube video of a player racing through the whole game in 10 minutes, Slate has a piece detailing just how difficult, and fun, the real Super Mario Bros. 2 game is:

In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it—I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as “a giant puzzle and practical joke” isn’t far off.

Finally, much to the dismay of everyone hoping for an actual gPhone, Google has announced Android, an open-source mobile OS it is developing in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance. An introduction to Android is available on YouTube (after being pulled initially), but it is almost unbearingly vague, prompting some to ask, “Is Google now in the vaporware business?” And of course, the inevitable iPhone reference.

I’ve been filling this blog with too many topic posts lately, and not enough quick and gritty link dumps (which used to be this blog’s bread and butter, don’tcha know). So before I discuss Jason Kottke discussing the democratization of curating, some links for today:

The Blue Ribbon Glee Club is Chicago’s self-professed “(first?, only?) finest punk rock choir!” Their website has some live recordings from a May 3rd show, including Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” (thrust into the mainstream by a certain movie). Mp3 luddites can also head over to YouTube for a video of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?

Erin McKean is “Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press”, which basically means she’s one of the bastards who are keeping inartful out of dictionaries. (I kid; she’s no traffic cop, and seems very nice.) Her “official biography” categorizes her as a dictionary evangelist, and this certainly seems appropriate. Over the past few years she has given many cool talks at many cool places (TED, Pop!Tech, Authors@Google), all with the hopes of redefining our view of the dictionary. With great wit and insight, she implores us to cast away our Elizabethan tomes and embrace a restructured language.

RAINBOW IN YOUR HAND – A flip book with 36 black pages. On each page is are small, colored boxes, and when you flip through the book, a rainbow appears. See it in action on YouTube.

A Brief Message is a weekly updated site presenting design opinions in 200 words or less. Recent contributors have included Erin McKean (yeah I have a crush, deal with it) on neologisms and Alissa Walker on Thinking Outside the “Dick in a Box”. Besides providing some large ideas in a small package, A Brief Message is also noteworthy for its own design. As Hans verschooten points out, the site (conservatively) eschews the cookie cutter design practices that have become law in this so-called Web 2.0 age. I know I am as guilty as the next, but it is nice to see each piece of content being given some unique attention.

And not to end on too serious a note, I leave you with some sage advice from The Aggrolites. If ever there’s a mess, when in doubt, pickitup pickitup pickitup

Besides looking good, the elastic list of Nobel prize winners provides a presentation that is interesting as much for the actual content as for its ability to effortlessly display information about that content. The elastic list visualizes the data in two main ways (better explained at the Well-formed data blog entry). First, the size of the cells is dynamic, and the cells change in size relative to the chosen filter. Second, brightness of the cells comes to indicate relative proportion during a filtered view, or “characteristicness” of the data when unfiltered.

I know I have made the whole thing sound unbearably boring, but even disregarding the technology the list is supposed to demo, it is worth a look. It is always fascinating to see the contributions to humanity that warranted this highest of honors.

One of the Internet’s first uses was as a national connection between labs and universities. The current Internet keeps with this tradition of disseminating scientific information. Also in today’s Undressing the Internet: cute dancing cats and girls getting ripped in half.

On the international front: Straight from Russia come folk redesigns of movie posters. And from the United Kingdom, a small article on everyone’s favorite Japanese author (read: mine), Haruki Murakami.

On the web design front: For anyone out there building a website, a couple new tools have emerged to help out. Most notably, Browsershots.org lets you test your web design in different browsers. For free. No account needed. Also cool, but more informative than helpful, raketforskning.com now has a live Pagerank tool so you can check your site’s Pagerank 1-2-3. And, finally, not a tool, but a whole website full of interesting things to do with CSS: CSS Play, experiments with cascading style sheets.

On the science front: First, a quick jaunt through mathematics. The Mathematical Atlas is pages and pages and pages of introductions to the areas of modern mathematics. Lost before you even begin? Check out the Math Atlas’ tour of the subfields of mathematics for a quick overview. Getting a little more specific, scienceblogs.com has an introduction to information theory. A very good, easy to comprehend read.

As science once again encroaches on the philosophical questions of the humanists, Geoffrey Harpham argues discussion between scientists and humanists could lead to a new golden age of philosophy and science.

Small physics (e.g., particle physics, quantum mechanics, string-theory, etc.) has become increasingly esoteric. Its theories are steeped in math and explaining them in layman’s terms varies from impossible to almost impossible. Thus, it is always commendable when someone comes along with clear explanations and visualizations of a tricky physics matter. To what is all this leading? Imagining the Tenth Dimension, a website for the book of the same name, which seeks to show what the ten dimensions of (one version of) string theory look like.

On the terrible, terrible, embarrassing story front: “I attempted to lose my virginity on craigslist.”

On the OMG IT’S SO CUTE front: Dance you ASCII cat, dance!

On the (finally) random links front: Wikiquote has a collection of last words. A personal favorite: Caligula exclaimed “Vivo” as he was being murdered by his own soldiers. Translation? “I live!”

Think you’re smart? Well, test yourself with the simple intelligence test.

A complete waste of time: A clock with dots for seconds and three centuries worth of days portrayed by dots.

Criss Angel rips a girl in half. That is as self explanatory as you can get.

Have a Windows password that needs cracking? Check out Ophcrack 2, “the faster Windows password cracker.” It’s available as a Live CD, so you can burn the program to a CD, boot from it, and get crackin’. Hurray for free ways to break laws and steal passwords.

I leave you with this: The Royal College of Art Summer Show in London had a submission by Tim Simpson entitled “Natural Deselection”. What’s the idea? “Three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.”