Neocreo.Blog
The stupidity of political correctness
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 06:53
Political correctness... according to wikipedia: "Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term applied to language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offense to gender, racial, cultural, disabled, aged or other identity groups. Conversely, the term "politically incorrect" is used to refer to language or ideas that may cause offense or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy."
I prefer to see it as the scurge of modern society. You are not allowed to dislike or laugh at anyone or anything that is related to religion, sex, age, political views, nationality etc etc.
At moments like this when I get really peeved, I like to quote my friend Oli "I have nothing against your nationality, sex or religion - I just hate and make fun of everyone equally."
What ticked me off now? Easy. In Sweden (where I live now), there are street signs to show where you are supposed to cross the roads (as if the zebra stripes on the road weren't a good enough indication). These signs are called "Herr Gårman" (Mr Here-You-Walkman). It is a word play in Swedish "Här går man" (here you walk) - basically to teach kids where to cross the street. See what they did there? Kinda smart. There was even a rhyme that kids got to learn
"Herr Gårman!
Herr Gårman!
På vita strecken får man
Här men inte där tut tut!
Här men inte där tut tut!
Herr Gårman!
Herr Gårman!
På vita sträcken får man!"
Loosely translated:
"Here you walk man! (Or "Mr Here-you-walk-man")
Here you walk man!
On the white lines you may
Here but not there beep beep!
Here but not there beep beep!
Here you walk man!
Here you walk man!
On the white lines you may"
Is that enough for some people? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Suddenly, after 50 years, the political correctness mob decided that it was sexist. Seriously. Because the sign depicts a "male" and not a "female" and is referred to as "Mr Walk-here-man". Political correctness solutiion to this? Make a new sign. OK, that is fine. Make a new sign depicting a woman in 1960's style dress and refer to the sign as "Mrs Walk-here-man.
WTF?! OK, I can buy that because men wear short hair it looks more like a man. But COME ON!! Sticking to the original intention of the rhyme, it just basically DOES-NOT-WORK!
Här går man != Fru går man (Here you walk != Wife walks man)
The original sign has a symbol for a humanoid. I cannot see an erect penis anywhere near the original sign? Are the stripes he steps on some weird symbolism for female genetalia? Have I missed something here? Did the bus leave and I wasn't told about it?
What is so much better with the new sign? What is the message? Wife walks over her man? Dude, walks like a lady? Is that the new rhyme? I can get behind the last question.
Boys and girls of all ages - isn't it time you stopped this bloody nonsense and stopped looking for innocent things and construct hidden meanings?
Other examples of PC gone crazy is a licorice ice-cream called "Nogger - Black", which was appearantly too racist for a white woman in her 30s. Appearantly the brown variety called just "Nogger" was not racist at all for 25 years. Another food item on the hot-list - negerbollar - coming from spanish "negra", ie black balls, which they are, have featured in the news many times because people are scared of the word "negro" after watching too many american movies and tv-shows. We Swedes stopped slavery a couple of hundred years before the US, and never imported africans in the first place. Why should we feel bad about it? It is just a word that is loosely related because of the colour for christ sakes! Back to the balls themselves - they are a delicious mixture of butter, oats, coffee, cacao and sugar, with a coating of coconut. They are not "chocolate balls" and not "oat balls" or "coconut-balls". I know for a fact it is not any black people involved in making them, neither as labour nor ingridient, but that the name is a referral to the original colour.
I can't believe I should have to get angry about this crap!
Could I move to another planet? Soon?
CSS3 for the masses
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 09:24
IMHO: CSS3 is a brilliant next step for presentational design for the web. And if you have been in the game as long as I have (around 13 years since my first webpage) then you know all about degrading your code so that alpha browsers get a really nice presentation with all bells and whistles (IE8, FF 3+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+), beta browsers get an OK presentation but might miss out on minor things. Gamma browsers (I count IE <= 6, IE for Mac, Netscape <=8, AOL users) well, seriously, just UPGRADE ALREADY.
In my latest project we are using CSS3, which appearantly even IE8 does a pretty good job of presenting.
One hump I got on my back is the implementation of columns in CSS3.
Typical column layout these days is done by floating or positioning div, depending on which school of thought you follow. This page for instance has a two column layout. It works and it is brilliant.
But is there any use for columns for content?
In normal newspaper layout you are used to read text in columns, and even that becomes hard at times, as the user looses track of where they were, especially when spanning several pages, or poor layouts. With the advent of columns for the web - users will not have a reference for dealing with this. Sure it is semantic and it will degrade properly, but my argument is that it will give a poor user experience, as users will have to scroll down for content, and print-designers think that their newspaper layouts automatically can be translated to the web. Bollocks to that. If anyone sees a good example of using multiple columns on a page, please let me know.
Until then -
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Why don't you use Mac OS X
Monday, 22 September 2008 13:19
One question I keep getting as a designer is:
"Why do you use Windows and not Mac OS X?"
I will tell you why:
Back in the day my first computer ever was a Commodore 64, later upgraded to Amiga 500. Beautiful computers and brilliant at what they were designed for: games. Amiga Workbench was also good for simple word processing and video effects, but I digress.
I played around with my dads Abc80, and his Vicor with Windows 3.11, but I honest to god did not start using computers daily until 1992 when I started college and was put in front of a Apple Mac II.
I loved macintosh, because the OS was so much more advanced than Windows those days. Not to mention the DTP software we used (Pagemaker, Freehand and Photoshop 2). Beat the heck out of Windows Paint for sure.
When I finished school Windows 95 had come out, and I bought it, mostly for games and surfing the internet. I was a Mac-taliban, suffering from the self rightious attitude that plagues so many Mac users.
With Windows 98, suddenly you could get working copies of Photoshop and later Pagemaker, which - of course did not work as well as on Macintosh.
Around the same time, Mac OS 9 came out and made my life a living hell. It was the worst OS I had used from Macintosh, caused constant issues with fonts and god knows what. I saw the bomb as my personal adversary. The first version of Mac OS X was pure hell as most software from Adobe had to be run in a virtual environment, and usually crashing.
As I was freelancing I started working more and more on my PC until finally I moved away from advertising to New Media. Photoshop worked just as well on PC as on Mac, and so did all other software too. Frankly I felt like I had more control with a Windows machine.
I also started to really see my fellow designers in a new light. Most of them actually got aggressive when I voiced opinion that Windows was a perfectly good platform (not to mention cheaper). They actually showed fanatical tendencies, refusing to adher to that if your users are 99% Windows users, they will not have "Geneva" on their system - just as an example. Even refusing to set their monitors to 96dpi to mimic window displays was against their beliefs.
I felt like I had left a sect and the members still in there could not tolerate any heretics.
I don't mind Mac OS - to me it is just a tool - not a way of life.
I just refuse to get one for the same reasons as I do not join a christian church - I like the message and the format, but I cannot stand being seen as one of the braindead users who believe every little thing is made of gold and that the message spewed out is the word of God.
So until then I declare a war on all terrorists from both camps, be they Windows fascists, Mac Talibans or Penguin huggers. And until then I will run dual boot with Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10.
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