From AfroMusing’s photostream on flickr, a program that allows people to report violence through SMS. The objectives for reporting, listed in the poster below are: mobilization, study and tracking, assistance, awareness- and fund-raising.
UnitedforAfrica maps reported incidents:
“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”
After looking at the Obama brand, the NYT gets around to the McCain brand. Best comment about the use of Optima comes from Seymour Chwast of Pushpin Studio:
Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.
Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.
Reminds me of the voice-over at the beginning of the movie Helvetica that goes something like: “Helvetica is the McDonalds of typefaces. It’s what you have when you don’t care what you’re eating, so you just eat crap.”
Yet another look at the branding elements behind Obama’s success. I get kind of impatient with the analysis that the brand is driving the success of the candidate. My take is that the candidate has always been different (people have been reading and enjoying Obama’s writing for years, because the thinking is different, feels new and free of baby boomer politics), and that the brand shows the difference. The focus on Gotham in the Obama campaign fetishizes the font (in the sociological sense, not the more interesting erotic sense(*)). Gotham is portrayed as having a power of its own, rather than being a reflection of the content:
Q: What is it about the typeface Gotham that adds personality to the Obama brand?
A: I don’t think that Gotham adds any personality to Senator Obama’s brand. I think it just amplifies the personality that’s already there. In fact, the typeface would work just as well for John McCain or Hillary Clinton, for that matter.
That’s kind of a messy statement and one that drifts into fetishism. Yes, Gotham amplifies the Obama brand, but then how could it work just as well for Clinton or McCain? McCain and Clinton are running classic strategies in which they secure a large part of their traditional base (which are seen as roughly equal) and fight over the center. By design, their campaigns are moderate American. Their brands need to look familiarly American. In Clinton’s case, it’s red, white, and blue, wavy flag curves and stars, and strong American typefaces. This is the standard political band:
McCain, the oft-described maverick, makes an interesting move away from the vernacular:
It’s US armed forces America, a familiar, centrist America.
It’s maverick (and I have loads of respect for McCain), but it’s grounded in the centrist strategy.
Obama’s strategy is based on game-changing (and I don’t say that as an endorsement, it’s a risky strategy), redefining traditional values, re-casting conversations Moving away from the American political vernacular that most other candidates use represents that.
There’s much more to the brand going on here than just the typeface. It runs the risk of not looking American, or at least not centrist, world leader America. The blues are measurably different, the curves connote countries and the planet, not flags.
Abandoning what I guess I’m calling the centrist America idiom is not unique to Obama or new. Gary Hart in 1984, my first political campaign, had a very high-tech typeface which Walter Mondale could never have used. What’s different is that Obama is still in the race so we have to look at the campaign to see why he’s winning when he shouldn’t be.
Gotham is not a force unto itself, rather it is a typeface that reflects the content of the campaign. As Robert Bringhurst so elegantly reminds in The Elements of Typographic Style:
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet, in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say must therefore aspire to a kind of statuesque transparency.
That said, there’s a nice bit about Gotham’s growing popularity:
there’s an oxymoronic quality to Gotham, which is why I think it’s become so popular. It has a blunt, geometric simplicity, which usually makes words feel cold and analytical (like Univers), but it also feels warm. It’s substantial yet friendly. Up-to-date yet familiar. That’s a tough hat trick. And Gotham has another quality that makes it succeed: it just looks matter-of-fact. But perhaps any typeface inspired by signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City — as Gotham is — will look like that.
If I had time, it would be interesting to switch the blues between Clinton’s and Obama’s materials above, and put Gotham under McCain’s military star and gold accents. My guess is that it would work about as well as dropping helvetica into the Marlboro logo:
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(*) Fetishism in the sociological sense comes from Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. His argument, vastly oversimplified, was that economists were talking about commodities (goods bought and sold in the marketplace) as entities abstracted from their physical realities (specifically, how much labor time went into their production) and turned into near-magical objects with prices that function in a world of maths and models.
I loved seeing this in the NYT yesterday:
It’s nice to be in suspense about the results of a primary this late in the year, to see voters mobilizing voters, and to have the pollsters twiddling their thumbs while, forgive me, the people decide.
Terrific TNR article referred to me by Todd Walker describes how the Obama team uses data and wonky policy techniques in a way that seems relevant for many of us in an increasingly number-rich, -doused, -drenched, -dictated world.
The article starts with a description of the influence of neo-classical refiner Richard Thaler:
Behaviorists like Thaler believed that the perfectly rational, utterly self-interested maximizers of economists’ imaginations had little in common with actual human beings, who frequently err when making simple calculations, who have trouble with self-control, who often act out of altruism or spite.
But what’s really interesting is how Thaler and his fellow behaviorists responded to this fairly critical insight. Though rational self-interest was the central tenet of neoclassical (i.e., modern) economics, they didn’t take a wrecking ball to the field and replace it with some equally sweeping theory of human behavior. Instead, they labored to bring economics closer in line with how the world actually works, one small adjustment at a time. “‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly,’” Thaler wrote in the introduction to The Winner’s Curse, quoting the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. “I hope to accomplish that first step–awareness of anomaly. Perhaps at that point we can start to see the development of the new, improved version of economic theory.”
One of my biggest gripes with data and marketing models (funnels) is that people tend to approach them as rules to live by. When faced with an anomaly, there are two responses: 1) wave it off as an anomaly; or 2) try to force the anomaly into the ‘model’. It’s a bit like the retrograde motion of planets: when the observational data pointed to non-circular motion of the planets, retrenching astronomers created these weird circle-within-circle movements that had no plausible explanation, but preserved the pretty circles. A third approach would be to evolve the model, soften its hard edges, add some dynamics to it.
The divide in economics between numbers and working models is becoming a chasm. What’s great about Thaler’s approach is that it functions somewhere between the wrecking ball of a new model, but avoids retrograde techniques. The thinking embraces the anomaly and allows for a punctuated equilibrous burst in the development of the model. “Like their intellectual godfather Thaler, the Obama wonks aren’t particularly interested in tearing down existing paradigms, just adjusting and extending them when they become outdated. (Thaler urges his students to master the same traditional, mathematical models their colleagues do if they want to be taken seriously.)”
Another nice passage highlights that there is still something along the lines of expertise and judgement that can live well with numbers:
The second difference is that the Obama hands tend to feel less hemmed in by establishment opinion. As one Obama adviser puts it, “Democrats want to be just a little bit different from Republicans, but not so different that they get attacked for being weak.” Like Hamilton, the Obamanauts generally reject this calculus–not because they favor some radical alternative, but because clinging to received foreign policy wisdom can preclude highly practical courses of action.
Of course, here they’re talking about foreign policy, which is not numbers-based. But the idea of “practical courses of action” — things which just make sense or feel right, pass the sniff test, resonate with a highly trained neerve ending have a place in their discussions, agenda, and plans.
It also allows for leadership without ignoring the polls, or innovation without ignoring the data.
Doug Coates (plasticbag.org) did a review of the XO for Icon magazine (with a sexy “air” picture of the machine). He’s ambivalent, to say the least, about doing a review in this context:
There’s something troubling about reviewing Nicholas Negroponte’s XO – the so-called “$100 dollar laptop� – for a design magazine. And that I’m writing the piece on my gas-guzzling SUV of a MacBook Pro can only compound the horror.
The XO has been in the news for a while, but icon is the first magazine to actually get hold of one. The thing is, this is not a machine designed to be evaluated by people like me. In all the ways that matter, it’s not a consumer artefact. It’s not trying to wheedle itself into your living room. It has more in common with a clean water pump than it does with an iPod.
As you might imagine from the text, he’s generally behind the project. His strong feelings prompted him to republish the essay on his blog (without Icon’s editorial cuts) and with an intro, where he explicitly talks about the politics of the XO.
But at least he talks about the design from the perspective of a design critic:
Green and white with a tough, textured plastic body about the same size as a lunch-box, it has been optimised in every way to deal with the extreme conditions of its use. Its astonishingly frugal use of electricity allows it to function in areas where power is sparse or even non-existent. The screen switches into an energy-efficient black and white mode that is also readable in direct–even aggressive–sunlight. The rubberised keyboard seals the device against dust and water. Even the friendly green “ears” of the device serve a triple function - acting as latches, protective shields for USB ports and as antennae designed to extend the range of the distributed wifi networks that will connect children across the planet.
There’s more in his review, and hopefully will be more from others. I’m still intrigued.
In today’s NYT, an article about Obama’s surge has a quick paragraph summing up what it means:
The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.
Now perhaps there is more polling data or, more important, tracking data, showing that many voters once thought he was unelectable or unqualified have recently changed their minds and think he is electable and qualified. If that were the case, though, why not say “exit polls in the latest string of victories show voters who had once considered him unelectable or unqualified are seeing him in a different light”? Better yet, why not tell us what caused this change?
Presumably there was no data to support that. Instead, there is a hypothesis that voters’ primary reasons for voting for a candidate are: 1) they have the money, organization, strategy, and personality/character/demographic/skin color to be a strong candidate against the likely Republican nominee (electability); or 2) their previous job experience maps to the skill set needed to be leader of the free world. It follows, then, that a vote for someone is based on these two factors and increased numbers of votes means an increase in these two factors.
This is a classic case of an unvalidated assumption. Ever since Nixon’s sweat glands lost him the 1960 election, we’ve had examples of more emotional, thin slice evaluations of candidates. A trip down memory lane:
Don’t trust him, don’t like him.
Wimp. Artificial.
Tough. He paid for the mike and he’s gonna use it, don’t you dare OReilly him.
Cool? Self-confident? Oh yeah: eminently qualified to be the leader of the free world, and with
a good strategy for getting elected.
Not to mention that people will gladly vote for candidates who represent something other than electability or qualifications — hope, trustworthiness, I want this guy to be president even if he’s not electable (Nader), outsiders can shake things up (Perot) . . .
I’m not unhappy about the results, just the poor thinking masquerading as analysis . . . at the NYT of all places.
The New York Times did a what now seems inevitable article comparing Clinton to a PC and Obama to a Mac. (Not sure a summary of the comparison is even needed, or even the article. It’s pretty obvious where it goes.)
I think the better analogy is that Obama is a 1.0 software release and Clinton a 3.x.y.
Obama 1.0 is full of promise, free of legacy, naive about marketing, and, being untested in the market, quite possibly everything it promises to be (and even what you hope for). While operating Obama 1.0, it has a clean feel, offers ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ moments of fresh surprise, and whatever isn’t working isn’t so bad: it’s 1.0 after all.
Clinton, on the other hand, is 3.x.y: all cruft and spaghetti code and in need of patches and special drivers. There are very features (positions) that you arrive at through a clear path, and when you do get there, they’re so laden with marketing ideas and embellishments that you’re never quite certain it’s what you asked for, want, or need. When you trace the history of any feature, the path is so circuitous and constrained by legacy issues, that you wonder how it all hangs together, or if it hangs together at all.
That’s not as loaded as it sounds - in many ways, it’s a rehash of the generational issue. Obama’s inexperience, like JFK’s, is free of cruft and spaghetti code, while having the added virtue of allowing people to project hopes and dreams onto the candidacy. Clinton’s experience, while showing market strength and durability, has the drawback of grounding a person in reality.