Week 8: 3 Points and a Question

1) "Perhaps the most persistent impulse of twentieth-century art and design was to physically integrate form and content" (74). Meaning, that the content was integrated with the actual concrete layout of the specific letterforms on a page. Today, especially as seen with websites, cascading stylesheets allow a global and systematic design as opposed to focusing on a fixed construction of a particular surface. I think the problem is that this loose structure causes a lot of the discontinuity that plague websites, or I think it could prompt a lot of templates that are easily reformatted and used often so that they coincide with the stylesheets.

2) Lupton argues that typography is usually ignored. With paper texts, the typography can make the page pop or make it the real identifier with the letterform, shape, size, texture, spacing, etc. She says one of the arguments is that it pushes design to the background, but she seems to share White's opinion that every element on a page is an element of design.

3) Tacking is the space between letters, Lupton calls it normal, positive and negative tracking. I find this interesting since Word refers to it as expanded, normal and condensed. I would think that it would be the same terminology. I think a good point to make is especially with long URL's applying negative tracking (or condensing it) is acceptable as that usually keeps it on the same line.

Question: Although from a design perspective it makes sense to have a user-centered design, in having the reader as the focus of all design aspects, what has been lost that the author could have contributed? What could the user-centered experience be taking away from the old design methods?