On a more mundane level the typographic challenges presented in a work like We Feel Fine are the daily challenges that face all designers of electronic media, namely designing for dynamic content. Designing something as basic as a nav bar the first question you wonder is ‘what is the longest link?’ Designing more complex pages that contain multiple instances of dynamic data, (news pages et. al.) present even greater challenges. How long will the story title be? How much text will be in the abstract?

When designing for earlier browsers we often resorted to a lot of graphic text for our headings and navigation, indeed it was not uncommon to find complete homepages that were just one chopped up Photoshop image. What this boiled down to was the designer wanting 100% control over the look of the page and the technology not being quite there (or the designers having to design and produce the page). This was never going to be a sustainable approach to web design. Taking a random sample (courtesy of the Way Back Machine we can compare the Novell homepage of 2000 to the present. Not only was the overuse of graphic text clumsy for rapid updates it also rendered your site invisible to the ever more important search engine spiders.

As designers become more familiar with CSS and we all, designers, clients and engineers alike, realise that better websites are a collaboration between designers and technologists greater typographic control over dynamic text is now being achieved. It could be argued that the underlying technology, be it of the delivery (CSS/XML driven websites) or the development tool (Flash, Photoshop) is responsible for the look and feel (I would argue to a degree of 60-90%). In a random survey of Basecamp users by 37 signals one telling response to the question ‘What is Web 2.0’ was ‘It means rounded corners, gradients,…’ As design ‘control’ of the web ebbs and flows between designers and technologists it is interesting to trace these parallel aesthetic shifts.

Traditionally good typographic design has been all about control of the page, but designing for ever changing content on multiple screen types running multiple browsers set to multiple widths on multiple OS’s offers anything but control. This is the challenge of designing for electronic media, it is all about maintaining control in an environment where you have no control at all.

David Suttle has been designing electronic media since 1991.

Marcos Weskamp makes work in the same vein as We Feel Fine. Lots of interesting examples can be found at his site marumushi. He is probably most well known for newsmap, an application that typographically visualises the constantly changing landscape of Google’s news aggregator.

Data mining and information visualisation are bound up together in this intricate application. We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvarthat gathers data, specifically about human feelings, from weblogs all over the internet and uses computation to generate a series of playful interfaces visualising a random selection of these entries. The creators describe the work as ‘an exploration of human emotion on a global scale using data gathered from blogs. Described as a digital art work, the piece is yet another example of the inter-disciplinary collaboration that interactive digital media necessitates and affords. An interesting concept is just that until it is realised, and this is especially true for the experiential nature of interactive digital art works. The technical prowess behind this piece is seemingly effortless, and the interface uses a graphic language more familiar to design than fine art. Typography has prevalent importance here.

This piece has many of the characteristics of interactive digital typography. The typographic design is ‘live’, generated on the fly using computational code. Although this styling is pre-programmed, the contents are randomly grabbed from hyperspace. Thus, this real-time textual content keeps changing and the typographic design becomes a template to contain potentially any source. It is also yet another example of the pervasive nature, use and re-use of digital text on the web. Anything can be cut and pasted somewhere else. Typographic design serves to facilitate and highlight this re-purposing. In the case of We Feel Fine, even the truth of the information is overshadowed by the power of the concept.

Through We Feel Fine we also experience a strange reading experience where traditional notions of time are challenged. The words appear when we interact and according to our selections, but we don’t have control over their content or the time they were written. The content may be immediate and historical and from multiple geographic locations. We can have multiple reading experiences of the same emotion. In terms of current world events, it may even be possible to track the private feelings of the populous in a way that is not interpreted by more traditional media forms.

This is an awesome work because it creates a sense of connection to something vast and abstract in a tangible inviting game like application and typography contributes significantly to this experience.

In the ongoing battle to find hierarchy and efficient ways of organising things in this digitally overloaded information world, I find that I am constantly revising and rejigging my bookmarks in Firefox. I find a great link and I think, I must put that somewhere I won’t forget it. I must put it somewhere logical so I will find it, and I should make it highly visible so I know its a really good link! Is that why del.icio.us is so delicious? Personally, so far, I am still happy with Firefox. Anyway, the point is, managing, organising and updating bookmarks is now a constant administrative chore, a neccessary evil that has to be kept on top of or it piles up (literally). It constantly forces me to examine what methods I find best for cataloguing material of interest; alphabetic, thematic, geographic, key words, etc. The constant nature of adaptability that digital technology affords, is what is so wondorous about it.

It also makes me wonder about electronic documents and how to best design them. Already there are lots of examples of customisable literature, many large (and small) companies focus a lot of energy on customer relationship marketing, building communities around their brands through their website interface. Indivualisation of marketing collateral has been around for years now and consumers are somewhat immune to it. Do you remember the first time you got an email from Amazon telling you about a new design book you should buy because they thought it would be of interest to you based on previous purchases? This washes over most of us now because it seems so easy. We forget what life was like before pervasive digital intellance.

This brings me back to the question of customisable hierarchies and how individuals are now finding ways to organise and manage information that suits their personal cognitive style. I was wondeirng, if I kept a history of, or recorded the changes to my bookmark manager in FF, would I learn anything about the seemingly organic nature of how I am critically appraising my research materials? Would I discover that I am constantly trying to fit my cognitive style to the technology or, that the technology is truly adapting to my changing knowledge? Since hierarchies are a lynchpin of good print typography, how might we compare these ‘live’ screen typographic hierarchies? Is the technology dictating the typographic design of screen hierarchies or is the technology enabling us to devise completely new ones?