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Just What I Need--Another Blog To Read. Posted on 07/10/2001.

I spent much of this morning clicking around Melanie Goux's brushstroke.tv. Mel (I can call you, "Mel," right?) writes about design, aesthetics, branding, cognition, etc. etc., all kinds of stuff that peterme readers enjoy. Her latest post deals with simplicity and complexity in visual design, spurred by the success of the information-dense Fox News Channel (which I'm guessing is similar to Bloomberg in all the data whizzing around the screen), and followed up with pointers to Kaplan's Information Processing Model, attempting to situate our desire for complex visualization in an evolutionary context. It recalled an old post of mine on what I called "multi-channel information reception".

I'm wary of drawing too many parallels from Kaplan's understanding of how human's scan and understand landscapes and how we deal with textual information density. There might be something there, but my gut instinct is to tread warily--the leap is quite vast.

Brushstroke also features "Me, The Undersigned," a design manifesto of sorts from Jessica Helfand. I have a love/hate relationship with Helfand's writing--she's clearly a very intelligent design formalist with an engaging and revealing point of view... But she's also *such* a graphic designer, promoting the aesthetics of design above all else, never ever ever really taking into account how her audience uses that which is designed. Still and all, a provocative voice worth hearing.

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