artifacts and central themes.

steven turner is a smithsonian curator, discussing the acquisition of scientific & medical artifacts from around the country. in this article, he is talking about going to get a collection of old physics classroom instruments from a teacher who has been keeping these historical tokens as they become obsolete. it is important to realize, he says, that it's not just the big important inventions and discoveries of the times that paint the picture of science through history, but also the simple things that the high-schoolers use in physics class to learn the things that scientists have already figured out.

in this way, and i'm going to quote directly, because this quote is so brilliant: "the best of these instruments are like time machines; they provide today exactly the same experience that they gave more than a hundred years ago. with them we can experience science in much the same way as our ancestors, and with that evidence we can begin to understand what science meant to them."

in our artifact collection, we have been thinking in this way. this kind of social archeology is precisely what we're invoking in our analysis of a 'culture', the idea that from only the artifacts, and the experience of using them, you can backtrace to the feelings that must have been generated by using them, and the kind of person you must be to have taken part in their use.

/

hillman curtis, author of education of an e-designer, writes of the danger of working without a theme: you can't stand up for yourself, and even those uninitiated to the world of design will be able to see that for some reason, your work just doesn't quite communicate. the identification of a core, a central theme, a contextual foundation, a secret message, is crucial to successful design, because even if the viewer is unable to pick it out once your finished, there will have been one guiding motivation behind every decision you've made throughout the design process.

he says that there should be a target, a three-tiered target, where the most critical, driving element is at the center: your theme, while the next two tiers are support and backup for that central concept, and that even a quick chat with your client should, in some almost subconscious fashion, reveal to you what those tiers contain and in what order. once these have been established, then you are free to move forward confidently, returning your decisions to your bull's-eye concept at every question along the way, no matter how small or seemingly unrelated.

this is how we should be treating our books. there is no such thing as random in design. having identified our core cultural values in the first step, every subsequent step should in some way relate to a central theme, even if it's not immediately apparent what that relationship is to an outside viewer. our layouts, then, and the colors of our imagery, and even the compositions of those images should all have a direct reference to that central theme.