The Paper Trail

The article is very interesting and helpful, but my attention is also drawn to the design, which is based only on text, with no images or ornament. This approach has a kind of simple authority. The writer understands that the first principles of layout are beautiful in themselves. But also he knows that he himself is an authority, and that people will appreciate his writing because of what he is saying, and not because it is eye-catching. This is an essentially masculine approach. We might even say it is merely masculine.

Since I am married now, the JDueck.Net website now comes from two people instead of one, and we are redesigning it to reflect this. It will be essential that the design not be exclusively masculine or feminine. Because I express myself in writing, the text should be clear to read. I should have confidence in my writing, and I should not try to use ornament to disguise faults in my writing. But because my spouse expresses herself in ornament and in pictures, each page of text should itself be also a picture and a desirable ornament that has its own clear meaning.

Good writing has meaning, and a good picture has meaning. When you examine the parts of a good picture with your eye, and again view the whole picture with your eye, you feel rewarded, because the different kinds of beauty you see have much meaning. The same thing happens when you examine a good piece of writing with your mind: you feel rewarded for your effort. When the page has clear writing with much meaning, and is itself also a good picture with much meaning, it is like a flat circle that has become a ball. You may enjoy reading it, and you may enjoy looking at it, but you are actually enjoying both things at the same time, without realizing it and without trying.

Another one for the now-is-the-best-time-in-history-to-be-a-writer file: We’re in the middle of a long-running wave of change in how books are written and published, the kind of change that happens once every few hundred years.

I am glad to see these kinds of discussions, although, at present, I believe it is useless to think in terms of “Christian art” or “secular art.”

This wonderful article makes me sad and anxious, for it provides a such beautiful counterexample to everything that is wrong with living in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Where I live, beautiful natural spaces and architecture are sparse, and where they exist, they are boxed into separate blocks or zones rather than infusing our general atmosphere.

The subject of designing natural and inspiring spaces is an interesting one to me, and this article is a highly satisfying one in respect of improving one’s perspective in that area, the more so because it draws on such an old, authentic source of thought from the past. But my satisfaction in it is overwhelmed by an even keener sense it awakens in me, of the gap between the possible and the real.