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walkingshadow is a good friend to me and lo, there were Rodney McKay icons in my mailbox today. I've decided that if McKay were to own T-shirts with himself on them, this would definitely be on the laundry pile, soft and worn and frayed at its hems.So I figure, what better way to break it in than with a good rant.
Speaking of icons, something that really grinds my gears: tiny text. I've discussed this with Miranda, who expends considerable time and sanity making them, and she explained it as a design element, the aesthetic pleasure of the inconsistent line, and that the text for most people either doesn't mean anything or isn't even words.
I still don't like it. What's the point of text if it can't be read? She mentioned Chinese characters on T-shirts having the same effect in that they're not meant to be understood. But mostly, I see tiny text like some stories I've read that are written well and have good premises but are unintelligible because there's an impossible amount of reading between the lines and psychic ability involved in discrening what it's trying to get across. It becomes more frustrating than anything else. I get the element of intrigue and making the consumer work for the product, I do, but what has been accomplished when the point is lost on the majority of the audience? And in the case of tiny text, all of the audience?
I'm fine with things looking like one thing and being another, so long as that other is discernible. But tiny text comes off as at best, wasted effort; at middling, a line that almost fits with the icon but not really so it's made small to hide that fact; and at worst, pointless pretention - like, oh, what, you don't get my art? How bourgeois of you. Don't get me wrong - I like art and talking to artists about their ideas and the ways in which their work manifests, but I do think there's a lot of it that's virtually incomprehensible or be so open to interpretation as to be rendered as such.
The idea behind LiveJournal is, in my head anyway, that it's a medium for the masses. It's for anybody who wants it, no particular talent required, and the whole idea is that within it, you're coming together in a community (or at least taking some varying levels of active participation in contributing to it.) So making an icon that can't possibly be understood by people who otherwise share every other interest in the universe seems counterproductive to the democracy of the medium. Which I realize is a fiction, whatwith fandom having its own hierarchies and politics, but back to the point, tiny text takes art that is smart or clever or funny and unnecessarily making it inaccessible. Icons are supposed to be, to some greater or lesser extent, a mode of self-expression in addition to the post. And if that piece of the message is lost on the audience or makes an unintended impression, then what hase been accomplished?
IMHO, as a member of that bourgeois. As proof, I will now return to my lunch of unfrozen arepa and instant coffee.
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I would have so many more icons from giveaways if not for tiny text. But no matter how much I love everything else, I won't use an icon that's got tiny text on it.
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