¶ Aspects and Orders · 20 May 2006 essay/tech
Although I'm not at all sure this is factually fair, I have begun to mentally, and maybe emotionally, blame Flickr for what feels to me like a plague of subject-oblivious square photo-cropping.
I should admit, I guess, that when it's me operating the camera, I'm a pretty extreme horizontalist. I'm happiest at about 3:1. In a tool universe built around 4:3, though, this is kind of a pain in the ass. I could mask my camera's LCD for 3:1 feedback, but then the picture is really too small to work from. For online display I have to assume 4:3-ish frame spaces, so 3:1 images end up in practice being shorter instead of wider, which is unsatisfying. And digital cameras will have to pack a lot more pixels into 4:3 sensors before I'll be informationally content to throw away more than half of them. And my obsessive preference for aspect-ratio consistency in exhibition sets means that I would usually rather stick to 4:3 for everything than mix in the occasional 3:1 where I spot an opportunity despite the obstacles.
So I understand, of course, the value of square-cropping in any content-neutral photo-showing application. It's possible to do an attractive job of mixing aspect-ratios, but it's exponentially easier to do an even more attractive job of displaying consistent aspect-ratios. Cropping 4:3s and 3:4s to 1:1 symmetrically is technically trivial, and although it's aesthetically unreliable in the abstract, the vast majority of amateur photographs are center-weighted, so it usually turns out OK. Actually, the vast majority of amateur photographs are also probably framed too widely, so a little universal symmetrical cropping almost certainly improves more Flickr pictures than it damages.
So cropping all pictures to squares for thumbnailing makes perfect sense as a Flickr design decision. It simplifies away arguably the biggest visual design problem in mass photo display. If you're looking at somebody else's photographs, it's easy to fall into assuming they are square, so any weirdness in framing you're likely to implicitly attribute to the photographer. The same applies to your own photographs unless you've spent some time seriously considering the originals, and the more you use Flickr, the more it is the way you consider your own photographs en masse.
But if your exhibited photographs are usually going to be approached through thumbnail galleries (the prevalence of which Flickr has also hugely influenced), and the thumbnails are usually going to be squares, it will simplify the rest of the experience if your photographs actually are square. I don't know if any digital cameras are already shipping with built-in square-cropping modes, but I expect those to start appearing very soon if they haven't already. The more square photos people have, the more display-tools will cheat and optimize for them, and the more incentive there will be to be square.
But square is a bad base ratio for photography, at least if by "photography" we mean people taking pictures of things people see, for other people to later share (or imagine) the experience of seeing. We see our world horizontally. Our eyes are side-by-side, our lives are gravity-flattened, our emotional landscapes are literal landscapes as often as metaphorical. My 3:1 fetish may be extreme, but I'm pretty sure that if you take photographs on their own terms, humans instictively respond more positively to wide aspect-ratios. The standard terms are actually telling: "landscape" refers to the subject of the picture, "portrait" to the act of picturing it. We can appreciate photographs in all sorts of shapes, but we can empathize with seeing most readily when the shared vision is the shape of experienced vision.
So this self-reinforcing dependent vogue for square photography is, I think, a machine gain and a human loss. Worse, it's a sparkly machine-gain that humans are lining up to lose. Machine gains are almost always sparkly, if only because it's far easier to polish a working machine than it is to figure out the machine you should have built instead, or admit that it was better, even if it was harder, to do something by hand. And we form machine-polishing clubs, and start companies to make machine polish, and open shops to sell it, and years go by before we stop and think about the flaws in which we've become invested.
So too with this idiotic chronology-switchback setup we've tempoarily settled on for blog formats. The right way to read incremental written forms, beyond any vague doubt, is in serial order. You start at the top of the first entry, you read to the bottom, and then the top of the next entry should follow the bottom of the previous one. Thousands of years of usability research has validated this basic design.
All of which was summarily and obliviously ignored by the original engineers of HTML and web browsers, with the result that they neglected to provide a simple and reliable mechanism for one absolutely essential bit of visual behavior: a fixed identity header and indepdently scrollable/pageable content. Without this, a designer of serial content can have identity reinforcement (come into the page at the top) or currency (come into it in the middle, where the new content starts), but not both. And since they didn't build in any meaningful tools for handling the user-subjectivity of "current", identity basically wins by forfeit.
The reverse-chron blog format is a sparkly-machine solution to this problem. It puts the newest entry next to the identity, thus at least superficially addressing both goals at once. For every other purpose, though, it's actively reader-hostile. If the entries form any kind of overall narrative, you have to read it in a painful zig-zag. If you are following a blog and miss a single update, you have to use the same awful up-and-down to find where you left off, read down, scroll back up, read down, repeat. This is bad.
But it's bad in what has become an established way, so even if you don't believe the alternatives are worse on their own terms, they almost certainly become worse in public practice. As with square photographs, we make our tools in the easiest shapes, and then we accomodate their limitations, and then we hone them to perfect their limits, and then we forget that this is not how we wanted to live.
Next time you make a crude tool, don't polish it, and don't accomodate its limitations. Use it the way you wish it worked, pay attention to how that hurts, and then throw it away and try to make the next crude, unsparkly tool so that using it doesn't make the tool better, it makes us better.
I should admit, I guess, that when it's me operating the camera, I'm a pretty extreme horizontalist. I'm happiest at about 3:1. In a tool universe built around 4:3, though, this is kind of a pain in the ass. I could mask my camera's LCD for 3:1 feedback, but then the picture is really too small to work from. For online display I have to assume 4:3-ish frame spaces, so 3:1 images end up in practice being shorter instead of wider, which is unsatisfying. And digital cameras will have to pack a lot more pixels into 4:3 sensors before I'll be informationally content to throw away more than half of them. And my obsessive preference for aspect-ratio consistency in exhibition sets means that I would usually rather stick to 4:3 for everything than mix in the occasional 3:1 where I spot an opportunity despite the obstacles.
So I understand, of course, the value of square-cropping in any content-neutral photo-showing application. It's possible to do an attractive job of mixing aspect-ratios, but it's exponentially easier to do an even more attractive job of displaying consistent aspect-ratios. Cropping 4:3s and 3:4s to 1:1 symmetrically is technically trivial, and although it's aesthetically unreliable in the abstract, the vast majority of amateur photographs are center-weighted, so it usually turns out OK. Actually, the vast majority of amateur photographs are also probably framed too widely, so a little universal symmetrical cropping almost certainly improves more Flickr pictures than it damages.
So cropping all pictures to squares for thumbnailing makes perfect sense as a Flickr design decision. It simplifies away arguably the biggest visual design problem in mass photo display. If you're looking at somebody else's photographs, it's easy to fall into assuming they are square, so any weirdness in framing you're likely to implicitly attribute to the photographer. The same applies to your own photographs unless you've spent some time seriously considering the originals, and the more you use Flickr, the more it is the way you consider your own photographs en masse.
But if your exhibited photographs are usually going to be approached through thumbnail galleries (the prevalence of which Flickr has also hugely influenced), and the thumbnails are usually going to be squares, it will simplify the rest of the experience if your photographs actually are square. I don't know if any digital cameras are already shipping with built-in square-cropping modes, but I expect those to start appearing very soon if they haven't already. The more square photos people have, the more display-tools will cheat and optimize for them, and the more incentive there will be to be square.
But square is a bad base ratio for photography, at least if by "photography" we mean people taking pictures of things people see, for other people to later share (or imagine) the experience of seeing. We see our world horizontally. Our eyes are side-by-side, our lives are gravity-flattened, our emotional landscapes are literal landscapes as often as metaphorical. My 3:1 fetish may be extreme, but I'm pretty sure that if you take photographs on their own terms, humans instictively respond more positively to wide aspect-ratios. The standard terms are actually telling: "landscape" refers to the subject of the picture, "portrait" to the act of picturing it. We can appreciate photographs in all sorts of shapes, but we can empathize with seeing most readily when the shared vision is the shape of experienced vision.
So this self-reinforcing dependent vogue for square photography is, I think, a machine gain and a human loss. Worse, it's a sparkly machine-gain that humans are lining up to lose. Machine gains are almost always sparkly, if only because it's far easier to polish a working machine than it is to figure out the machine you should have built instead, or admit that it was better, even if it was harder, to do something by hand. And we form machine-polishing clubs, and start companies to make machine polish, and open shops to sell it, and years go by before we stop and think about the flaws in which we've become invested.
So too with this idiotic chronology-switchback setup we've tempoarily settled on for blog formats. The right way to read incremental written forms, beyond any vague doubt, is in serial order. You start at the top of the first entry, you read to the bottom, and then the top of the next entry should follow the bottom of the previous one. Thousands of years of usability research has validated this basic design.
All of which was summarily and obliviously ignored by the original engineers of HTML and web browsers, with the result that they neglected to provide a simple and reliable mechanism for one absolutely essential bit of visual behavior: a fixed identity header and indepdently scrollable/pageable content. Without this, a designer of serial content can have identity reinforcement (come into the page at the top) or currency (come into it in the middle, where the new content starts), but not both. And since they didn't build in any meaningful tools for handling the user-subjectivity of "current", identity basically wins by forfeit.
The reverse-chron blog format is a sparkly-machine solution to this problem. It puts the newest entry next to the identity, thus at least superficially addressing both goals at once. For every other purpose, though, it's actively reader-hostile. If the entries form any kind of overall narrative, you have to read it in a painful zig-zag. If you are following a blog and miss a single update, you have to use the same awful up-and-down to find where you left off, read down, scroll back up, read down, repeat. This is bad.
But it's bad in what has become an established way, so even if you don't believe the alternatives are worse on their own terms, they almost certainly become worse in public practice. As with square photographs, we make our tools in the easiest shapes, and then we accomodate their limitations, and then we hone them to perfect their limits, and then we forget that this is not how we wanted to live.
Next time you make a crude tool, don't polish it, and don't accomodate its limitations. Use it the way you wish it worked, pay attention to how that hurts, and then throw it away and try to make the next crude, unsparkly tool so that using it doesn't make the tool better, it makes us better.