It seems that there are already threads about least favorite designs and so forth, but I thought we should see if our collective complaining can put the brakes on some of the prevailing BAD design trends.
My vote goes to color coordinated bookshelves. You know, you are seeing it everywhere now... put your books on the shelves arranged, not by subject, not by size, not by author, but by the COLOR of the SPINE. The first time I saw this I thought "what kind of anal retentive nitwit memorizes each and every book they own by the color of their spine?" The answer is clearly NONE. You know that if they ever do reference their books (they are not just decorative objects) that they spend way too much time scratching their heads thinking "... now where the hell...?"
Ok, Ok, it's cute and I get it... you don't like the visual chaos of all those different colors and fonts. Well, if that's the case, put your books in a closet! Or get a library card. Every time I see another lemming copy this stupid idea, I am overcome with an impulse to knock every book off their shelves and say "this time do it by hue!".
Ok, maybe I am coming a bit strong on this particular point, and there are certainly other trends that annoy me. Not just for their trendiness, but for their senselessness. I mean, design is about rational solutions to problms as much as it is aesthetics. I just can't tolerate ideas that absolutly fly in the face of reason, that have no purpose other than to be cheeky.
Please help make it stop!
Oh I've done that for years
- the colour coordinated thing..
But here in the UK Penguin books are made like that- so it's not such an odd thing to do.
Books of different eras and genres have different coloured spines, but essentially the same format.
Obviously I don't do that for reference books, but might be guilty of putting them in sizes...and colour oftens helps me recognise a certain book.
Surely alphabeticizing could be described as equally anally retentive?
..and why is anally retentive such a bad thing when it comes to something like books which naturally need order?- the antithesis would be to throw them in heap in the middle of the room..
Books Do Furnish A Room...
I too have to own up to putting all my (several hundred) orange spined Penguins together and I reckon they look smashin'. They were designed by Jan Tschichold (a man with credentials) for those who care. I also have a set of white spined Abram Games designed 'pictorial' Penguins from 1958 and they look great too. Books and print media are becoming endangered - a university library I know has, out of 5 floors, only one containing books. In twenty years time when reading matter is a computer and a bundle of memory sticks we may miss the humble book and the decorative opportunities it offers
Not for me
I don't like the color arrangements either---I'd never be able to find what I want though maybe it works better with smaller book collections (or with you Brits and your Penguins---we don't have much of anything like that in the states).
That said, one of my grown kids has done this with her books and says she has no problem finding what she wants. Though yeah, she has about 1/8 the books I do.
I was wandering through IKEA the other day and did a double-take when passing by the Billy bookcase display. Something looked really good. Guess what---it was that the bookcases were filled with books with the spines turned inward. Only the page edges showed. It made a really nice pattern. Of course I'd never, ever do that and I would hope that no one else who actually reads their books do it. But I know there are people who go out and buy huge lots of used books just for decorating purposes, and I bet at least a few of them will do this trick. Oh well.
Spine inward
This is actually an old-fashioned bookmark of sorts. My grandmothers both did this to indicate books they'd read or weren't currently using much. I personally like the way it looks, but I'm not sure how I'd be able to know what book was what on the shelves. I don't like the color coordinated method either, but it does indeed cut down on the visual chaos. I tend to put book behind doors cuz I can't take all the eye clutter. I love books but I don't like looking at hem unless I'm actually reading them
Recognition
Why is recognition by colour deemed to be less worthy than recognition by text..which is altogether more difficult, and we are mostly visual people ?
Why is harmony eschewed for discord just because we're talking about books?
I'm not even 'going there' on the content of said books 😉
"Why is harmony eschewed for discord just because we're talking about books?"
Because books contain content, they're not object d'art. Organizing books by anything other than subject matter is silly, to say the least. When you want to locate a book, you want to locate the book's content, not the book's spine color. ("Hmm. What do I feel like reading? Cadmium Scarlet, or French Ultramarine?", "Was that Nabokov novel Venetian Red, or was it Prussian Blue...?)
My husband's beloved book collection is more than 1,500 volumes, and he's prone to geeky tantrums. If I REALLY wanted to piss him off someday, I'd reorganize by color, then hide somewhere he couldn't get me.
I just don't like the rainbow effect
it feel kindergarten-ish to me. But hey, if works for somebody, well then it works for them. My clothes are all in my closet arranged by color, so I don't think it's an invalid method at all. my closet only has 6 colors in it though, so it's not cacophonous. Black, grey, steel blue, chocolate brown, taupe, and rasperry. Easy on the eyes!
One other thing...the human eye can distinguish much, much more than 15 colors. It's preposterous to think that we'd be able to evolve the art and technology that we have if our ability to dostinguish tonalities was that poor. Having been slapped for using wikepedia as an information source, the below link is all nice and scientific and thorough. We can actually distinguish colors in a range from 400 to 700 nanometers on the optical scale. The actual number of colors along that range is nearly infinite but scientists think we can see several million dostinct colors. I doubt most people could actually manage that, but some of us are more sensitive than others. I seem to be able to see a color and remember it quite precisely when I am shopping for things of matching hues and tones. My husband is lucky if he can tell the difference between dark brown, deep navy and black.
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/humanvisionintro.html
uggh
Hate it. Needlessly complex.
I never think to myself "where did I put that orange design book?" I think "where is that book about chairs...oh, right, it's in the chair-book sections!"
The spine in thing bugs me too. It's traditionally a way to store old manuscripts - moisture swells vellum pages (same reason books had latches on them). But medieval libraries also had the covers marked on the foredges of the books as well as the spine. And the books were so valuable they were literally chained to the shelf.
There is something to be said for cohesiveness. The one caveat I would offer is, if you have to do it, do it with paper wrappers. That way you can do all of your design books green, and all of your fiction orange, and all of your art books blue, etc. A laser printed clear label is easy enough, no?
Also - I discovered last year that I am legally color blind (never had a clue!) So I would forever be confusing my blue books and purple books, and my green & brown books!
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