English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Here's a humorous but instructive video showing the virtues and limitations of simple elegance as a design principle. It's a Google video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298

That's a snapshot above of the first pane of (hypothetical) MS redesign of the iPod packaging, which is quite cool. The video makes me wonder, too, about how graphic design for product packaging is tied to distribution channels.

I shared this blog with a friend and he shared this image with me (along witha reccomendation that we read Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information). I think it's breathtaking. And my ability to have an emotional response to it has caused this class to get a great deal more personal. It's only beautiful because it's wrong and complex and so completely self-assured.