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> So what if we don't care about those issues and we don't feel the tension? A valid question that I can't answer well briefly. It takes some training or prac
by aamar 12y ago
> So what if we don't care about those issues and we don't feel the tension?
A valid question that I can't answer well briefly.
It takes some training or practice to recognize many forms of beauty, such as that in paintings, film, or buildings. The more educated/practiced one is in such things, it seems, the more one is able to pick out beauty and its lack. This consciousness makes ugly things more painful, but this is probably outweighed by the increased pleasure of beautiful things. (The idea of training improving one's perceptions isn't in tension with some person-to-person & culture-to-culture variance in what's beautiful.)
Even without practice, certain kinds of beauty or visual tension (which btw is not always ugly, though usually is when not "resolved") probably affect you even if you're not aware of it. Such effects have been observed in the other media I mentioned, though I'm not sure if typefaces have been so studied. So even if you don't feel the tension, it may be there, and it would only rise to consciously perceived levels with long exposure. Obviously there's some theory and speculation involved, but many fundamental design principles do by & large work.
Finally, let's say you conclude that it's a waste of time to enhance your critical eye for typefaces, you don't believe there is unconscious tension, etc. This is reasonable! But even then, you could still—nearly effortlessly—pick typefaces that work for you and work for us when you're communicating with a broad audience.
- coldtea 12y ago>It takes some training or practice to recognize many forms of beauty, such as that in paintings, film, or buildings. Sure, but do you recognize a beauty that's actually there, or you merely recognize what you were taught to recognize? (e.g you respond with a Pavlovian reflex to things you were conditioned to see as beauty).
- aamar 12y agoIt's unlikely that it's significantly Pavlovian because reflex is typically taught with blunt reward or punishment schemes, which isn't much like the kind of training most get. Also, you'd expect reflex to respond more to superficial components than deeper principles like visual harmony (though my judgement isn't free superficiality in my judgement and others'). Similarly, you'd expect a reflexive effect to be strongest when seeing conditioned stimuli, i.e. the exact art I learned about, but it's frequently much stronger when seeing something new. Beauty isn't "there" in the object to in the same way mass or volume is there; it's contingent on human perception. Beautiful things trigger similar effects in a huge variety of people, perhaps universally (though being attentive to conscious of those feelings doesn't come automatically). So it seems meaningful to discuss what's beautiful and what's not, though skepticism about any single individual's or culture's standards of beauty is warranted.