Bogdan’s Blog

I’ve come across this tool when I was trying to edit some personal documents and thought this would be the next nightmare: using text forms to add a 3-letter text, add drawing so I can put in some symbols.

But to my surprise, none of this happened. When I opened my pdf files in Infix, it automatically detected the text portions I wanted to add some text or to edit (a simple strikeout, for instance, when I had sevral options).

Quite a nice tool, and very intuitive – it’s like working in a word file, but save it as pdf.

is a non-smoker these days (@ -Stelio – a more personal status update )

new theory of elegance or the art of being pretentious: http://bit.ly/llJ55

I’ve recently come across an interesting article on elegance. The article has as a starting point a book written by Matthew E. May, “In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing”.

Mr. May is attempting to re-shape the aesthetic concept of elegance historically and anachronistically and begins the exposition with a simple definition of what elegance is: “Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful” – an all encompassing definition based mainly on the power of adjectives the author deemed necessary to use to justify the theory.

Furthermore, Mr. May goes on with a further clarification of the matter at hand:

“Elegant ideas—products, services, performances, strategies, whatever—all have some degree of these four elements: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability”.

Now that part puzzled me a bit. Would it mean that everything meeting these criteria might be ‘awarded’ the absolute value of elegance? I was really curious and started thinking about possible examples. But Mr May was faster than me. He used 3 examples of elegance (I believe it was in “ideas and strategies”)

1. Toyota (that being his favourite example of utmost elegance) – as it turns out, Mr May happens to be on Toyota’s payroll ‘advising’ their specialists on design matters (let’s not pull out the market share reports of the newly launched cars).
2. In ‘N Out Burger – for those in the unknown, this a “freakishly popular hamburger chain that started in Los Angeles a half century ago” ( I won’t bother discussing the elegance of a fast-food chain)
3. First Direct, a British Bank – apparently being rewarded this quality because they don’t have branches (what if all banks became elegant?!)

And as our world is built elegantly symmetric, the author gives examples of lack of taste – the flag carrier of the ship being no other than … Microsoft Word (yes, you read correctly, not Windows, not even the whole application suite, but only part of it) – we all hope Mr Gates’ designers will hear of this and turn MS Word into a more seductive and symmetrical product.

And the bogus goes on.

First conclusion: despite the fact that Mr. May seems to be a keen adept of simplicity, the only way he can describe his ideas and explain concepts is through superfluous adjectives.

Second conclusion: basing one’s idiosyncrasy on certain theories does not grant validity to the theory (quoting Zen does not make the article more valuable).

Third conclusion: always do what you know, i.e. if you’re a marketer, then don’t define aesthetics.

companies increase their marketing spending in 2009 http://bit.ly/O5iQn

listening to Zamfir’s Skylark-Ciocarlia: http://bit.ly/19W3l0

the new Kaleidoscope Art Magazine is out and online: http://bit.ly/HKygd

SAN FRANCISCO – Air New Zealand is delving into the gay and lesbian market with a special themed flight that will feature drag queens, pink cocktails and a cabaret performed by the flight crew.

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