We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through!

This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China.

The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly normal, these folks invented some linguistic innovations that – at first glance – seem to reflect some serious erudition, like “hydrograph”, “wield”, “fumigator” and “micro therm smoothing” (“ironing” to the rest of us). It sounds like the output of an English professor who was locked in a dungeon for decades until he went mad…

And if you can decipher “powder of in dusion bleach”, do share!

One gripe I have with the help systems in many consumer software applications: they’re written with the assumption that we users are all clueless newbies.

Take the Microsoft Office tools: they have many advanced and powerful capabilities; it is both interesting and useful to know what exactly they do. But the Help system only gives you the step-by-step “How To”. Say you want to try the Auto-Summarize feature of MS Word, and are curious what exactly it does (I mean, beyond automatically creating a summary). How does the feature work? What algorithm is involved? How does it identify the important parts of the document? Knowing this is not only interesting; it can let us users know what to expect, and how to use the feature better. But all we are served is a sequence of steps like

And so on. Necessary and useful for the computer-naive types, but not sufficient for the technical or curious.

I sometimes imagine the day when I’ll run into a button (perhaps in Word 2015?) that says “Stop world hunger”, and when I check it up in Help it will only say

C’mon, folks, you develop awesome code – let us know what is going on behind the scenes. At least give us a link to this information after the stuff the noobs use is listed…

]]> http://designblog.nzeldes.com/2009/10/we-arent-all-noobs/feed/ 0 http://designblog.nzeldes.com/2009/08/a-noble-piece-of-hardware/ http://designblog.nzeldes.com/2009/08/a-noble-piece-of-hardware/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:39:38 +0000 Nathan Zeldes http://designblog.nzeldes.com/?p=600

Engrish is all around us; here is a recent sighting that made my day.

This is from the box of a Teac Media Systems slim multimedia keyboard, model TK-5108. One can’t help but wonder whether this item is noble by birth, being descended from a long line of aristocratic peripherals, or is its praise the result of some outstanding feat demonstrating strong nobility of character. 

A picture is worth a thousand words – when it is a good picture. There is a huge gap in effectiveness between the best and the worst illustrations you see in technical and scientific publications. The trick is to convey the essence of what’s being shown, whether it is a machine, a building or an anatomical detail of some biological specimen, without drowning it in the irrelevant; and it gets trickier when you’re dealing with cutouts and other means of showing inner details of complex systems. Many illustrators never get the hang of it…

But today I accidentally surfed onto the site of Beau and Alan Daniels, producers of “cutaway, ghosted and phantom view illustrations in various styles including: Blueprint, watercolor, photorealistic, pencil, pen and ink, pastels, and black and white line art”… and they have an extensive portfolio there of incredible illustrations spanning technology, science and biology that is truly a feast to the eyes. I simply had to share it with you!

Take a look and enjoy!

A few days ago I was at the IEC history of computing museum where they also exhibited their progress in map making – from old blueprints and paper maps to modern CAD and GIS software. They had there an old 1960’s map that caught my eye – a 1:50,000 topographic map by the Israel Survey Department. These were the best you could get when I was a kid hiking around the country; every house was correctly shown as a black dot of the exact right shape, and every hill and gully were visible in the contour lines.

I looked at the map and it struck me how much maps’ visual quality has progressed since then, with modern printing techniques. The stark colors used in the 60’s are replaced today with delicate pastels; the topography is enhanced by fine shading; the important details are not drowned out by the density of equally strong contour lines. The information of the old maps was perhaps perfect, but to the modern eye they look, well… old. Unfortunately, as far as I know the maps you can buy today at such a detailed scale use the same old techniques.

Then the next day I came to see a new Israel Survey Department map that was wondrous fine to behold, done in pastel shades and fine shading gradations, reminiscent of what you see in Google Maps but with all the detail of the maps of my youth. And my friend Gadi happened by, and I said unto him, lo, see this map, for it is very finely done, and only the other day had I wished such were made; and he looked upon the map and found it good. And I said to him, surely I should blog about this map and compare it to the older ones, and he said, verily thou shouldst. And I resolved to make it so. And then the matter passed from my mind until my alarm clock went off to wake me for my day’s labors.

The bad news is, evidently the Israel Survey Dept. has yet to produce the fine map I saw in my dream. The good news is, looks like my blogging has reached the point where it passes the immersion test. I’ve found long ago that when I really immerse myself in some practice or task, it makes its way into my dreams. As a forensic scientist, I would dream of Gunshot Residue Particles; as a Thin Films VLSI engineer I would examine LTO defects in dreamland; and when I took to developing software, I would dream at times of bugs – I remember once actually solving a particularly stubborn one in my sleep, a solution that turned out to be valid in real life. So now I dream of searching for stuff to blog about!

As for my resolution, I can’t show you the nonexistent topographic map, but I can and hereby do show you a comparison of an old ISD map and a detail of the same area from Google Maps (Terrain option) that illustrates the visual qualities I was dreaming of merging with it.

These days food products come with lots of information, as mandated by our well meaning consumer protection laws. Information, however, does not always enlighten us.

I was looking to try a butter spread that doesn’t harden into a brick in the fridge. There are many such products on the supermarket shelves, each proclaiming its virtues – “Naturally soft!”, “Easy to spread!”, and so forth. What they fail to explain is what about the product makes it resistant to hardening. Is it a mechanical texture? A chemical additive? A food chemist would probably figure it out from the ingredient list, but not us regular mortals.

So I want to give kudos to Arla foods, the Danish maker of Lurpak butter. Their spreadable product bears the following inscription: “Made with specially selected butter, blended with just enough natural rape seed oil to make it easy to spread directly from the fridge“.

This may be less quantitative than the usual ingredient list, but it makes a great deal more sense: you can immediately grasp what was done to the butter, to what extent (what a clear image, “Just enough”!), and that no “unnatural” acts were involved.

And indeed, it does spread well directly from the fridge.

And now, a nice sighting from Pil and Galia.

They report buying a coffee press made by Bodum, a leading maker of these ingenious devices. And on the bottom of the box came this enlightening revelation: “Boiling water and children should be kept apart”

At first I actually thought this was said in jest, a sophisticated attempt to remind people of the danger without sounding too officious; but the other versions made it clear I was giving Bodum an unwarranted benefit of the doubt. The French warning is the silliest: it says that “Boiling water can be dangerous for children”. Which raises two immediate replies (beyond the obvious “Well, Duh!“):

1. Can be?
2. Why only children? What about adults?

Oh well, at least the coffee is good.

We already saw how overuse of pictorial instructions can be confusing. Well, I just ran into a wonderful victory of this trend. I passed a large office copier – the Konica 7222 – and here is what I saw on its document feeder:

These guys spared no effort in their belt-and-suspenders approach: there is large text, and tiny text, in every language you could desire; there are pictures, and icons, and arrows all over the picture… isn’t it just wonderful? Especially given that no office worker would need any of it except the “Face Up” bit?

I bought a screen protector for the LCD display on the back of my Nikon D40, and I just have to share the wonderful text on the back of the package, which reads:

I’ve already expressed my incredulity at this sort of stuff; this one is just for your reading enjoyment.

Incidentally, the product itself is excellent, far better than the cling-on film type protector I tried before it, which simply fell off one day (in other words, did not have preservation status such as new product). This one is rigid and attaches to the camera at its raised edge. And of course, it always keeps 100% transparency because become UV coating processing work!

Here is a box containing some medicine. As the law requires, it has the lot number and expiration date clearly marked. Well, OK, not clearly… in fact, the information is barely visible at all. The law, one can guess, says nothing about the information having to be Legible.

It’s not like making the text visible is so difficult… as the next photo proves.