#legibility

As it assumes the form of nonverbal knowing, of a thinking outside of language, what begins as a seemingly scientific, because denotative, act, in spite—or perhaps because—of its ambition to discern and record (thought) objectively, ends up rejoining the literary and artistic forces of modernity to become an exercise in esotericism, in which objectivity seems indistinguishable from solipsism, from the arcaneness of intransitive (because self-referential) speech. Offering the semblance of positivity and universality, the graphs and diagrams are simultaneously cryptic and enigmatic, their readily visible forms impenetrable even to sophisticated readers, who are typically at a loss as to what they mean without detailed explanations, without a careful reconsideration of the words.'' The coexistence of such polarities of meaning making suggests that diagrammatic denotation—or, more precisely, the diagram as denotation—needs to be rethought as an epistemic conundrum, one in which the ongoing modernist sense of a crisis of language continues to play itself out in the form of a collective fantasy. This is the fantasy that language is somehow disposable, that if we could simply find a way to get to the bottom of things—geometrically, algebraically, statistically, or however—we ought to be able to arrive at that utopian, evicted state of not needing language altogether. Beyond the dots, the lines, the curves, the circles, the squares, the numbers, and other figures on the page, there persist a wish and a demand that bestow on diagrammatic denotation the import of something excessive, something obscene. To put it differently, when graphs and diagrams are used in theoretical writings in the literary humanities and interpretative social sciences, they serve in effect as little theaters where the unresolved relationship between words and things repeatedly stages itself as a spectacle, calling attention to what Franco Moretti calls a “total heterogeneity of problem and solution.”'* Side by side with the words, the diagrams appear as something like a language, albeit one that dreams of being without language; something like writing, albeit one that dreams of doing without writing. In their proximity to words, the graphs and diagrams yearn, as though with a kind of mimetic desire, to take language’s place, to usurp writing’s hold on abstraction by becoming the preferred native informants of thought.

I am begging you not to use tiny fonts in your designs, comics, gifsets, and posts. Please especially do not hard-set font sizes with code. I don’t even have THAT severe of eye issues and my vision is 20/20 with glasses but tiny font causes eyestrain no matter what.

Logistics and legibility are hard, a small case study

In his seminal book Seeing Like a State, James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists:” lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a more centralized, orderly fashion. Scott argues that high modernists end up optimizing for a system’s legibility from their perspective, at the expense of its performance from that of the user. Indeed, that love of order is above all else about appearances. Streets arranged in grids, people waiting in clean lines, cars running at the same speed… But everything that looks good doesn’t necessarily work well. In fact, those two traits are opposed more often than not: efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient. This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together.

Good day to everyone except those who leave brackets out of their trigonometry working. What is this? What is squared? What is prime?