I recently read Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City. It is a classic work of urban design. And was an inspiration for an excellent presentation given recently by Yale’s Patrick Lynch (no relation) on visual standards for our university’s web content. Concepts like paths, edges, landmarks, nodes and regions have as much relevance to organization of web content as they do to a cityscape.
In addition to the ideas in the book, the design of the book itself is fabulous. In particular Lynch includes drawings in the margins to illustrate the points in the adjacent paragraphs. Why isn’t this layout style used more often? It is so much clearer than having a diagram or figure below the text, if not on another page altogether. The copy I was reading was an old library book, which also had penciled underlines and notes by another dedicated reader. Which added yet another dimension to frame the ideas.
E-books? Kindle, iPad, you guys have a long way to go before you match this kind of reading experience.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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