( Designing for Sustainability) It’s not just mammals and birds: the face of the jeweled lacerta lizard will also catch your eye. Left to right: ( Information Architecture) A perennial favorite: the “Polar Bear” book, with the world’s friendliest-looking polar bear. Over the years, we’ve learned that many of our customers and authors gravitate to animals with recognizable faces, especially when they’re looking directly at the viewer. The images we use on the Animal books are from the entire animal kingdom, from large land mammals like tigers and elephants to fish, birds, insects, and invertebrates. People especially like animals that have faces. We replaced the snake with a rather pleasant-looking rabbit. Another customer sent angry email telling us he’d never go to one of the pages on our website because it had a snake on it. He went through the entire book and put white tape over the graphic on the first page of every chapter so she wouldn’t have to confront the spider. The husband of one reader complained about our use of a spider on-and in- Webmaster in a Nutshell. People will go to great lengths to avoid seeing certain animals. We got an avalanche of mail from readers informing us that chimpanzees absolutely do not have tails (our readers are all over this stuff). I once misread the caption on an engraving and mistakenly identified a monkey as a chimp. Not a chimp.Ĭhimpanzees don’t have tails. A few things we’ve learned over time Figure 2. We’ve published hundreds of Animal books since then, and the brand is well known worldwide. But Tim got it immediately-he liked the quirkiness of the animals, thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings-and it just felt right. Some of the people at O’Reilly were taken aback: they thought the animals were weird, ugly, and a bit scary. At the end of the weekend, I gave several sketches to my neighbor to take into the office. I was so energized and inspired that I spent an entire weekend working on the covers without much sleep. That resonance grew and expanded as I learned more about both the technologies and the animals. And, as I investigated the attributes of the real animals, I quickly discovered that there were intriguing correspondences between specific technologies and specific animals. They seemed to be a good match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough that I figured they’d probably appeal to programmers. As I looked for images for the book covers, I came across some odd-looking animal engravings from the 19 th century. Sometimes when designing, things come together effortlessly-everything falls into place as if it were inevitable. They sounded to me like words that might come out of Dungeons and Dragons, a game that was popular with a geeky (mostly male) subculture. One of the original Nutshell Handbooks.Įven the terms associated with Unix-vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few-were weird. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful. Join the O'Reilly online learning platform.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |