Three sites that restrict text by 1) number of words, 2) number of questions, or 3) amount of space.
Panopticist
Panopticist limits the word count on its sidebar link roll. Check out the haiku-like “five five-word links.”
Tull’s Ian Anderson loves cats!
The horror of overcompressed music.
Bronson Pinchot’s now a freemason.
The aesthetics of wind farms.
Mike Davis on “horrific mega-slums.”
SuprGlu
Instead of offering typical bios, SuprGlu conducts interviews with users customers in a “three questions, three answers” format (example).
3. 3 things you’d bring with you to an island, for a week?
That’s funny, I didn’t even know this Island question was next. For a week, let’s see. I think I’d definitely bring my wife. Now this is always the tricky part. If I bring my laptop or ipod does the battery magically stay charged for the week or am I just out of luck. If it stays charged then I bring my laptop as one item. If no magic batteries exist then I guess I bring my pet unicorn and a sci-fi anthology. The unicorn is cool right?
Similar: Guy Kawasaki’s “Ten Questions With…” interviews, the “5 Questions” bit Craig Kilborn used to do at The Daily Show, and FiveQs (the same five questions are asked to various “inspirational” people).
37signals
Columns present a challenge for online layouts when text runs too long or short. When we recently redesigned our marketing sites, we decided to embrace space restraints and shape our text so it shows up in matched columns which end at the same point (Basecamp shown below, you can also see at Backpack and Campfire sites).
It means shaving a few words here and there but that’s all part of the challenge. You’ve just got to make it work.
Related: Embrace Constraints [Getting Real]
Des Traynor
on 05 Feb 07Restricting text is something I think is incredibly useful. People just won’t read 200 words about what your product does, if you can’t say it in 3-7 words, then you’re in trouble.
Thanks for the Sunspots link on writing, you guys carry a lot of traffic :)
Des
Mike Bingaman
on 05 Feb 07Check out OuLiPo, it’s a literary movement based entirely around embracing constraints. It includes people like Queneau, Perec and Calvino. Perec wrote an entire book (A Void) without using the letter ‘e’.
brad
on 05 Feb 07Writing economically is one thing, embracing constraints for the sake of embracing them is another. Writing an entire book without using the letter “e” is just a stunt. So is writing a book or article without using any conjugations of “to be.” The goal should be to make every word tell, and to communicate clearly and succinctly.
shawn
on 06 Feb 07Thanks for the mention, Matt. Those were actually questions for SuprGlu users, not employees. We wanted to highlight some cool glu pages and thought it’d be fun to also ask some questions to go along with the screenshot.
Dave Davis
on 06 Feb 07What’s the difference between a “stunt” and an “exercise”? We might agree that niether would make great reading by definition, but when one succeeds it can be remarkable.
As both a student and teacher of design, most exercises I’ve done, by choice or rote, would neatly fall into the “stunt” category. Every quarter, some student transforms a “stunt” assignment into something stunning. It’s like clock work. The bell curve produces a couple spectacular successes and failures, with a big lump of pleasant “just hit the marks” responses. The ones that succeed can be breathtaking, often BECAUSE of the limitations.
Finally, as an artist, I find limitations are often the seed of creation. I may have no ideas about a project at all, but my available materials, time and space are possibilities, resources to trigger imagination. Mosaic, assemblage, collage, and montage are forms based on embracing constraints for the sake of embracing them. This has never been more true than in our network/data world, when anyone can fabricate or deliver 2D and 3D forms directly, to any arbitrary ideal or degree of realism or abstraction.
No matter how you see the products, stunts or exercise, the process of embracing constraints PURELY as an end, has proven useful historically, but most especially today.
brad Hurley
on 06 Feb 07@Dave Davis: I agree entirely about the value of constraints. Working within constraints leads consistently, in my opinion, to more creative results than when you’re faced with pure blue sky. I’m just arguing that creating an arbitrary constraint such as “I’m going to write an entire novel without using the letter e” puts emphasis on form over function. It’s all about the constraint, not about the story or its telling. You can be very creative within the many existing constraints that apply to writing a novel; adding a purely arbitrary one is what feels like a stunt to me…it feels like something to attract attention but not to be taken seriously.
Dave Davis
on 07 Feb 07Sure it smells a little funny. And after reading the wikipedia entry, would personally classify it as a sort of bizarro-dada, rules run amok kind of thing.
In spite of my prejudice, I don’t have to look far to counter your argument. Consider the frm f txt mssgng thts evolved around IM and cell phones… or if you’re old enough to remember pre-WWW bbs’s, you would recognize the form suggested by this movement. Further there have been many serious inquiries and efforts to simplify the english language and replace idiomatic spellings with more phonetic ones. In fact this goes on all the time, unnoticed… how long before the English succomb and drop the “u” from “color”?
To some extent, all art is a social experiment. It’s safe and acceptable to take NONE of it seriously. In this case, I think you’re being too quick on the draw with the “stunt” finger. While I wouldn’t join their movement, and see it as pretty trivial in 2007, in 1960 it was prescient!
d www.dataesthetic.org www.screamingbob.com
This discussion is closed.