November 29, 1999

Monday, November 29, 1999: Sooner or later

Coincidentally, a couple of people wrote this morning to comment on my design using the Chinese characters, and I wanted to put up some information about where they came from.

The characters are from a free font called The Mei Ornaments from Vintage Type. I downloaded the font a long time ago, but although I could see its uses, I didn't have a translations of the characters, so I hesitated to use it. Then somehow, I don't remember how, I stumbled across The Introduction to the Mei Ornaments, which gives a translation of each symbol—its Chinese name and the English meaning.

Once I had that, I felt that I could honestly use them in a design. Otherwise, I would be risking the same mistakes that we see time and time again on foreign products, especially those from Japan—English used (apparently) simply because the look of the words is somehow trendy or attractive, not because of their meaning. And sometimes the meaning is completely inappropriate to its use.

I wanted to avoid creating a decorative design out of pretty picures that were actually words in someone else's language. It seemed somehow disrespectful, and, of course, opened myself up to creating a home page that said something like, "Dishwater Candles Seaweed Tea." I had no idea what the pretty "ornaments" said.

While I was playing around with the design, I bought a Japanese newspaper at the newstand and scanned in some images. This is what I came up with. I loved the way the vertical image fit in the table so nicely. I did wonder what it said, though, so I asked Matt if he could show it to his former roommate, who is majoring in Japanese, if he could take a look and translate it for me.

His friend wrote back and said that the characters said "asahi shinbun," literally, "morning (asa) sun (hi) newspaper (shinbun)," the name of a prominent Japanese newspaper. He went on to say that it would be sort of like having the New York Times banner as your webpage background. So, pretty as it was, it wasn't appropriate. I was glad I asked him, though, of course. Not that it would be that big a deal, and I doubt I have too many people reading my site who also read Japanese, but you never know.

Dinah has discovered that she likes to sit on top of the automatic water bowl. She sits on top of it and then leans over and plays in the bowl, dipping her paw in, then licking off the water, or sometimes just shaking it so that water flies everywhere.

She also leans over and plays with the food in the food bowl, knocking bits out, then jumping down and eating them off the floor, which is apparently lots more fun than eating them out of the bowl.

So far she hasn't managed to knock either of them completely over, although we've had some near-misses, with puddles of water and small piles of food on the floor rather than in the bowls. I haven't quite figured out whether it's better for the water bottle to be full, so it's heavier, and perhaps less likely to tip over, or whether it's better if it's almost empty, so that if she does knock it over, there'll be less mess to clean up.

I suppose it doesn't matter. I suppose we'll find out sooner or later.

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