psmv6: Transient tendency

A week or so ago I was having a lot of dreams involving a complicated looking computer screen full of text data. Lots of different colours and formats, complicated in the way of the front page of a tabloid newspaper - or, indeed, of the Guardian, which goes in for the same typographic complexity, in a more tasteful and restrained way. All to do, I am told, with making the page look lively and interesting.

I had at first thought that Bing or Google would turn up something suitable by way of illustration to this post, but despite trying various clues, no, and I was reduced to knocking something up in Powerpoint using snippets from the screens that Bing and Google did turn up.

In the dreams, although the image was static, it did not, for example, contain rolling text in the way of an Arterio in-carriage display, my impression of it was fairly mobile, with my attention flicking from one part to another. And there was no depth to the image: even when, in the dream, I attempted to home in on this or that panel, the text remained illegible. I had no idea what it was about - and in fact, is was not about anything. So the dream, while being about text, was not text, not words, it was entirely image.

Dreams of this sort went on for a couple of weeks, but now seem to have gone away again. No idea what prompted their coming.

PS 1: web designers are now rather overdoing this complexity to my mind. The Financial Times website, for example, has plenty of image panels with moving text overlays. Lesser sites have moving image panels with a sound track; not exactly films, but tendencies in that direction. I find all this sort of thing irritating and annoying rather than helpful - or even interesting. While the Sun is just loud.

PS 2: I am reminded that a correspondent recently told me that the way to avoid trouble at the FT is to use their paper facsimile rather than their main website.

Now found. Down the very bottom of the webpage. The thing called 'FT digital edition'. First impression is that while you get rid of the irritation in question, not as convenient in other ways.