Circles in a World of Squares

These last several weeks have been particularly busy ones for me. My world has grown very small, though the elements of which it is knit are no more unusual than ever. Specifically, my time has been spent in writing an extensive paper that will hopefully unlock the door to a quality PhD program somewhere and in procrastinating by designing Websites for friends. Specifically, while two friends have hired me to design their sites for them, one of them in particular—namely my friend Linda—hopes to have her site ready for release very soon. In fact, as soon as I dot the last “i” and cross the last “t” on this newsletter, I will need to return back to it for she has sent me the instructions for additional pages that I have not yet rendered.

Her site looks deceptively simple but it has proven especially difficult. There are several reasons for this factor, perhaps not the least of which my ineptitude at designing. Certainly I enjoy Web programming, but my own site has very few frills and mainly serves as a wonderful place to park my pieces and to facilitate the free offering of the same. Yet for whatever I lack in skill, there is something inherently enjoyable to me in programming though I fritter away hours of time, do endless searches on Google through discussion forums in an effort to figure out how to get a snippet of Perl or Javascript code to work properly on a page, and, in the case of my friend and now client Linda, figure out a way to get around the difficulty her site has posed. So then, why has it been difficult? Let me evade the question a moment longer with a simple lesson in computers.

Look for a moment at your screen, beyond the words on this page. Do you not see that it is rectangular? And even if you are not very well versed in computers, you probably have heard of little things called pixels: they comprise television screens these days as well. These tiny little things called pixels are guess what shape? That’s right. They are itsy-bitsy squares. Now consider the layout of this paragraph you are reading. Do you notice that it is basically a rectangular block of text? Simply put, the world of computers is a world of straight lines, squares, and rectangles. While Linda does not know much about computers, she does know what she likes and she also knows how to draw. Yes. Linda likes circles and she drew me a pretty picture that I then had the good pleasure of re-creating on the computer screen.

I knew there were ways to create circles in square worlds but I cannot say that I have had much practice doing so. Of the hundreds and hundreds of Web pages my hands have coded, absolutely none have contained circles unless there happened to be circles included within the illustrations and photographs on a given page. While I actually did have a few ideas about how to create these circles, I thought there might be a very easy way to do so: a way that was industry-standard. So I fired up Google and within the first few hits found a promising-looking entry in my search for “creating circles in Web design.” What I found did not help me in the least when it came to creating such circles, but it was quite interesting.

Molly E. Holzschlag is a Web designer whose blog is laid out in rectangles. I later learned in the comments on this page that this was because her template was apparently designed by Dave Shea. Now I have never met Holzschlag or Shea, but I can venture a shrewd guess: Molly is a woman and Dave is a man. Pretty insightful, huh? But in the context of the article, this little detail becomes especially relevant. It seems that according to it, in a recent study conducted by the University of Glamorgan in Pontypridd, Wales, there is a definite gender difference in what men and women prefer in Internet Web design. The first part of Holzschlag’s title really says it all: Girls Prefer Circles: Gender Bias and Web Design Esthetics. The fifty responses to her entry question whether or not such a study reveals a gender preference or if other factors are afoot. But my personal thoughts as I was reading this entry in the wee hours of the morning, my eyes bleary and my goal still thwarted, was to feel cynical and snort: “Of course guys prefer straight lines in Web design: circles are darned impractical!” That was not because I was disparaging women as being unpractical. It just was what it was: a blowing off of a little steam because whether all women like circles or not, Linda does and now I was suffering the consequences. That does not say anything of her practicality or about practicality in general except insofar as it highlights the fact that when God created the Internet, he did not have circles on his mind. ;)

I did not know what to make of the study when I read it and still do not. It seemed a little much like a generalization to me; it still does. However, I was bemused by my friend Karen’s response when I sent her a test link to preview. The opening lines of her e-mail begin: “Wow, that really is completely different. Really nice pastels. And of course I’m more about curves than sharp edges, so the rounded corners and circles appeal to me.” That last sentence in particular could have been lifted straight out of Holzschlag’s blog.

Anyway, I have a good Christian friend named Greg who is an artist, an inventor, and a Web designer among his various other interests. In fact, Greg is one of the guys who meets in my home on Wednesday nights; Ray is another guy who comes over as well and he is an electrical engineer who currently does computer programming for a living designing software for a bank. So Greg, Ray, and I are all computer geeks among the many other things we share in common and apart. Ray has not done much work with the Internet per se, though he is a very creative story teller and has written some amazing accounts about a fanciful family called the Wumpitathumpas on his blog in which he takes on the voice of the family dog. Many of these stories are actually deeply spiritual allegories, though most are so involved that I confess he has to explain them to me as I pick up only a fraction of his intended meaning otherwise. By contrast, my friend Karen, who has never met him in person, usually tracks very well with the things he writes. Maybe I just don’t read enough stories.

Anyway, I was sharing my circular troubles with Greg. He had just recently bought the latest edition of Microsoft’s FrontPage and had been doing quite a bit of designing with it himself. Greg has his own Website where he sells his digital prints online, one of which has proven quite popular in the United States and which I saw in a poster shop in Utah long before I ever met him. It is called Whirlpool Sunrise and features a man with guitar case in hand ready to walk down the neck of a guitar that looks suspiciously like a Gibson Les Paul. (Yes, Greg is also a musician.) The print seems to convey the sense of a journey into the potentially dangerous but promising unknown and is rendered more poignant by its ambiguity.

Perhaps Greg’s biggest claim to fame, however, is his panoramic tripod mount called the Panosaurus that is used to steady a digital camera for creating those digital photographs you may have seen in which one can scroll around an entire room with one’s mouse. Greg has some samples of these he has stitched together that he plans to market to real estate agencies so that prospective buyers can take preview tours on the Net of the current homes for sale. Such photos are first captured as stills with a fisheye lens and then stitched together with special imaging software which he will likely soon offer bundled with the Panosaurus. One can read all about this exciting new technology in Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier.

Yes, Greg has proven the all-American entrepreneur in recent years, carving out an online business for himself by selling his prints and especially these Panosaurus heads to people around the globe. He tells me the French in particular like his mount and it has been featured in trade shows in Paris and abroad. (How do I know this? Because as poor as my own French might be, Greg’s is so lacking as to be nonexistent and I have occasionally been called on to translate e-mails: « Un Panosaurus pour aller, s’il vous plaît. » Also, note that if you decide to visit his Panosaurus page, he offers his apologies: he is in the process of updating and redesigning it. From what I have seen of his sample pages, the finished result will look very good.)

In any case, Greg recently bowled me over by buying me a copy of FrontPage to supplement my own Web designing tasks that are helping me get caught up a bit on my bills. Previously, I have done the bulk of my coding by hand. In fact, even though FrontPage has proven very helpful, my most frequent use of the program to date has been its split screen where I hand code in the top pane and immediately see the results in the bottom one. Naturally, I tried using FrontPage to help render the circles and to great success! with one slight catch. FrontPage is a Microsoft product and while it plays nicely with Internet Explorer, its circles did not even render on Firefox, Opera, or Netscape. So, it was back to the drawing board all over again. I was still able to use FrontPage—and the solution to my troubles is a classified trade secret that I shall not divulge—but not quite in the way the program intended. Let us just say that there was also a lot of coding done by hand and a photo-imaging program or two called into play as well.

What I will say openly, however, is that her entire site is laid out with invisible rectangular tables. And the little circles that make up her links at the bottom of the page are basically “painted” over the tops of squares. If one’s browser is set to outline the linking area, one will see a perfect square when one clicks on any of these small circles. But no matter: for all intents and purposes Linda had her circles and we are all well pleased, right? After all, who cares what goes on invisibly behind the scenes: if it looks like a circle and (for the most part) behaves like a circle, then it must be a circle. We won’t tell anyone that it is actually a diabolical square masquerading as a circle of light. But, alas, there was one final problem.

It seems that in my lack of experience in Web designing, I had not taken into consideration the various screen resolutions. What that basically means in layman’s terms is that different people have different-sized viewing areas on their screens. You and I may both have a seventeen-inch monitor, but you might be able to fit a lot more icons on your Desktop than I can on mine. That is because our screen resolutions are set differently. A larger screen size today is 1024 x 768 pixels, the first number referring to the width of the screen. (Look again at your screen and you will see that it is wider than it is high.) Linda and I both have fairly inexpensive Compaq Presarios and our screen resolution is set to 1024 x 768. However, her sister’s screen resolution is set to 832 x 624 and a fellow M.D.’s screen is set at 800 x 600. That meant that while she was away for the Thanksgiving Holiday and was showing off what was finished of her new site to her friends, it suddenly looked much different on their computers than on hers.

In all truth, we never did settle this particular problem. I was able to shrink it down some but she didn’t like the design for the 800 x 600 screen because it had to rely on internal scroll bars. She reasoned that if internal scroll bars were needed, it might as well look and function as she intended on computers with higher resolution: people with lower resolution screens would have to scroll twice anyway but there is no sense in making everybody do it.

The interesting thing is that Greg and I had been talking about screen resolutions just a few days before this incident. His jaw dropped when I told him that on my own site, I didn’t set page widths. His jaw dropped even further when he learned that I do not use tables at all, except when I am featuring what even a novice user would clearly recognize as a table or sometimes when I am placing photographs. In fact, when I do use tables, I do not use absolute widths but rather percentages. In layman’s terms, this means that rather than specifying, say, that the width of my table be five inches wide I might specify that it take up eighty percent of whatever screen it is displayed on. On a higher resolution screen, it might be (picking an arbitrary number out of thin air) nine inches wide and on a lower resolution screen only seven inches wide.

You see, my Website fits my personality well. I am a laid-back and easy-going person by nature: a go-with-the-flow sort of guy until my convictions get trampled on and then I am compelled to take a stand. But in most instances that are not life and death, I’m easy. My pages do not require tables because they aren’t very aesthetically complicated. Many of them contain a lot of information, but the design has nothing to do with it. It does not matter whether your computer has a high or a low resolution, whether it is old or new, my pages will cozy right up and make themselves at home on your monitor. They are practical pages but they do (I would like to believe) have a touch of artistry about them. I have nothing against Linda’s site with its (apparently) feminine pastels and circles. It is a fine site as sites go and fits her personality which has never been well-contained within boxes of any sort: it keeps bubbling out of them.

Sometimes I start feeling self-conscious about my site. I look around at other sites that are fancier or more professional or have more visitors and I begin to feel a little inferior. I am aware of my site’s limitations. By now, you have probably figured out this newsletter really isn’t about websites at all. It is about how we all tend to think of ourselves. We compare ourselves with others. There are other people who have prettier exteriors or who have deeper content to their pages. There are squares and there are circles and a great deal many more who are somewhere in between: perhaps trapezoids or rhombuses or shapes as of yet undiscovered. Sometimes we look around and we start feeling self-conscious because we don’t have frames and because we are not set to absolute widths. We fail to see how this lets us flow naturally into any circumstance, quite unaware at how others like us because we place few demands on them and morph to their personality while losing none of our own. Or perhaps our circles don’t quite fit in a box or function in a world built for squares and rectangles. Maybe in one instance we stick out too far and in another partially disappear. We sometimes forget that it is because we are colorful and unique that this is why people like us.

I am who I am. I do not have many tables. I do not have fixed widths. I flow well into most spaces afforded me. I’m not as fancy as some, but I am filled with many philosophical ideas that are there for the taking if one wishes or that can just as easily become bland rectangular blocks of text that disappear into an unassuming background. But hang it all, I’m me. I ain’t nobody else but me. And what is more, even the Tao Te Ching, that ancient book of Eastern wisdom, has got my back on this one, for it reminds me of my tendency to flow into fixed spaces without losing my essence:

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

I am again reminded that wisdom is as much about what is not said as what is, that the silence in which the notes of a melody resound is just as important as their pitch, and that the blank spaces on the canvas give the painting its proportion. I am reminded that sometimes it is not so much what you put into the code as what you leave out that makes for the most user-friendly Websites. Most of all, I am reminded to express my gratitude to God for making me who I am and no other and for giving me so many wonderful friends that make life interesting and exciting—even when they ask me to design pastel circles for them.

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