Roland Barthes wrote that the centre of Tokyo is occupied by a void...it is a quiet forest that lies at Tokyo's heart.
...The centre of Tokyo is certainly a void, but one that is protected by a circular train line, the Yamanote, which forms a 40-km (25-mile) loop around it. It seems to me that this ring of steel emphasizes the importance of the void, and the depth of its significance.
This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.
"Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.
And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."