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From: sysmark@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt)
Subject: Re: Communications
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.175017.12876@helios.physics.utoronto.ca>
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Organization: University of Toronto Physics/Astronomy/CITA
References: <1991Jun19.204044.11529@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1991 17:50:17 GMT

In article <1991Jun19.204044.11529@agate.berkeley.edu>
bks@lima.berkeley.edu (Bradley K. Sherman) writes:

| I would like to add my voice to this chorus.  Someone at CACM should
| read Jon Bentley's old column on layout and check in with the SIGCHI
| people about the shortcomings of overusing color and fonts.

Hell, I'd be delighted if they'd start running Bentley's column again.
It was truly annoying when it was dropped.  I seem to recall (though
I can't easily check, as most of my books and journals are in boxes at
the moment) that a year or two after dropping it, the editors announced
that the column would be reinstated.  I don't recall ever seeing its
reappearance, though.

In any case, things have become truly appalling.  (I know a couple of
folks who feel that the quality of the *content* had deteriorated to
the point that it was no longer worth reading years ago, making the
topic of layout and graphics an irrelevant one.  But we'll leave that
one for a different thread ...)

Since the small subset of my stuff that's not in boxes is totally
disorganized, it was easy to take a random sample off the shelf:
I picked the first three CACMs I found -- Feb90, Sep90, and Jun91.
The first one predates the invasion of the layout artists from hell,
and still has the appearance of a professional journal, more or less.
Sep90 reflects the beginning of the downward trend, and Jun90 has
reached the level of self-parody.  (What purpose, for example, does
the nonsense along the top of pages 68-84 serve?)

They really have fallen prey to what a friend calls the "ransom note
style of document preparation".

Mark Bartelt                                             416/978-5619
Canadian Institute for                          mark@cita.toronto.edu
Theoretical Astrophysics                        mark@cita.utoronto.ca