Journal entries in 'Ruminations' for February, 2005

i am bill

In Japanese, there are several different ways of expressing conditionality. For example, "[past tense verb ending in -ta] + ra" is one: "sore wo tabetara, byouki ni naru" = "If you eat that, you'll get sick." Another is "[plain form of verb] + to," as in: "sore wo taberu-to, byouki ni naru." The latter form always made sense to me because "-to" is also the Japanese word for "and." But at the same time, I was aware that this connection doesn't really make sense and I wasn't sure why it seemed to help me remember the conditional form.

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I was reading a post on Airbag Industries about a little design contest Greg, who runs Airbag, had arranged for a friend. The friend was starting a company and needed a logo, and Greg was too busy to design it himself, so they set up a few judges and offered an iPod Shuffle, worth $99, to whoever submitted the winning entry.

Suddenly the discussion exploded into claims that such contests "devalue the design market," because any real designer would charge $800+ for a logo design. I've seen these kinds of claims before; professional designers outraged at new designers fresh out of college and desperate for work, that charge relatively piddly prices for design work. They argue that these designers shouldn't accept such low prices for their work, because it hurts the value of design work as a whole.

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