A Rain of Frogs

Because of its history as a steel town and possibly because of its name, Pittsburg is a city that gets a bad rap it doesn’t really deserve.

It’s a city full of interesting architecture, fascinating history, and some of the most beautiful geography I’ve ever seen a city nestled into.

All that, plus Crosby and Malkin, too.

Among all the things I am getting tired of hearing from the mainstream media (war, famine, oil prices, recessions, subprime lending mess, American primaries, terrorism, China-Tibet tensions, Olympic protests, cancer, plastics, genetically modified foods, blah blah blah blah blah…) I think that the hybrid thing is really starting to get to me.

Treehugger is falling all over itself mourning Volkswagen’s decision to not bring the hybrid Golf concept car to market. For myself, I can’t help but cheer.

We all know the difference between a hybrid vehicle and a normal one, right? A normal vehicle has an internal combustion engine that outputs power through a spinning shaft to a series of gears that eventually turn the wheels of the vehicle to move it.

A hybrid vehicle has an internal combustion engine that outputs power through a spinning shaft, through a series of gears to an electric generator. The electrical output of this generator charges a bank of nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. These batteries, in turn, feed electric motors that turn the wheels of the vehicle to move it. To me this seems much more complex than the normal car, and more complexity means more expense.

Hybrid vehicles have the option of operating for some time from the energy stored in the batteries, but until so-called “plug-in” hybrids come to market, this is irrelevant because the power to charge those batteries must come from the internal combustion engine. The difference between a hybrid vehicle and a normal one is therefore one of power transmission from the internal combustion engine to the wheels.

The power transmission system of a hybrid vehicle may be slightly more efficient than that of a normal vehicle, but if it exists, it is a marginal difference. Hybrid vehicles are marking up high efficiency rates because they are powered by small internal combustion engines. The combined mileage (highway and city) of a 2009 VW Jetta TDI (2.0L 4-cylinder diesel engine) is approximately 50mpg, while the Toyota Prius (1.5L f-cylinder gasoline engine), poster child of the hybrid revolution, achieves 46mpg.

You read that right, a standard diesel engine in a bigger car achieves 10% better fuel efficiency than a hybrid. But environmentalism isn’t just about fuel efficiency, regardless of what the mainstream media is telling people. The total environmental impact of a vehicle, from cradle to grave, must be considered.

When that Jetta is finally retired, it will be melted down for scrap, and the metal from that transmission will be recycled (or downcycled, possibly) into new products using processes we already have in place. What happens to the Prius and the batteries in it? And that’s assuming those batteries last the life of the car. Plug-in hybrids might change this equation a bit, but that plug-in energy still needs to be generated somehow (coal seems a likely source, at least for the United States), and those batteries still need to be recycled safely.

As I’ve written before, the Prius is less energy efficient than a Hummer over its entire lifespan. Now take fuel economy into consideration, and compare that Prius to a diesel VW Jetta, or the new TSI engines that VW is working on. Non-hybrid cars that get better mileage than hybrids, at less cradle-to-grave cost to the environment, with far less complexity.

Seems like a better idea to me.

Last time I explored the concept of balance, which is one of the more encompassing principles of composition. A designer can control the emotional impact of a piece by creatively using (or abusing) balance.

This post will be a short exploration of proportion. Proportion is a much smaller topic than balance in terms of scope, but it is still one of the more important principles of composition.

Proportion is all about scale, about large objects and small objects. Most people raised in western society learned at a relatively young age that a sense of depth, or distance, could be created by making objects closer to the viewer larger, and those more distant objects smaller. By using proportion in this way, a composition can be given a sense of depth. In eastern cultures, a sense of depth is conveyed by placement – the closer an element is to the top of a composition, the closer the audience perceives it to be. And it will be perceived to be further away if it is closer to the bottom of the composition.

In conjunction with depth and distance, proportion gives us another important attribute that can be used to clarify a message. Not only are larger objects perceived as closer, they are also more dominant than other objects. It seems obvious, but the closer something is, the more important it seems. Conversely, smaller objects can appear further away, and thus are perceived as subordinate to larger objects.

This dominance and subordination allows the designer to create a visual order out of an otherwise potentially chaotic composition. More important elements can be made more dominant by making them larger, while less important information can be subordinated by making it smaller. As with balance, composition can make use of dominance and subordination to create a sense of chaos.

And like balance, proportion can be used to enhance the emotional qualities of the piece. Larger images are more evocative and emotionally powerful, especially when the proportion not natural (arge man looming over a small woman to create more of a sense of fear, or a large woman conquering a smaller corporate world to reinforce a strong female message).

Manipulating order and chaos, and the dominance and subordination of culturally powerful imagery (guns, babies and religious symbols are all examples of culturally loaded imagery) can create a jarring emotional impact to reinforce a message. These same properties can be used to render the piece emotionally flat, if required.

A strong understanding of proportion and how it can be used to to modify the message or purpose of content, can add depth and order (or disorder) to composition.