Web Log Costa Blanca

A last few words about fonts, before I move on to images.

Just yesterday, a new client wrote to me about my first design for their property development site: “The letters of the text are a little thin, could you please make them thicker in general, it will be easier to read I suppose?”

As it happens, her eyes were spot on. I had tried the experiment of calling first for elegant Century Gothic. This is not one of the fonts guaranteed to be on every visitor’s machine—but it’s on enough of them for me to take the chance. (I’m so tired of Verdana/Geneva and Arial/Helvetica.) She evidently had the font on her machine.

My response was of course to switch to nice chunky Verdana—again. But I pondered on the assumptions behind her request. She is a partner in a big Russian property development company operating here in Spain, and they have obviously commissioned many print designers. She clearly thought I had the kind of control over fonts that a print designer takes for granted.

And why don’t I? How come Firefox and the Mozilla project are so stand-offish about embedded fonts? There is even an ‘at-rule’ in CSS (@font-face) which is supposed to allow developers to embed fonts. The Mozilla project scorns it.

Why? To go back to an earlier post of mine, my guess is that they are all principled introverts who think that questions of visual display are beneath their notice.

If only there were a few visually stimulated extroverts on the project…

It gets worse.

I thought yesterday’s post might be of some interest to the people who publish the Bulletin. I checked their Web site, and could find no e-mail address—in 2007, no e-mail address?—just a contact form. I’ve included it (scaled down) below, so you can see what I am talking about.

I duly entered my personal name and family name, etc. After the four identifying fields there is a bigger area labelled ‘Subject’. Odd label, I thought. This is normally used for a subject field, not a message field—but I didn’t want to be picky. I entered my message in the field, and clicked on the icon labelled ‘Submit.’ And what happened?

A message appeared in the ‘Status’ field saying “Subject Required !”

This happened no matter what I entered in any field. I could not submit the form. Have a go yourself, if you don’t believe me: www.costablanca-bulletin.com. (I can’t direct you straight to the form, since it’s a Flash site, and they make all the elementary errors designers usually make with Flash sites, like not letting you identify individual pages.)

Looking at the design, my guess is that they meant to include a proper ‘Subject’ field, but overlooked it, then gave the message field an internal id such as message, while labelling it ‘Subject’ for the visitor.

As for the error message, its curtness would be unforgivable even if I had been responsible for the error. It unerringly betrays the untrained amateur—someone who thinks that Web design is about HTML and pretty pictures, rather than about designing systems for people.

This unusable form is worse than the playground-style rudeness I identified (in another site) yesterday. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for visitors on the part of the site owners—and ignorance of elementary testing procedures on the part of the designers.

One of the things I do every now and then is check out the Web sites listed in Costa Blanca publications. Some of you may have come across the free booklet called the Bulletin, which comes out once a year, and covers Altea, Benissa, Jalón, Teulada, Moraira and Calpe. There is some handy information in it, such as bus times from Calpe to the airport. (I picked up my 2007 copy recently, when I renewed my car and house insurance.)

Its own Web site is a Flash site, with a PDF copy of the printed booklet. Some thought has gone into the design, and I personally find it quite attractive—if it weren’t for the flashing text. This has been a no-no, condemned by every serious designer, since the early 1990s. It is a great pity, since it detracts from the professionalism of the site.

What really upset me, however, was the low standard of most of the Web sites listed in the publication. One of the motivations for this blog is to collaborate with other local designers in raising awareness of good design principles, for our sake and for our clients’ sake.

I may comment some more on particular sites in later posts, but one thing has to be mentioned immediately. It is unforgivable to make unfinished pages public. One site listed in the Bulletin is in German. It has little flags which link to English and Spanish versions—or rather don’t. The links go nowhere. This is an insult to visitors—like offering a handshake and then tripping the other person up, as children do on playgrounds. It also suggests the company is disorganised and amateurish.

Maybe the site owner is too busy to produce the necessary pages, or has been let down by someone else. Fine. Just keep the flags off the pages—until the pages that the flags promise are ready.

When I first came to Spain, in the summer of 1967, I used to play football with some Spanish lads on the deserted beaches of Gandia and Dénia. Over the years, I saw things change (you wouldn’t find either beach deserted now). The biggest changes, however, seem to be happening in this century.

I came to live on the Costa Blanca six years ago, in a house some one hundred metres up a steep hill, about five kilometres from the centre of Calpe. I used to drive to my house through vineyards, round hills with ancient terraces, and up and down an empty valley in which the only building was a ruined farmhouse.

In 2007, I drive through houses. There are rows of terraced houses where there used to be vineyards. There are houses out of a Renaissance Italian painting right up what used to be terraced hills. There are houses in the valley.

The odd thing is, I see so few people around these houses. There are so few lights on at night. The obvious answer is that they are being bought by foreigners and Madrileños who only come here in the summer. So why are there so few signs of life in the middle of August?

The pattern is repeated in the centre of Calpe. Huge skyscrapers have gone up—but at the height of the summer, only a few windows twinkle. Entire floors are black. And the town streets are quiet. Business picks up a bit in August, but there is no sign of a huge influx of population.

I’d love to know who has bought these empty houses. If they have been bought by speculators, isn’t there a real risk of supply exceeding demand? Or has anyone bought them? Is the whole enterprise just a way of laundering drug money?

Anyone with inside knowledge is welcome to comment.

No, there isn’t a typo in the title (this time). These are the very words which confront any visitor to the English homepage of the Barclays Bank website here in Spain. They are part of an animated ad for the bank’s deposit account.

Of course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “mass”, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.

I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.

Extraño, ¿no?

In my last post I referred to a couple of books. I thought people might like to know where to get hold of books on the Costa Blanca.

There are several English bookshops, but far and away the best—for my money—is the Librería Europa in Calpe, run by Gil. He can order just about any book you’ve ever heard of—and he is an ace at tracking down books which are out of print.

Gil is a character in his own right, so the bookshop—just off Calpe’s main shopping street—is definitely worth a visit. For further details you can check out the Librería Europa website.