Article

The Transnational Glitch

Below is my article for Volume 2, Issue 1 of Libre Graphics magazine. You can still buy the issue or download it from their website.

American English is the common language of computing and the internet. That’s quite unfortunate. There are indeed many talented non-English speakers building our websites and shaping our digital future. That potential aside, one only has to look at the programming languages themselves and even small things like web addresses to see a bias towards English. Functions in popular programming languages are derived from English and, while websites that are not in English exist, their URLs are always in English, with only the domain extension (.fr, .pt, .es, .cn, etc.) available to give the website a sense of cultural identity.

Libre Graphics Research Unit article on Furtherfield.org

Last month I attended the Co-Position meeting in Brussels of the Libre Graphics Research Unit. I’ve already talked about one of the work sessions in a bit of depth. Today I was alerted that an article I wrote for Furtherfield that gives an overview of the meeting went live!

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How can designers and programmers work more harmoniously? How can the tools being created better meet the needs of users? There is a need for designers to have a greater role in the production of the tools that they use, aside from just reporting bugs, requesting features or designing logos for open source projects.