Post #3584730
2026-07-03 11:24 UTC
@dfstarshine@icosahedron.website I believe, in practice, that the style simply comes from digital-typesetting. It finally became possible to print books with full colour digital images anywhere in the page. That had been either prohibitively expensive or impossible in the past, and I think it lead directly to Utopian Scholastic’s design elements of disparate items combined together on the page. Education books no longer had to be boring and digital photo manipulation allowed designers to play with layout in a way they hadn’t been able to before with manual / photo-typesetting
Replies (2)
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@dfstarshine@icosahedron.website 2026-07-03 11:26
@Kroc@oldbytes.space Probably. It's significant though how much of an effect the aesthetics of these things has on the psyche of a generation.
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@ermo@fosstodon.org 2026-07-04 13:02
@Kroc@oldbytes.space It always fascinates me when someone points out how new iterations of technology removes shackles that everyone had sort of internalised as "that's just how it is". See also: The concept of a glass teletype and how that changed the world of communications, or Image Recognition + Machine Learning, that has made it possible for researchers to use massive datasets consisting of millions of source images, instead of having to painstakingly digitize tens of images by hand. @dfstarshine@icosahedron.website