Miami Beach, Summer 2018

And here we have a few more hot, summery Florida photos to go with the summer 2018 Miami photos I just posted. This time the photos are from wandering around Miami Beach, which involves a surprisingly long bus ride from Miami proper. Again, it was a fun and interesting place to wander around playing tourist. I just don't have any very deep thoughts about the place. But hey, not every post here has to be me trying to theorize about something for twenty paragraphs, especially when it's New Years Eve and I'm just a post or two short of how many I did back in 2016. I'm sure nobody else cares about that particular goal besides me. Just putting it out there for full disclosure.

I will say that having this many Art Deco buildings in one place, with the usual Miami Deco color scheme, the overall effect gets to be a bit silly after a while. The smattering of 1980s postmodern buildings in the same color scheme, like the first photo above, somehow makes the overall effect even sillier. I said no theories, but my theory about that is that what architects' clients really wanted in the 80s were brand new Art Deco buildings, but with modern wiring and plumbing and so on, and they wanted that right up until they saw what all that attention to detail would cost in 1988. Also no architect under 40 wanted to work on paper anymore and things had advanced so you could get most of the job done on a decked-out Mac IIci, at least so long as you limited the design to a few simple shapes and colors. And out of necessity, a whole new style was born, along with dense art jargon explaining why it's the new One True Way. That's my theory, anyway.

Said theory is based largely on my own experience of trying to do creative stuff on a Mac back then. You'd have this feeling of unlimited possibilities -- and there really was a lot you could do even back then -- but inevitably you'd run into hardware limitations and have to scale things back until the machine would meet you kind of halfway. Wireframes that won't render. Spell checkers that get exponentially slower if your document is too big. Spending hours in PageMaker creating a concert poster for a coworker who needed one, scaling elaborate band logos just right, adjusting fonts by tenths of points, and so on, only to find that the office's low-end laser printer wasn't up to the job. Too many fonts, too much clip art, a few individual band logos that were way too rad and xtreme to be printable at any size. There was talk of going to Kinko's and trying to print from there, but that was Very Expensive, and the poster layout wouldn't quite fit on a floppy anyway, and I think the job eventually got done the old-school way, with tape and a photocopier.