It's been a few years since the release of Virginia Postrel's popular book, Substance of Style, so I was very delighted to find this bit of confection from her on Slate: How Modernism Got Its Curves.

Curiously, her essay is presented in a slideshow format. Okay. Must be a design thing? I excitedly clicked on the link and sat back to watch it unfold. And what unfolded in front of me was just utter crap. The slideshow doesn't work on Firefox (at least not on a Mac). It worked better on Safari and IE but, because of the depth of the unresizable popup window, it assumes you're viewing on a cinema display at greater than 1240x768 resolution.

Because of the layout, the slideshow navigation is actually concealed in the default view. It's completely bereft of a conscious application of design (form and functionality).

What on earth? Did she even look at this? Then again, come to think of it, I always did think that the design of her book is rather insipid. Decent content in bad packaging dilutes her message.