its_Johnny on Nostr: "The Cerîde-i Adliye began in the 1870s as the Journal of the Courts, a bulletin for ...

"The Cerîde-i Adliye began in the 1870s as the Journal of the Courts, a bulletin for staff of the Ottoman Empire’s newly created Nizamiye courts, which had just replaced independent religious judges with judges answerable to the state. It survived the fall of the empire. Then for a few years in the mid-1920s its covers became pretty wild.

Each issue led with a full-page infographic, and they were dense, ornamental and close to unreadable. Legal statistics were plotted onto figurative structures with a level of small decorative detail that carried no information at all. The titles were still set in Arabic script, since alphabet reform was two years away.

The designer Deniz Cem Önduygu analysed one in 2017 for Ömer Durmaz’s exhibition Speak to the Eyes in Istanbul. His conclusion was blunt. Most of the covers’ problems, he wrote, came down to “sacrificing data readability in order to make it look much more interesting/complex than it is.” On the cover he chose, recovering a single number required finding four separate points and adding them together."