Or a government bureaucracy where the processes and decisions are all visible to the public. And from everyday life to cultural life, too, there's been a vogue for the transparent. The 1990s art of Damien Hirst involved making animals transparent by slicing them up and then sticking them in clear glass vitrines. In design, the extremely simple, utilitarian look of Web sites like Google and Yahoo are said to be transparent design. But now, I'm here to announce, transparency is pass .
Translucence is on the rise.
The official start of the translucent age was the summer of 1998, when Apple's translucent iMac computers were introduced. The iMac was not a boring opaque beige box like every other computer. But it wasn't transparent, either. A transparent computer would have been a novelty item just for gearheads, a quick one-liner as a design object, and I think a dud in the marketplace. Instead, the Apple designers realized that they had to make a computer that was visually complex.