Presenting my third annual iPics of 2017. I shared twelve images last year, but this time around I could only muster ten that I would attach my name to. Thanks to the professional photographers I work with, I can only claim to be an observer of my surroundings. And with only mobile optics, I’m a JV shooter at best (whenever possible, I deploy the cheap trick of using the b/w mode to enhance the mood). This year’s subjects range from big cities to small towns and from national parks to my own back yard. I even included a self portrait (one of two possibilities shown).

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Today is Friday. Normally, that would be cause for celebration. The weekend is nigh; the promise of fun and frivolity is sure to bring a smile to even the most dour among  us. So it gives me no pleasure at all to be the first to tell you that we’re all going to die.

What—no time to read? Let me just summarize for you:

“Parts of the planet will become uninhabitable.”

“Devastating streams of particles from the sun, galactic cosmic rays, and enhanced ultraviolet B rays from a radiation-damaged ozone layer, to name just a few of the invisible forces that could harm or kill living creatures.”

“The consequences for life on Earth could be ruinous.”

“It will have its way with us, no matter what we do. Our task is to figure out how to make it hurt as little as possible.”

“It’s time to wake up to the dangers and start preparing.”

I don’t know about y’all, but I think I’m gonna hit up Costco this weekend and stock up on canned goods.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: The end of the world isn’t happening any time soon. The bad news? Well…let’s hear it from an actual time traveler who’s totally, definitely for real.

The birth of ambient music: “I started hearing this record as if I’d never heard music before. It was a really beautiful experience, I got the feeling of icebergs, you know? I would just occasionally hear the loudest parts of the music, get a little flurry of notes coming out above the sound of the rain—and then it’d drift away again”

It’s happening.

The average profit margin among U.S. companies is 7.9 percent (6.9 percent when you exclude the financial sector). The public thinks it’s 36 percent.

“Facts are facts and truth is truth,” wrote Thomas Stuart Ferguson. Unfortunately for him, the truth he found wasn’t the truth he was looking for.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

There’s a chapter in Leszek Kołakowski’s wonderful Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers (Basic Books, 2007) entitled “Faith: Why should we believe?” in which he outlines an argument from the Pensées by Blaise Pascal. Here’s the money quote:

“It is remarkable, Pascal says, that people don’t think about the things that most vitally concern them: their deaths, immortality, salvation. They do not think about them because they do not want to think about them; they would rather not be reminded of what awaits them. They flee from what is most vital, escaping into amusements of all kinds, anything to forget; their entire life becomes a series of amusements, a way of escaping. We invent all sorts of ways to avoid confronting the fundamental issue: hunting, theatre, parties, intrigues—even wars—all these are just ways of anaesthetizing the pain of existence.”

Happy Monday.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

The Oatmeal has, as usual, nailed it: “Two half-wits do not equal a full-witted person. They equal a quarter-witted person.”

Of course, the problem runs much deeper than a meeting attended by half-wits. It’s the whole idea behind “there are no bad ideas in brainstorming,” which is not only demonstrably false, but also quite obviously dreamed up by someone who’s never participated in a group brainstorming session. (My conservative estimate, after 16 years in this business, is that, of all the ideas generated by three or more people in a room at a single time, roughly 98.5 percent are terrible.)

I think some of the misunderstanding comes from the mythos surrounding creativity. There’s no single proven method, because we all approach our jobs in different ways. I prefer the quiet of solitude, where I can think through a problem, uninterrupted, and try to come up with multiple ways of solving it. Others feel the need to express themselves to anyone who will listen, gauge feedback, and adapt their solutions accordingly. But because we as a society seem to be obsessed with consensus-building—not to mention the idea that collaboration is always better—the latter approach almost always wins out.

I’m not so sure, though. There seems to be a single-mindedness behind most great ideas. While you can bet that committees are responsible for stuff like this.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the design life the writing life  |  make a comment

On January 1, 2018, helveticka will celebrate its 30th anniversary. In honor of this milestone, over the course of this coming year I’ll take a look back to when we first began, share some memories, and wonder where all the time went.

We might as well begin with this photograph.

John Mraz and I founded Anderson Mraz Design on January 1, 1988. Eight days later, we walked into J. Craig Sweat’s photography studio to get our picture taken so we could promote our new venture. I was just six months married and four days into my 28th year (what’s with all the 8s?).

These days, the big glasses and skinny ties—not to mention the slender physiques—are long gone. But the adventure that we began so long ago continues.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(4)

So this guy went out and captured 10 terabytes (!) of raw data last summer with a $110,000 Phantom Flex4K high-speed camera. His gift to us? Three minutes of lightning shot at 1,000 fps. It’s…beautiful. Be sure to select the 4K option and watch it in full-screen mode. (Hat tip.)

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In 1955, Robert B. Young, of Ford Motor Company’s marketing research department, sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Modernist poet Marianne Moore. “[W]e find ourselves,” Young wrote, “with a problem which, strangely enough, is more in the field of words than in car-making.…Our dilemma is a name for a rather important new series of cars.”

Given that Ms. Moore’s oeuvre is characterized by “linguistic precision, keen and probing descriptions, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art,” what could possibly go wrong?

Moore agreed to help out, and, over the next several weeks, sent 43 suggestions to Young (or hundreds over the course of an entire year, depending on the source). My favorite? Honestly, it’s a toss-up between “The Intelligent Whale” and “Utopian Turtletop.” Not surprisingly, Ford went in a different direction, ultimately deciding on “Edsel.”

Let this be a lesson to you, folks: Naming things is hard.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  comments(1)