One of my favorite books is The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson.

The now-famous 1995 publication achieved its rarified status for two reasons: Carson’s emergence in the 90s as graphic design’s bad boy – doing groundbreaking work that defied every mainstream design convention – and the fact that it’s the best-selling graphic design book of all time. Its title is in part a response to a 1993 interview with Neville Brody, another graphic designer of note, who suggested that Carson’s work represented the “end of print.” Carson took it as a challenge.

Among his notable work is a three-year stint as art director (1992-95) for Ray Gun magazine. Note the full-page ad for subscribing – another dig at Brody:

I remember going to my local grocery store and thumbing through issues whose provocative pages were artfully illustrative and alluring. I discovered – much to my surprise – that if you’re interested in the content, you don’t mind working a little harder to read the text. (It’s a magazine, not a book.)

Carson’s surfer lifestyle and lack of formal training definitely informed his chaotic design solutions. Is it art or graphic design? Is it beautiful or just plain ugly? Is it communication or decoration? The answer to all of these is both – all at the same time. It’s like reading a puzzle or interpreting hieroglyphics. It sometimes takes a little longer to connect the dots, but it’s well worth the time.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Carson’s approach is that there are actually clients who continue to appreciate it – though his design sensibilities are about as far away from my own aesthetic as you can get. As he said himself, he would never be caught dead using Helvetica.

Today, David Carson continues to influence and shape the design landscape. His client list, industry accolades (including a 2014 AIGA Gold Medal), and constant demand on the global lecture circuit are all signs that both print and Carson are alive and well. And while he has his detractors, he’s pretty much considered the coolest graphic designer ever.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(1)

from THE MOWER
Philip Larkin

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

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

When people ask me what I do for a living, and I respond with, “I’m a writer,” there’s a 99.78 percent chance that the followup question will be, “Like…for what?”

It’s not as easy to explain as you might imagine, because normal people have a hard time believing that actual money changes hands for the kind of work we do around here.

“You write books?”

“No. I…”

“So you work for the newspaper, then.”

“Um, no. It’s more like…”

“Have I ever read anything you’ve written?”

“Probably not. Look…”

“But you’re a writer.”

By this point in the conversation I’m in full-on defensive mode. No, I don’t have a degree in creative writing or journalism or English or anything like that, I explain as patiently as possible. (I actually studied music, of all things – if by “studied” you mean “drank copious amounts of cheap beer and listened to a lot of records.”) And even though I know about verb tenses – there are 12 of them in English, if memory serves – I couldn’t define what “future perfect progressive” means if my life depended on it.

“But wait,” I say. “I’ve published stuff!”

Too late, though. Because that’s when it occurs to my interlocutor that, if this guy can throw a bunch of words together on a page and call himself a writer, what’s stopping me?

Nothing, it turns out. Absolutely nothing.

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

Did you know that Theodor Geisel took his pen name – Dr. Seuss – from his mother’s maiden name? Neither did I. And did you also know that pretty much everyone has been pronouncing it incorrectly? From You’re Saying It Wrong (Ten Speed Press):

The American public, unfamiliar with the German name, went the phonetic route. “Soos,” they called him, incorrectly. Alexander Lang, a college pal with whom he worked on the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, commemorated this lapse on the part of the reading public in verse:

You’re wrong as the deuce
And you shouldn’t rejoice
If you’re calling him Seuss.
He pronounces it Soice (or Zoice).

Not so fast, says Philip Nell, author of Dr. Seuss: American Icon and The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats. “If you pronounce it ‘Doctor Zoice,'” he writes, “you’ll sound like a fool.” Turns out the good doctor was totally fine with the Americanized soos.

So. If you want to sound all fancy and pretentious, insist on “Dr. Zoice.” If you want people to know what the hell you’re talking about, just say it the way you’ve always said it.

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

“We are, all of us, office babies,” writes Madeleine Aggeler, “and exclamation points are the written equivalent of child-proof bumper guards — a soft piece of punctuational padding that protects our emotional fontanelles from the sharp edges of conversations.”

As much as I hate to admit it, she may be on to something. No one in the office would deny that exchanging emails or instant messages with our very own Courtney Sowards (who, let’s be honest, never met a punctuation mark she didn’t like) is a far more pleasant experience than it would be with, say…me.

But Aggeler’s larger point – that it doesn’t cost anything to be amiable, so why not? – goes well beyond the addition of a handful of exclamation points, I think. And it’s something we should all be working toward.

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

AI-generated jazz? It’s apparently a thing now:

DeepJazz is a 2016 project by Princeton computer science student Ji-Sung Kim that spews out piano solo variations on Pat Metheny’s “And Then I Knew.” The model was created using the original Pat Metheny track MIDI file as the data source, the Keras and Theano machine learning APIs, and a long-term short memory (LTSM) recurrent neural network. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are popular in today’s AI composition because they learn from previous input by looping and thus backpropagate on the fly.

Problem is, it’s…not very good.

Maybe it’s just me, but improvisation doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that could be done by AI, mostly because it’s so personal. I mean, if all it took was an understanding of music theory and chord progressions and scales and all that, there’d be a lot more Coltranes out there.

“Crescent”: John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums (1963)

But there aren’t. Because improvisation requires reason, reflection, and a musical vocabulary established over decades of study. It’s also because a great solo is about balancing silence, repetition, and cohesiveness with conceptual and thematic development. That’s just the fundamentals: A guitar teacher I once had stressed the importance of tension and release through resolution, which necessitates an understanding not only of the material, but also of your audience. And what about the other musicians? Improvisation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Without the collective energy of the other musicians on stage, it’s just noodling – which is pretty much what we get from DeepJazz.

So color me skeptical. Sure, it’s a pretty impressive feat. But to quote Samuel Johnson, it’s rather “like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(2)

Good news for all you minions of Mephistopheles (Beelzebub believers? Lucifer lovers? Beasts of Baphomet?): The IRS has granted tax-exempt status to the Satanic Temple.

Speaking of the Devil incarnate, 1,300 glass plates from Hitler’s personal photographer have been digitized by the National Archives.

In other news, Snoop Dogg’s bong brand gets the Pentagram identity and packaging treatment.

Think modern life is distracting? John Cassian, a fifth-century monk, complained that his mind “seems driven by random incursions” and “wanders around like it were drunk.”

Wordsmiths Gone Wild: Teachers at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop “seemed to think that free booty was part of their compensation package.”

(Is it me, or is there a theme connecting all of these? Probably just me.)

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

What a stupid time to be alive – as, it turns out, the prophets foretold. First, sports teams are dropping Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” on accounta she “recorded at least two songs with racist content” nearly 80 years ago. (You know, back when pretty much everyone was a racist.) And second, selfie deaths are an epidemic now, apparently. There’s even a name for the phenomenon: “killfies.” Makes me long for the days when idiocy was relatively harmless.

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