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We’re Doomed

Fancy a quick look at what’s happening around the world? According to Mother Nature Network, it appears that the end of the world is on track, which might explain this giant rogue iceberg, the addition of 2.2% artificial light every year (“threatening the 30% of vertebrates and more than 60% of invertebrates that are nocturnal”), and the banning of cats in Omaui, New Zealand. Oh—and if you find this highly venomous six-eyed sand spider lurking in your bathroom, be sure to alert the Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion. She’s gone missing.

I’m done now.

“Get up (get on up)…”

Francis Fukuyama is a veritable quote machine. (Sort of like this, only…different.) Here are a few choice nuggets from a recent interview published at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“We think of ourselves as people with an inner self hidden inside that is denigrated, ignored, not listened to. A great deal of modern politics is about the demand of that inner self to be uncovered, publicly claimed, and recognized by the political system.”

“What makes students feel good about themselves is not necessarily what’s most useful to their education.”

“When you’re younger, you may think you’ve got independent ideas, but you do depend on the affirmation of friends and colleagues.”

“Social media is perfectly made for identity politics. It allows you to close yourself off in an identity group, get affirmation of everything you say, and not have to argue with people who think differently.”

Quiz Time!

To a non-designer like me, the difference between Helvetica and Arial is like the difference between competing brands of a certain crème-filled sandwich cookie. Oreos are the preferred choice—obviously—but Hydrox will do in a pinch. (And, to be quite honest, few of us could really tell the difference.)

When it comes to fonts, though, people get weird.

So weird, in fact, that David Friedman took twenty logos that were originally designed in Helvetica, recreated them using Arial, and presented the results side by side in a fun online quiz. Things got a little dicey around here this morning when Shirlee and Skooch each scored 19, Courtney 18, and CK, well…perhaps it’s best if we not mention it right now.

The real tragedy here is that, while type nerds are fighting over font supremacy in what amounts to a battle between vanilla and French vanilla, the arrival of the “world’s first genetically engineered superfont” has been largely ignored.

“The Grandfathers of Logo Design”

It used to be that logo design was “mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.”

Then along came Paul Rand, who upended everything with his IBM logo in 1956. And then? Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar created an abstract mark for Chase Manhattan Bank. Logo design hasn’t been the same since. Take a look:

Stop! Grammar Time!

Jealous vs. envious. Synonyms? Not quite.

Let’s say you see Skooch roll up to helveticka world headquarters in his sweet new Honda CBR300R motorcycle, and boy howdy do you ever wish you had one yourself. So…you’re envious.

Let’s further say that you’re Skooch’s girlfriend, and you’re not at all keen on the attention he’s been getting from the ladies on account of that same motorcycle. You’re jealous.

See, envy is all about what you don’t have; jealousy comes into play when you want to hold on to that which you already possess.

I Want to Believe

“Conspiracy theories,” writes Clare Coffey over at the estimable New Atlantis, “obsesses [sic] over human history and insist that it can be known, not as a collection of data points and mass social tendencies through time, but on a human-sized stage with real human actors.” She goes on:

Cryptozoology taps into a tradition of natural history in which nature is wild, and jealous of her secret oddities. Its amateurism and eagerness towards all phenomena distinguish it from science, but it is precisely in those qualities that its riches lie. It does not assume an enchanted world, precisely, but a world that has never lost its edges, where discovery has never ceded precedence to technical tinkering.

Speaking for myself, I think she’s right. I kind of want there to exist a “large, hairy, bipedal non-human primate” lurking in the same woods I frequent. I mean, sure, yay science and all that, but “secret oddities” are kind of cool, too.

Good to Know

Always quick to remind anyone who will listen that the glass is, in fact, half full, Courtney offers up some helpful advice for the weekend: How to Survive a 10,000-Foot Fall.

Rhett Allain, associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana State University, says that experimental evidence on the subject is thin, since it’s unethical to throw people out of airplanes for science.

“Fortunately, we don’t have enough data to make a trendline,” Allain says.

Still, Allain and others have a few ideas about the factors that might determine whether or not you survive a tumble from thousands of feet in the air.

Turns out there’s physics involved—and a little luck. Plus, some sound advice from Dr. Jeffrey Bender, professor of surgery at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center: “Don’t land on your head.”

Fun for the Whole Family

Have you heard? helveticka is 30 years old. And since we never do things the easy—or, let’s be honest, normal—way, we celebrated not with a cake, but with an exhibit.

Mind if I shamelessly quote from the press release? Thanks.

“We’ve spent the last three decades building relationships with talented specialists hired to help strengthen our company’s outcomes,” explains [CK] Anderson, principal and creative director at helveticka. “So we created an exhibit that celebrates unique perspectives from 30 of those people.”

Curated, designed, written, and installed by Anderson and his team, CX30: Creative Experiences, Thirty Collaborators isn’t your typical exhibit, he says. While work from a few commercial visual artists is presented, the essence of the show is the personal stories provided by the participants themselves. “When we reached out to these 30 collaborators,” says Anderson, “we asked each to tell a story—about themselves, about their careers, about the creative experience. We were looking for tales of adventure; death-defying feats in the face of terrible danger. Maybe even one or two poking fun of clients.”

What they got instead was far more personal: They provided insights; recalled interesting, funny, or challenging circumstances; revealed breakthrough moments in their careers; offered business philosophies; and, at times, shared surprising personal details of their own creative experiences.

Among those represented in the exhibit are artists, photographers, illustrators, programmers, videographers, media buyers, printers, animators, fabricators, composers—even a cartoonist. While the majority of them are from Spokane, some hail from as far away as Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

“For those working in or around the creative industry,” says Anderson, “we think they’ll find these stories compelling and relatable. For those thinking about a career in the arts, or new to the creative profession, we hope it will be inspiring and informative. And for everyone else, we think it’s a wonderful way to showcase some amazing local talent—the sort of creativity most people just don’t realize is out there.”

CX30: Creative Experiences, Thirty Collaborators is up right now at the Washington Cracker Building, just a stone’s throw from helveticka world headquarters at 304 W Pacific Ave. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday, 5–7 p.m.

Can’t make it? Fear not: You can get a taste at 30creatives.com.

Quote of the Day

“The more I work,” writes London-based artist and musician Martin Creed in the foreword to Works, a survey of his career published in 2010, “the more I think I don’t know what I am doing.” He goes on:

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. It is like sweat or shit. It comes out as I go along. As you do one thing over here, something else comes out over there. It is not what you think you are doing. It is like scum on top of things or like sediment at the bottom. It builds up while you are doing other things.

Working feels like trying to face up to what comes out of you.

Art is shit. Art galleries are toilets. Curators are toilet attendants. Artists are bullshitters.

Ten of Thirty

Twenty-three years ago, we launched our first exhibit.

It happened almost by accident. I’d stumbled across several World War I and II propaganda posters in the basement of the Cheney Cowles Museum (now the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture) while researching its photography archives. A short time later, I sent them a letter suggesting that it would be wonderful if the WWII posters could be displayed, given that so many of the era’s poster designers and illustrators were prominent industry figures. I thought it would make for a nice, humble little show at the Spokane Falls Community College design gallery.

What happened next certainly came as a surprise. Larry Schoonover, then the deputy director of the museum, liked the idea—but he wanted the posters shown in its main gallery. It turns out my inquiry was timely: The 50th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, which brought about the end of WWII, was fast approaching. And Larry saw an opportunity to commemorate the event.

Behind the Red, White & Blue: Posters, Propaganda & Pride opened October 13,1995. To this day, the exhibit remains a highlight of my career. It opened the door for our firm’s work in experiential design, allowing us to blend our individual curiosities with history, storytelling, and the opportunity to create in three dimensions.

In the simplest of terms, exhibits are places where voices are heard, where visuals become emotive, and where one’s understanding is heightened. It’s also where we, as writers and designers, often feel the greatest impact.

Miscellany

So there’s a thing called the iPhone Photography Awards. And they just announced the 2018 winners.

While we’re at it, Scuba Diving magazine did something similar.

“It’s like keeping wine in a cellar instead of on the kitchen counter.” One of life’s great mysteries has, at long last, been settled. #science

The late Donald Hall on aging: “I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I rise to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed by further exhaustion. At night I watch baseball on television, and between innings run through the New York Times Book Review. I roll over all night. Breakfast. Coffee.”

I’m reasonably certain that every word of this is true—though, in the spirit of inquiry, I intend to seek an evidential basis for each of the claims presented. Starting right about…now.

Time to Detox Your Masculinity

This article on young men and the “new narcissism” is worth a couple of minutes of your time. Turns out they’re “drinking less alcohol, smoking less and, oddly, having less sex, perhaps because sex involves focusing on someone else”—a 21st-century asceticism that requires no real sacrifice, “just a new exciting set of powders and pills to order on Amazon Prime, while you have earnest conversations about the dangers of our consumer culture.” Plus, I discovered a new word—bumf—which, according to my copy of the OED, is slang for “toilet paper; worthless literature; (usu. derog.) documents, official papers.”

Thirty years later…

…we’re still here.

I know what you’re thinking: That cannot possibly be. After all, nobody expected it to last. A couple of graphic designers, half a generation apart, both from rural Washington towns that start with the letter C and neither with any business knowledge whatsoever, starting a design company back in 1988? I guess it proves that literally anything is possible.

So, last Saturday, we threw a party to celebrate. Not so much for helveticka, but for our families, friends, collaborators, and, of course, for our clients. Surprisingly, more than 200 people showed up. Maybe it was the free live music. Maybe it was the wine, the beer, and the gourmet hot dogs.

Or maybe it was the chance to learn about 30 collaborators who, over the years, played an integral part in helping our firm reach this milestone – each of whom shared a personal story either directly or indirectly related to their profession. The result is a body of exhibited work we call CX30: Creative Experiences, Thirty Collaborators.

And, as luck would have it, nearly all of them were on hand to mark the opening of CX30 and to help celebrate helveticka’s thirtieth anniversary.

Thanks to everyone who shared this moment with us. We’re glad you came – each and every one of you.

photographs by Chad Ramsey

Stop! Grammar Time!

When people ask me for advice on writing,* I’ll often respond with “Never use utilize. Always use use.” Sure, it’s a little smart-assy (I prefer to think of it as aphoristic), but it’s more than just snark. I’ll let David Foster Wallace explain:

[Utilize] is a puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter. I tell my students that using utilize makes you seem either pompous or so insecure that you’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look smart. The same is true for the noun utilization, and for vehicle as used for car, for residence as used for home, for indicate as used for say, for presently, at present, at this time, and at the present time as used for now, and so on. What’s worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: ‘Formal writing’ does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

More thoughts from DFW at the invaluable Oxford Dictionaries blog.

*Don’t laugh! It happens. No, seriously.

An’ a one, an’ a two…

“In 1932,” writes Armand D’Angour, associate professor of classics at the University of Oxford, “the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett reported to an audience at the Royal Musical Association in London the words of an unnamed professor of Greek with musical leanings: ‘Nobody has ever made head or tail of ancient Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.'”

Until now, that is.

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