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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

Got a couple weekend reads for you.

First, an article in the LA Review of Books that compels me to admit that maybe—just maybe—the French are right about something:

English speakers think of their language as “open,” “flexible,” and “accommodating.” The French story is exactly the opposite. In French minds, their language is a particularly complex and nuanced tongue with no gray zones and little, if any, à peu près (approximation). Words are right or words are wrong. Every word has a precise meaning distinguishing it from other words.

Second, the Washington Post has a story about Jerry and Rita Alter, who “may have been hiding a decades-old secret, pieces of which are now just emerging”:

After the couple died, a stolen Willem de Kooning painting with an estimated worth of $160 million was discovered in their bedroom.

More than 30 years ago, that same painting disappeared the day after Thanksgiving from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.

And Wednesday, the Arizona Republic reported that a family photo had surfaced, showing that the day before the painting vanished, the couple was, in fact, in Tucson.

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

This brilliant article over at The Outline is chock full of aphorisms that ought to be cross-stitched on pillows in homes across America.

Here are a couple of good ones:

“Publishing is a retail industry, not a meritocracy.”

“Just because you are fluent doesn’t mean you can write.”

My favorite, though? “Writing is hard. Writing artfully so that someone enjoys what you’re writing is even harder.”

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

All this straw-banning nonsense is, well…just that: nonsense. Given that 60 percent of the plastic in the oceans comes from only five Asian countries, these new laws are nothing more than virtue-signaling by career politicians. I mean, take a look at this chart.

That aside, my favorite part of this Newsweek story is the quote from Chris Milne, director of packaging sourcing for Starbucks: “Starbucks is finally drawing a line in the sand and creating a mold for other large brands to follow. We are raising the water line for what’s acceptable and inspiring our peers to follow suit.”

I don’t know about you, but I count four metaphors in those two sentences. Four:

“Starbucks is finally drawing a line in the sand and creating a mold for other large brands to follow. We are raising the water line for what’s acceptable and inspiring our peers to follow suit.”

Then there’s the clichéd language like “what’s acceptable” and “inspiring our peers,” not to mention all the questions I have about how a large brand—or anyone, really—is supposed to follow a mold. And that’s not just a PR lackey speaking off the cuff, either. It came right out of the “Starbucks Newsroom.” Which means a bunch of middle-management types signed off on it. Heck, they’re probably incorporating it into a slide deck even as I write this.

When this stuff passes for good writing or clear thinking, forget about the plastic choking our oceans and killing the fish. We’re all doomed.

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