A trip to the print shop to check and sign off on paper stock, colors, and registration still happens, but less so with the advent of digital printing. Offset printing—now reserved for larger-quantity projects—still requires us to ensure that the quality of printing meets our satisfaction. Having a good loupe to check the four-color process and spot color ink alignments is critical. When I was making press checks, I never left the office without my Betaview 10X.

And while the pressmen always gave me grief about my homemade pretty pink shoestring lanyard, I never misplaced my loupe. It’s kind of funny how once you start looking at printing that closely—right down to a gnat’s ass—nobody pokes fun of you anymore.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

The Norks have nukes, there’s an Oompa Loompa in the White House, and Hot & Spicy Cinnamon Oreos are a thing. It’s enough to cause even the most stoical among us to despair.

But hey, we here at helveticka are a creative bunch. When a client comes to us with a seemingly intractable problem, we put our heads together and solve it. So I asked the best and the brightest around the office for help with the following:

“The world would be a much better place if…”

Based on the responses, I’d say we nailed it:

Linda “…fields of cotton were actually made up of tiny balls of cotton candy.”

Courtney “…every single person did at least one kind thing for another each day, giving us a daily reminder to be more selfless.”

Steven “…we lived in a virtual reality world where everything we thought instantly materialized, like the Construct in The Matrix.”

Michelle “…we could all just get along, if there was more sunshine, if we lived for today, if there were more happy endings, if we drank more wine, and if we were all as awesome as Aaron except on the days when he asks me to do stupid crap like this.”

Aaron “…more people listened to the Grateful Dead.”

(And yes, we can deduce from this that Linda is a fantasist, Courtney an idealist, Steven a solipsist, and Michelle a monologuist. As for me, well…I’m the only one offering a practicable solution. So call me a realist.)

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

Lionel Shriver bravely tackles the “cultural appropriation” mob over at Prospect magazine. “Given that the better part of the human race is crazy, stupid, or both,” she writes, “there’s nary a thought in the world whose airing won’t offend somebody.”

She’s right, of course. The problem, though, is that those in thrall to this sort of nonsense aren’t inclined to listen to reason. In fact, they’re probably taking to social media right now to denounce her.

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

“Contrary to popular opinion,” writes Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, “malls are great, and they always were.”

Did you know that more than a thousand words—e.g. mule deer, prairie dog, snowberry—appeared for the first time in Lewis and Clark’s journals? Neither did I.

Postcards and propaganda.

Ah, the five-paragraph essay: “a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US.” It’s “dysfunctional – to say nothing of off-putting, infantilising and intellectually arid.”

Speaking of essays, Marilynne Robinson has some thoughts on freedom of conscience.

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

So we’re midway through Black History Month, which can be pretty intimidating for white folk like me in an era in which a word like “racism” has lost all meaning – and when the concept of “privilege” has become completely unmoored from reality.

How do we celebrate? Should we? Dare we, lest we offend someone?

This isn’t the place to get into all that, I reckon. So let me offer up a recommendation: Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers, an epic four-and-a-half-hour composition that took Smith more than 30 years to complete. It’s hard to describe, but the entry on the Pulitzer website does a pretty good job: “An expansive jazz work that memorializes 10 key moments in the history of civil rights in America, fusing composed and improvised passages into powerful, eloquent music.”

“More than anything,” writes Josh Langhoff at PopMatters, “Freedom is about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith’s imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits.”

BBC Music’s Daniel Spicer wrote that Freedom “is a spiritual call to action, a powerful argument not just for civil rights but for universal human rights; a vision not just of a better America, but a better humanity; a plea for compassion and, yes, love.”

“It’s a major work for Mr. Smith,” sums up Ben Ratliff at the New York Times, “and for the ambitious and experimental end of post-Coltrane jazz he represents, the kind of music in which intuitive and collective improvising meets strict notation.”

As for me, well…I find Freedom utterly mesmerizing. I have a few of Smith’s recordings; this, I think, is his most personal. His trumpet playing is at once plaintive and elegiac, clean and pure, soulful and beautiful – punctuated, at times, by appropriately righteous anger. And though the scope of the work itself is massive, I tend to think of the individual pieces themselves as meditations; intimate reflections on a time in our history that can best be described through Huxley’s dictum that, “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

It’s a truly remarkable achievement.

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

Did y’all hear? Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute that “hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.”

I’ve long held that there’s literally no reason whatsoever to omit the Oxford (or “serial”) comma. I mean, here I am back in 2010 making the case for its preservation.

The New York Times offers a couple of defenses for its anti-Oxford position, only one of which is believable: “[N]ews writing has traditionally omitted the serial comma—perhaps seeking a more rapid feeling in the prose, or perhaps to save time and effort in the old days of manual typesetting.”

Here’s the thing: Ambiguity, the chief result of omitting the Oxford comma (as the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled last week) doesn’t lend itself to “a more rapid feeling in the prose.” You know what does? Clarity. And that, my friends, is what the Oxford comma offers in spades.

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

“Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white),” writes Danielle Lazarin, “I fantasize about offering her a book by a woman instead, replacing the male voices in her head with female ones one book at a time.”

That’s funny. Every time I see a woman in public reading a book by a man (usually dead, usually white), I think, Yay! Somebody’s reading! And then I imagine that, as a grownup, she’s probably capable of making her own decisions—since she probably knows better than some stranger with an axe to grind exactly what she likes to read, and most likely isn’t making that decision based on the author’s sex, race, or current state of existence.

But then, I’m a man. What the hell do I know about lady readers?

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

Twenty-four finalists (out of 450) have been selected in this year’s Book Illustration Competition run by The Folio Society and House of Illustration. The book, to be published later this year, is The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Entrants were required to read A Scandal in Bohemia, The Man With the Twisted Lip, and The Musgrave Ritual, then provide an illustration for each, as well as a design for the book binding. The Guardian put together a gallery here; you can view the longlisted entries—and cast your vote for the People’s Choice Award—here.

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