blog
tyblography

categories

architecture (29)
on location (21)
random thoughts (1,262)
staff (27)
the design life (289)
the writing life (414)
blog archive




55, 56…and counting…

mexican_mine_office_blog

In the summer of 1988, the year our firm was founded, we landed two very important projects: annual reports for The Washington Water Power Company (now Avista Corp.) and Hecla Mining Company. At the time, print was king and annual reports were at the top of the designer food chain—high page counts, high production values, high stakes. The completion of this year’s for NOVAGOLD was our fifty-fifth annual report since 1988, with our fifty-sixth following a few days later. In the mining sector alone, we’ve produced thirty-seven. In addition to collaborating with great clients, these reports have taken us to several locations—mostly remote—throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. While I’m not sure our experience qualifies us as annual report specialists, I can attest that, twenty-eight years later, we continue to view ARs as high-privilege projects.

Print Is Dead! Long Live Print!

“There are no two ways about it,” wrote John C. Abell in a 2011 article over at Wired. “E-books are here to stay.” Sure, they were “fundamentally flawed,” but that didn’t stop him from poking fun at the “ambiguous tactile argument” from some “late-to-never adopters.”

At the time, I thought Abell was full of it. Reading between the lines, he seemed to be predicting the demise of print. On the one hand, he acknowledged that “books are legacy items that may never go away”; on the other, he wrote that they “have been forever marginalized as a niche medium.”

Well…it looks like we’ve already hit peak digital. The publishing industry “suffered a bad attack of technodazzle,” writes Simon Jenkins. “It failed to distinguish between newness and value.”

Tech isn’t always the answer, it seems—particularly when there was never a question in the first place.

Bubble Circus!

If any of our readers out there feel compelled to compensate me for all the work I do to deliver fresh, incisive content every week, I wouldn’t say “No” to a setup like this. Problem is, I wouldn’t get any work done.

Spokane Scene no. 18

compoundmod

I know what you’re thinking: that I’m about to take these poor folks to the woodshed for hyphenating a compound formed by an adverb ending in ly plus a participle (“publicly-traded”).

But you couldn’t be more wrong.

No, I’m taking them to the woodshed for hyphenating a compound formed by an adverb ending in ly plus a participle (“publicly-traded”) while ON THE SAME FRICKIN’ BILLBOARD not hyphenating another compound formed by an adverb ending in ly plus a participle (“locally owned”).

“Consistency,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Perhaps. But it ought to be the first refuge of the proofreader.

Quote of the Day

E. B. White, from an interview conducted by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther for the Fall 1969 issue of the Paris Review:

“Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.”

Good thing Twitter wasn’t around back then. Oh, and the entire interview is here.

I like quilting…

… nah, I love quilting. I grew up quilting and sewing and surrounded by beautiful quilts and fabrics. I also grew up around a lot of ugly quilts and ugly fabrics. I acknowledge that we each have our own tastes, but brown country quilts are just not my thing. These are.

Melt my heart, ladies. Ya’ll just made my Friday.

 

HBD, SK

Søren Kierkegaard was born on this day in 1813. Since he’s pretty much my favorite philosopher, we’re going to let him write today’s blog post in honor of his 203rd birthday:

“The essential sermon is one’s own existence. A person preaches with this every hour of the day and with power quite different from that of the most eloquent speaker in his most eloquent moment. To let your mouth run with eloquent babbling when such talk is the opposite of your life is in the deepest sense nonsense. You become liable to eternal judgment.”

Opera for Two

So the missus and I went on a date last Saturday morning. (Actually, it wasn’t really a “date,” since we’re far too old for such nonsense.) Anyway, we parked our butts in the super-comfy recliners at Regal Northtown Mall Stadium 12 and watched the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD broadcast of Strauss’s Elektra.

Director Patrice Chéreau’s austere staging added nuance to the story; soprano Nina Stemme owned the title role; under conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Met orchestra never sounded better.

Interested in catching the next broadcast? Next season’s HD Live schedule has already been set. And no, not all operas are expressionist takes on early-20th-century Freudian psychology with a side of blood sacrifice and a lust for vengeance. Sometimes there’s illicit sex, too.

Time for Some Dead

The kind of weather we’re enjoying right now elicits different responses from different people: some get dirty in their gardens, some hit the trails, some spend the weekend “at the lake.” Me, I dust off the Grateful Dead albums. So let’s kick the season off with a live version of “Wharf Rat”—the second performance ever, in fact—from February 19, 1971 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York:

Poetry Break

inbloom

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

from The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot (1922)

Been a Long Time…

The edco catalog represents one of the interesting ways projects come about. I last saw Clayton Goldsmith, international sales manager for edco, back in August of 2002. At the time, he was working for a furniture manufacturer in the Midwest, and we were assisting in planning their upcoming promotions. The client eventually imploded—thankfully before our actual work began. So I was surprised to receive an email from Clayton (subject line: been a long time…) last October. He’s now living in Germany and working for a Swiss/Dutch company in the bike business.

edco_blog

After completing a 2016 product catalog for him—edco’s introduction to North America—Clayton and I finally met up again at a bike show in Sacramento. I’m just hoping it’s not another 13 years before we work together again.

Stop! Grammar Time!

Premier and premiere are, respectively, the masculine and feminine forms of the word for “first” in French. But is there a difference in English? Glad you asked.

Only premier is used as an adjective:

Aaron is the premier chess player at helveticka world headquarters, due in no small part to his gigantic intellect.

It can also be a noun:

Philippe Couillard, Premier of Quebec, signed into law a bill mandating the consumption of poutine and maple syrup during all Canadian high holidays.

But then, premiere is also a noun…

The premiere of CK’s one-man show, “Chewelah Chewbacca: My Struggle with Hypertrichosis,” promises to be the must-see production of the season.

…except when it’s a verb:

Shirlee will premiere her bold line of camouflage business casual attire later this spring.

So:

adjective = premier
noun = premier/premiere
verb = premiere

Or, to wrap it all up in a tidy little sentence:

Premier Couillard premiered Shirlee’s premier clothing line at the premiere of CK’s one-man show.

Miscellany: Special Arts Edition!

Franco Zeffirelli is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s descendants. (Well…sort of.)

Dame Carol Ann Duffy (no, you’re thinking of Carol Anne—I’m talking about Britain’s Poet Laureate) won’t be writing anything for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Seems she’s busy penning an ode “celebrating the end of the old gas and electricity meters, which are to be replaced by 2020.” Totally understandable.

Speaking of poetry, James Parker makes the case for Les Murray as “the greatest poet alive.”

Next month, the Guggenheim will install “a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function.” Donald Trump is gonna be hella jealous, as the kids say.

Just two days left to catch Rob de Oude’s solo exhibition at DM Contemporary in Manhattan. Can’t make it? Check out some of de Oude’s remarkable work here.

Friday Afternoon Reading

It’s the classic David-and-Goliath story: The widow Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut, “isolated, cash-starved, often without electricity or running water on a palatial estate on the Potomac River in southern Maryland,” against—and I swear I’m not making this up—Big Time Toys, represented by the national law firm Epstein Becker & Green.

And that’s not all. There are knockoff Sea-Monkeys from China, scientific breakthroughs, 1960s bondage films, Jewish neo-Nazis, and “Cupids Arrow” Mating Powder. At stake: Nothing less than the late Harold von Braunhut’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire.

You’re gonna have to read the article to see how it all connects.

Color Me Intrigued

Though I have mixed feelings about the colorization of black and white photographs, I have to admit that this time lapse is pretty darn mesmerizing:

There’s something deeply satisfying in the cleanup part of the process, isn’t there?

The video, by the way, comes to us courtesy of The Paper Time Machine, a crowd-funded publishing project that, as of this writing, is at 20 percent of its goal.

back to top    |     1 59 60 61 62 63 131     |    archive >