It’s mid-March and already the spring-time lovelies are peeking their heads out of the ground to brighten up the Pacific Northwest. To say I am excited is a gross understatement. Being from Alaska, sunshine works wonders on me and those added splashes of natural color basically makes me skip to work. If you are lacking in either of these categories, here is my treat to you: 10,000 flower images stitched together by French director Thomas Blanchard. You’re welcome.
I know I’m supposed to be outraged (or something), but all this photo collection elicits from me is fond recollections of my childhood. Nostalgia’s funny that way. Speaking of which, remember when record companies did this? Good times.
Helvetica has always had a sense of purpose. While it’s one of several great fonts at every designer’s disposal, it is—by far—the most famous. And it didn’t achieve this status simply by lookin’ good (although the documentary certainly didn’t hurt). Helvetica is educated. Hardworking. Likable. And for nearly 60 years now, its success has depended on keeping an open mind and never being afraid to appear on anything, anywhere, at any time. In short, it’s never met a design it couldn’t help. In this regard, Helvetica is a very charitable font.
That’s why we formed Helveticahaus—to showcase a typeface that’s willing to give itself over to a higher calling. And with your support, this haus will give aspiring designers an opportunity to continue to use Helvetica in new and exciting ways.
Today I bring you not one, not two, but three articles with at least a tenuous connection to the writing life: Barton Swaim reviews a book on metaphors, Tom McCarthy proposes that “if there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google,” and Julia Holmes exposes the sordid underbelly of copy-editing.
What? Tired of blog posts about grammar and writing and other stuff nobody cares about? Tell Courtney to write something designy.
If you’re one of those who wonders why so many people these days are concerned, hurt, offended, or “made uncomfortable,” by something as innocuous as a word, a photograph, or a tasteless joke, this is the site for you.
On the “problematic nature of the snow shoveling gender gap,” for example, we learn that “the patriarchy hurts men just as much as women: forcing yourself into rigid gender roles keeps you outside on a cold, snowy day, gents. Wouldn’t you rather be inside while your partner shoulders some of the burden?”
It’s brilliant stuff.
The irreproachable Morgan Lynch, soon-to-be runner-up in the office chess championship, alerted me to Bartholomäus Traubeck’s modified record player that “plays” slices of wood:
It’s a brilliant idea, really (inspired by a Jethro Tull album), and the resulting sounds are surprisingly musical.
Last Saturday I had the pleasure of presenting a lecture at Boise’s fourth annual Modern Masters series, sponsored by Preservation Idaho and Idaho Modern. The subject? The late Spokane architect Kenneth W. Brooks, part of our region’s stellar mid-century modern architecture movement that spanned two decades beginning in the early 1950s.
Brooks received three national awards from the American Institute of Architects in three different decades: Washington Water Power Central Service Facility (Spokane, 1959—the first national AIA award in the state of Washington), Intermountain Gas Company Headquarters (Boise, 1966—where Saturday’s event was held), and Columbia Basin College’s Art-Drama-Music Complex (Pasco, 1978).
Though I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Brooks, his determination and love of his craft were unparalleled.
There’s much to disagree with in this interview with Wordnik founder and CEO Erin McKean—like when she says, “I truly believe that if something is used as a word, it’s a word.” But there’s also a lot to commend it:
Sometimes it seems as if people think that words just go into dictionaries to be preserved indefinitely, like pressed flowers. The dictionary is seen as this arbiter of the One True Answer to any question about a word, instead of a buffet of possible (and delicious) answers.
To fight this mistaken belief, I try to change the conversation from “is this word in the dictionary (and therefore a “good” word)?” to “what information is available about this word, and how can you use it to make a decision about this word’s fitness for your purpose?”
McKean makes a great point. And a bunch of others, for that matter. Read the whole thing.
When my friends and I used to act out Star Trek episodes—favorites were “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “The Devil in the Dark,” and, naturally, “Arena”—everyone wanted to be Kirk. There was a logic to it, I suppose: Kirk always got the girl. But even at that tender age, I had already come to terms with the fact that, somehow, even if I were Kirk, I’d never get the girl. Spock it was, then.
True story: I practiced raising my left eyebrow independently of my right for hours in front of a mirror, just so I could register disdain toward anyone who acted illogically. (I also practiced the Vulcan nerve pinch on my older sister, which didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped.) As for the hand signal—the “Vulcan greeting,” I think it’s called—please. I could do it with both hands by the time I was in third grade.
Forty years on, and this, a gift from my daughter, is what I drink my afternoon tea out of:
Yes, yes, I know—it was just a TV show. And a campy one at that. But honestly, it’s hard to imagine my childhood without it.
Sadly, Leonard Nimoy died this morning at 83. He lived long, and he prospered. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Spock. You were a nerd before it was cool.
“I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.” Jerry Garcia
For the kickoff to the 37th Annual Northwest Bach Festival last night, the missus and I eschewed the wine-and-cheese affair at Barrister in favor of a showing of Francois Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould over at the MAC.
The presence of Zuill himself (no, not that one) was a pleasant surprise, though it sent the ladies into a collective swoon that threatened to delay the start of the film. I mean, seriously—the guy looks like he just stepped from the cover of a grocery store romance novel.
Apparently, the event to attend this year is the Catalyst String Quartet’s performance of their own arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. That’s this coming Sunday at St. John’s Cathedral. I understand that smelling salts will be made available following Mr. Bailey’s pre-concert “conversation.”
Over at First Things, David Bentley Hart has written something of an homage to Amanda McKittrick Ros, author of such turgid prose as “Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”
That’s from Ros’s 1897 novel Irene Iddesleigh, a book that Ros herself considered a masterpiece, but was published only when her husband paid a Belfast printer to do so. Hart’s appreciation makes for a delightful read—if only to be reminded that there have been far worse writers than I.
Whether you are a tech enthusiast or a person born any time after 1940, you will appreciate this new partnership: Mattel and Google Cardboard are teaming up to recreate the ever-so-popular View-Master. But not everyone is too keen on the new partnership, asking bluntly, “You wouldn’t strap a smartphone to your face, so why let your kids do it?”.
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I am infamous for misspelling a word in a design project. A word. One. It will never be seen by the client, of course, thanks to my helpful teammates who love to point it out. (And thankfully so, since my pride is far less important then product perfection.)
Meanwhile, in an effort to continue to hone my professional skills—like learning how to spell restaurant without auto-correct jumping to y rescue (as it just did)—I’m always on the lookout for helpful tips and articles. Like this one, for example, which helpfully asks, “Should designers care about typographic mistakes?”
One of my favorite design authors is Marty Neumeier. I first became aware of his work in the 1990s when he was editor and publisher of Critique magazine, a journal dedicated to design thinking. Years later, he published a book called Zag, which, as I recall, is the only book I’ve ever read twice. (Of course, my writer would find it hard to believe that I read it even once.) Neumeier also wrote The Designful Company and The Brand Gap.
A trip to Portland provided an opportunity to hear the author talk about his latest book, Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age, which my writer would also find hard to believe—let alone that I’ve ever set foot inside Powell’s Books.
“At seven billion strong,” writes Neumeier in Metaskills, “we’re now the most populous mammals on the planet with the possible exception of rats. And since the rats aren’t likely to be game changers, it’s up to us. We’re the ones that will make or break the future.”