Long time, mon ami. How you livin’? I myself am in Greenpoint, but only for the next week or so, sadly. But let’s get back in touch. I’m looking for good work and also for good times. Double awesome for combinations of the same.

In the meantime, until everything gets settled, here are some of my graphic-design-related oblique strategies:

• Delete all of your layers except for your least favorite.
• Proof-print using only hand tools.
• Convert all metaphors to praximal elements.
• Txt a random friend of yours an amusing quote from a movie and use whatever he or she sends back as your greek text.
• Beat your laser printer to death with your friends, and replace it with a medium-format inkjet. Use it for at least a week.
• Throw a good book out the window.
• Blame USPS.
• Send your nemesis a copy of your most recent positive review.
• Print one proof with all of the colors inverted.
• Print one proof with all of the inks dialed down 10 percent.
• Eat your lunch on the floor while looking up at your project.
• Eat your lunch on the floor while looking up at your project. Just start drinking if lunch is over already.
• Redo your gutters.
• Subject your spot colors to inquiry.
• Do not think in terms of explanations.
• Use time like color.
• Find an intern to berate, but think better of it at the last minute.
• Stay up all night.
• Compare what you do when hungry to what you do when fed.
• Steal a pattern.
• Lie to the next person that walks by you.
• Use an Olfa L-2.
• Translate the copy to Russian and back.
• Buy a steak and cheese sandwich and eat it.
• Ignore your health.
• Consider tangerines.
• Create a superset of your problems.
• Look at the proof print on the Brooklyn edge of the East River while the sun sets.
• Atomize into praximes.
• Switch computers with a friend. Save-as. Fuck the document up royally. Make them do it too. Compare results.
• Boxes of the same height look orderly when in a row.
• Let your nemesis do the talking for a little while.
• Stop being an asshole.
• Make an exhaustive list of all of your options. Flush it down the toilet and go with some cheap clip art and Helvetica.
• There are things on your page right now that are far stronger than any of your random flashes of inspiration.
• Throw the I-Ching with two friends.
• Get a divorce.
• Commit to systematized passive-agression.
• Redraw all the lowercase “s” characters in the lede with a Bic — preferably a blue one stolen from an ingrate.
• Hug your mom if you can.
• Overprint the next laser proof onto the most interesting thing in your recycle bin.
• Use a donut as your crop bars.
• Sit very very still for five minutes and try to hear a bird.
• Leave your poofs with an animal for a night.
• Change your body type style to that which your creepy uncle uses for his RTF email defaults.
• Give the finger to at least one animal — preferably a mammal.
• Consider what must be changed to avoid reification.
• Where you were acting retarded, now act autistic.
• Shift your colors in HSL space by a value equal to your latitude.
• Do not think about graffiti.
• Figure out which designer you are ripping off, and rip off whomever your victim stole from most egregiously.
• Your boredom can be mitigated by the sub-rosa addition of dirty words, whereas to amuse your readers, you will need a chihuahua.
• Make your color harmonics make someone wince, and dial down from there.
• Go to MoMA and pick up an attractive person without once looking at any art.
• Hate-fuck your nemesis.
• Hire your archenemy.
• Get a night job at Krispy Kreme and note how long it takes for your friends to find out. Quit when they do.
• Incompletely break the surface of your monitor.
• Pick RGB values using your systolic blood pressure at intervals. Use diastolic for CMYK and rectal temperature for HSV.
• Use games of Scrabble to understand your own stupidity.
• Commit an atypical crime for your socioeconomic profile.
• Drunk dials are about as productive as focus groups. They’re also cheaper and more entertaining for everyone.
• Some people kill everything they fuck. But most fuck everything they kill.
• Write something in the middle of your favorite Niggli book with a Sharpie.
• Slowly pour hexachromium into a public toilet. Stop only when you feel truly criminal.
• Throw a rolling pin through the front window of Printed Matter.
• Use the smallest typographic shifts to turn the worst jokes in the copy into the most base and tasteless statements possible.
• Convincingly slip on a banana peel.

Hopefully they can get you out of a jam.

But so yeah. It’s good to sort of be back.

-fish