This Stephanie Seymor S is borrowed, with maximal expressable respect, from M/M.

Hi. I would like to take a moment of my time and yours to discuss something very important to me: the letter S. At the time of writing, I am currently uploading a series of gigantic files to a particularly sluggish web server, and I’ve been working waaaay too hard considering school just started like the day before yesterday — so hey yeah, let’s take a moment, let’s talk S.



See, when I first started drawing Cello 2, the current iteration of the typeface I’m doing for my dear associate Peter Sachon’s putative website, I was using a simple construction logic to generate these pseudo-serif terminals. By matching a simple curve that extended, say, three diagonal points across the grid with a corresponding two-point curve, I could generate modular curves that didn’t appear overwhelmingly robot-tastic … or at least, such was/is my hope. As the sample above may hint at, aligning these curves on the grid can yield anything from exaggeratedly bracketed serif shapes, through to the sort-of freakish alien chunks you see from M/M, to straight-up ball terminals and other such flourishes.

This proved to be a great trick, in this case… almost too great, because it readily yielded like 95% or so of the alphabet, almost as if it were a forgone conclusion. I drew most of it in one shot, on the Amtrak regional from Boston to New York, the day after the Fourth of July. Everything was sort of super easy in those first leadholder-on-Moleskine sketches, but the exceptions to that ease were serious problems. Specifically, I couldn’t get the N and the S to play right with the rest of the system.

I ended up making some exceptions for the N (as you’ll see soon, when I finish Cello 2 and release it bigshot style) but I thought I could outsmart the S situation. Really, I made the classic rookie mistake: the one where you think you know what you’re doing, but really you don’t.

I had noted the manner in which a good deal of serif S’s have their middle bit as thick as their counterpart letters’ vertical bits. And yeah, I am sure there are real terms for these things, but I do not feel like rooting through all of Bringhurst to figure it out… I’ll just show you, instead. Look at Amarillo USAF’s S, versus that of Mr. Crouwel’s Foundry Gridnik:




… I had always thought the Amarillo S made more sense, as it were, until I literally saw the truth about serif S forms with my own two eyes … a nice little nerd-epiphany I came to, incedentally, while staring at a bookmark from St. Mark’s Bookshop which had been set in some thunderously thick-ass bold Bodoni face. I saw that litany of S shapes and realized what is eye-rollingly basic to all you type nerds out there: that our Western Latin S is a compressed version of the German tall S (which you may also recognize as the first half of the ß character).

I know it’s just ravenously naive and sycophantic to point out how fantastic it was to realize this factoid, but fuckin’ A, what do you want? It’s my blog, and so. Really, this blew my mind. It led me to revise Gusset’s S, like so:



… In the case of which, the highlighted shapes were moved down to emphasize the S’s middle. Furthermore, Gusset’s S is the only character in the typeface that contains octagonal shapes that have their longer edges paralell to baseline.

See what I mean?? I had become that guy: the condescending new kid who dispenses pedantry beyond his means. I couldn’t get over it. Here’s an abbreviated chart of the evolutionary course of Cello 2’s tormented S:



… When I say abbreviated, I really mean it: there were a ton of minor variants to all of these, and I spent at least twice as long poking and prodding one ill-concieved S after another as I had designing the remaining entirety of Cello 2’s characters. Eventually I arrived at what I actually believed was the pinnacle of systematized S formalism — the fourth from the left in the above graphic.

WHICH WE ALL CAN SEE IS JUST A SHITTY BODONI KNOCKOFF. When I tried my doomed Pygmalion character out with its peers, I could see that it didn’t work… but I didn’t allow myself to believe it. Really. I know this sounds indulgently retarded and nerdy, but I had a really emotionally charged summer, and I ended up subjugting a lot of my tumult and anguish into letter-drawing. So there you go.

And so: it was an equally revealing thing to come back to the original Cello 2 S. I don’t care what the experts say: I like it in the mix, as it stands. Doing away with the ball terminals proved to be the final touch (and yeah, that is an editorial decision I am going to avoid exploring in any sort of metaphorical way).

So yeah. That’s how it went, and this is how it is… when Peter’s website launches next week, I’ll link you all up in there, and possibly pony up downloadable font files for all this and more. In the meantime, take a look at an S near you… or whatever your favorite letter happens to be. Shit’s crazier than maybe you thought, yeah? Yeah!

-fish

PLEASE NOTE: the following bit contains information about the iphone, including (but not limited to) my opinion about the iphone, thus rendering it of little consequence to basically anyone on Earth.

So I had an iphone, for about 24 hours. The virtual keyboard was a total dealbreaker. Maybe my fingers are too fat, maybe they have been spoiled by the tactile feedback afforded to me by my blackberry… regardless, the iphones’ input method was a dog. I mean yeah, you go to the apple store, you play around with one, and perhaps you think (as I did), “wow, that iphone is quite a sexy litte number”. But the thing did not stand up to actual standard use.

Then also, the whole lack of text-selection and copy-paste, and the interface quirkiness (it’s all very well thought out, as anyone will tell you, but that is exactly the problem: it is well thought out, but that hardly guarantees intuitiveness to anyone who is less than 100% cerebral in the manner in which they use their fingers) and the rather strained ichat metaphor for txting… and, and, and. It’s cute, but it fails. Plus, what is with the email options? It will check for new messages either a) never; b) once every 15 minutes, or c) once every half-hour??? What the fuck am I, twelve years old???? My ugly-ass blackberry (to which I have reverted) gets my email as soon as you fling it at me.

Plus, you know, six hundred dollars is class money.

Yeah so yeah. I didn’t drink no Kool-aid. Just so you know. You wouldn’t think that, necessarily, given that you can’t swing a dead cat in my personal living space without knocking over at least 8 or so apple products, but anyway no. Not this time.

Anyway. It’s been a pretty good summer, despite the fact that I spent most of it completely freaking out and acting generally antisocial. For a while there, I didn’t really want to do anything except draw letters and write code. I was fortunate enough to live near Christian (and indeed I still am, for a few more weeks), cuz he would drag me out and make me drink beers, even when I was maximally clammed up. He would then altruistically permit me to effusively babble on about whatever it was that I was thinking about at the time (usually type design) while graciously and generously not smacking me in the face. Really, I couldn’t ask for much more.

So yeah yeah. A few more projects to wrap up, and then it will be fall. I suppose this was my last “summer break”, but really I had such a blast doing actual work, such that the very idea of a “summer break” is complete moot. I am ready for the REAL WORLD, again; bring it on I say. I do have to get through this nastay thesis thing, and then ok yeah. Yeah! I’ll see you back here next year… you can buy me a beer at Enid’s, and I’ll draw a typeface for you. Yes.

Yeah so it’s that time, again. Here we go:

Good:

• Moved to Greenpoint for the summer. Down the street from last summers’ sublet… I’m basically at the corner of Driggs and Leonard.
• A ton of my highly esteemed colleagues are either in the general region, or are converging on it shortly, which is unbeatable.
• Executive Decision wrapped things up quite fucking nicely in PVD, I think. Kevin and Isaac traded off DJ sets par excellence and rocked everyone until the cops came at around four. I think I may have pushed the practical limits of what I can get away with in my house, partywise, but that won’t stop me, I should think. Indeeeeeed.
• King-size bed in my summer spot!
• Girl talk remix of “Let’s Call It Off” by Peter Bjorn and John on repeat
• Thee Bang Gang Deejays remix of “Ice Cream” by New Young Pony Club on repeat
• Mylo remix of “No More Conversations” by Freeform Five on repeat
• Breakbot remix of “Let There Be Light” by Justice on repeat
• Pretty much anything else linked to and/or mixed in by the Acid Girls (who are not girls, incedentally; and plus their music is so awesome I am not even going to mention the kerning on the logo like the twerp that I am)
• It was kind of hillarious how my finger was a topic of discussion at the last round of parties before everyone left for the summer (see “ugly”, below). Everyone was all like, “I heard about your finger!” and “How’s your finger doing?” … no matter the circumstances, those are funny sentences, amirite??
• Got an alarm clock with an ipod dock. Waking up to a mix entitled “Loud Noises” by the aforementioned Acid Girls is pretty unbeatable.
• This is shocking, totally: I got a book on semiotics that I actually love. Like not just “don’t dislike”, “would think twice before burning”, or any of these kind of qualifiers I’d normally apply to books on semiotics. I fucking love it. Mainly it’s because the guy writing it actually seems to hate semiotics as much as I do, or at least the prevalent strain of semantic nonsense that passes for “semiotic theory”. I maybe will go into why it’s awesome if I see you in person, but I certainly won’t defile the internet with any more verbose tripe on the subject, but so yeah, there you go. I’m not ashamed. Fuck yes.
• Generally, my summer reading stack is pretty awesome, I would say.
• Before coming down here, I was up late in the studio with a friend of mine, and we threw the I Ching. I had never done this before. I must say it was absolutely terrifying how punctilious my prognostication was. It wasn’t mystical or nonsensical, it was just straight-up pragmatic in a frighteningly accurate way. I mean, I get it… you surrender your editorial urge to a stochastic operation, and instead use the result as a template for what you already understood, yeah yeah yeah. It was still eerie. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime, after I get done raving about the semiotics book, when I see you. Right. Ok. Trust me on all this. Yes.
• Air conditioning
• Upgraded AirPort to 802.11n draft version; it’s very nice and shiny, with blinking lights.
• Freelance work that isn’t hell
• Doing portfolio and all that stuff, for real. This is actually fun and not torture, for some reason.
• Might be able to talk Mr. Vit into a permanent thing over at SpeakUp, which would be super fucking fantastic, I’d say. I will have to go out to his Park Slope house and bring his new baby a bib, or some sort of apropos newborn-baby-type gift, to be nice. Right? Right.
• McCarren pool is still free! Rock music, hipster chicks on a slip’n’slide, and Brooklyn Lager at 12 noon. Well hey.

Bad:

• I miss my mom.
• Not done with miserable stuff yet. After school I will have to sell my mom’s house, and other such things… it will not stop anytime soon. As I told a friend of mine recently: it’s going to break my heart, many times over, and I can see it all coming the same way you can see storms coming in the midwest. Yeah.
• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when you are sad, Apple Computer’s music products have the uncanny ability to sense it, and they like to exacerbate things by shuffling up the most heartwrenching music in your library.
• In a word: girls.
• I’m going to miss my friends so so so much. Half the GD grads on their way out were the kids I started here with, and they are awesome. I fucking love them; thank god a mess of them are coming to New York. It will not be the same without them in any way, nonono.
• I need to freak out. I have been repressing the swell of emotions I had after my mom died, and I need to freak out and deal with it. That’s never pleasant, but it is necessary… I hope I do it right. Basically.
• Have to finish some work up from school, cuz I missed so much stuff last semester.
• Apartment is misgraded quite steeply; one end of the computer desk is notably lower down than the other. I’d bring a level in here to check it, but it [the level] would just laugh.
• Had to order DSL cuz all the wireless around here is locked up, and I need me some internet for real. I thought I could go the rest of my life without touching another RJ-11 plug… I was wrong. So so wrong.

Ugly:

• There appeared to be a mammoth stock of DVDs in the apartment I’m subletting. The day I got here, I was classically hung over, on top of the typical exhaustion from an interstate move, and so I got all comfy on the couch, with ice cream and juice from the bodega on the end-table, and a pile of what I thought were MOVIES I could WATCH. But no. The cases are all empty… presumably, my subletee took them to Argentina, which is where she went. C’est la guerre. Blech.
• Last Friday, back in Providence, I was driving the car that my dear associate Hannah lent me while she’s on the west coast. Hannah took a glass-blowing class last Wintersession, and she made this sculptural piece that involved very long strands of thin glass, maybe 1/8” in diameter, max. We had used the car to move this piece to the studio about three days prior to this Friday in question. I bring this up because on that Friday, I was heading to the dry cleaners’, or somesuch, and I casually went to flick some dirt off the passenger seat while at a stoplight. When I pulled my hand back I saw that my right ring finger had a three-inch long piece of 1/8”-diameter glass going RIGHT THROUGH THE TIP OF IT. I have been telling people that it looked like an olive in a martini… usually they don’t really wince until I throw that detail into the story. It really did, though, really, except with blood, and it was my finger and not an olive. Basically I freaked out and pulled off the road. My friends were awesome; they drove the car back for me and picked me up at the hospital, which I was taken to in an ambulance. So. If you see me and my finger is all bandaged up, that’s what happened. Yes.
• Also glass-related: I dropped a beer bottle in my kitchen this morning while barefoot. I didn’t suffer any further lacerations, or anything, but cleaning it up was (as the header denotes) fucking ugly.
• Saw two cockroaches in the bathroom already. Blech. WHYYYY??!?
• Sometimes you just don’t know what to say to someone, despite having a list of roughly 10 jillion things you want to express to them.
• The subway is already hotter than the core of the sun; I have had to start carrying around extra shirts already, so when I go to meetings and whatnot I won’t look like some sort of uncouth neanderthal ogre.

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

so let me bring you up to speed. here is the deal: I am in greenpoint. I am in apartment #3F at 67 driggs, near mcgorlick park. I am subletting this spot from a chick I met on craigslist. I spent all my spare cash on the rent here, and on the rent in my PVD spot, and on a new computer I didn’t really need but kind of wanted anyway, and so no I am closer to broke than I’d like to be, which is why right now I am drinking miller genuine draft. I have an air conditioner and an enormous turbine-sized industrial fan so I am not too absurdly hot. I am trying to work on my book and so far ofer erenfeld, david reinfurt, stephan moore, and a few other kids have agreed to give me interviews, which will give me enough material to prevent the whole project from collasping under the weight of its own hideously self-referential footnotes.

I am doing some freelance work but it won’t pay me for a while. I went, the other night, to Hiro, to see VHS or Beta spin for the Hot Chip release party, and I danced like a complete utter retard, thanks to the unique combination of compounds and music I was subsequently exposed to. I have a fire escape here where I can watch the sun set over the park. I have sort of exposed my head and neck to enough sun to begin the tanning process, but the skin there is still kind of pinkish, and the rest of me is classic computer-geek pale white, so I literally look like a red-neck, which is very sad.

I couldn’t go to a party this weekend up in troy, which is also sad. I went to a party at the new O-R-G studio the other night, where many people including my ex-girlfriend had received summonses for drinking outside, like just before I got there, and they were selling a magazine called “tourette’s”, the mere presence of which in my personal space kind of bugged me out so I spent 10 bucks to acquire the two issues of it that they had for sale, and I was handed them by stuart bailey himself, which I did not realize until after the transaction, during which (thanks to the three or so hastily consumed warm heinekens) I made several comments that (in retrospect) made me sound like some sort of douche, and I will not reproduce them here, for your benefit.

I recently went through all my old fiction writing and found, unsurprisingly, that it was all utter garbage, but amusingly there are bits of it that are so amazingly bad that they successfully transcend and become bad in a fascinating way that catches and refracts all wavelengths of light all around you when you look at them, like a prism of horror sort of. I amused myself one morning by taking the best of the worst of it and typesetting it all neatly, with small-caps numbers and flourishes on the page numbers and hillariously ornate drop caps and shit like that. I will not show you this, again for your benefit.

I get headaches like all the time but I’m out of advill. I am trying hard not to start smoking again.

I’ll let you know more when I know more. yes.

-fish