Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

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

Hi. Been making some type. Here’s the ridiculous face I made, just so I could make something and relearn fontlab. Free for you:

• OpenType
• Mac PostScript
• Windows TrueType

… I do welcome your feedback. Of course, I know it’s ridiculous, so refrain from saying “it’s ridiculous”… more awesome would be comments along the lines of “your kerning tables are fucked under OS 10.3” (or what have you). But hey.

Gusset is released under the BigShot License Version 1.0, which is exactly like the MIT license, except that whenever a graphic design bigshot sees something you did with the font, you have to tell me about it. It’s all there in the file, including a list of bigshots. Yes.

Ok. Non-ridiculous stuff (as perhaps this one will be when done) is coming SOON, I swear to jeezus. Yeah!

-fish

I have a chronic and long-standing hatred and contempt for my own work. It’s endemic to the profession, generally… like the common cold of design. Or really, any field where making things out of ideas is the stock and trade.

But so: my dear friend GAC, if you don’t know him, is a supremely excellent photographer based in PHL. He can really point a camera at stuff, and he can really whip a llama’s ass with a belt. After I fretted publicly about not having decent photos of my design crapola, he suggested that he might assuage my stated disparity, and we hatched a plan. We had a raucous 24-hour work-bender-photoshoot, some of the results of which you see here.

But yeah: so it’s really really really fucking nice to see someone else seeing your stuff. Whatever one might say about the stuff in question (and a lot of this is debatably not even “my stuff”), it feels SO GOOD to see it from a point of view that is somehow liberated from your own weatherbeaten prism. Like an eyeball massage or someshit. Yes.

Anyway. I’m just sayin’. Wanted to share and all. You should do this, really, if you’re stuck: have your friend do your portfolio, and do theirs in return. It’ll be awesome.

And yeah I’m sure you already know all this shit already, but I am nothing if not grotesquely naive. I mean, I got swindled out of my gizmos by a pituitary mutant. So you probably saw it all coming a mile away. C’est la guerre, no? Yis!

I took out my tongue ring, and quit smoking. I made a list of people with whom I no longer wish to communicate, and deleted their entries from my fone. I made another list of people for whom my love is disproportionaltely greater than the amount of time I spend talking to them, and vowed to rectify this disparity. I started working in Merce’s studio again, and with relish. I wrote some code for them that does not viscerally disgust me. I have been using a bunch of 4GL/mainframe/non-RDBMS techniques for all this (hence the entry title), the mere fact of which is enough to make me laugh out loud. I am also a gigantic nerd, for the record.

I started to start a company/studio/collective with two of my dearest friends, and I am very excited about this. I started to do a website for a friend of mine, for which I have already designed a typeface, which of course is far from perfect (or even “decent” or “readable”, really, at this point), but is thus far super fucking entertaining. I also started to do a book for another of my dear friends, like of her artwork, and it’s a supreme pleasure to make a book of someone else’s shit, vis a vis my own, let me fucking tell you.

I went to the infamous Glass House, by the late Mr. Johnson. I took many pictures, and watched the Cunningham dancers dance. I missed my mom for all this, but less in a mopey way and more in a corner-of-your-mouth-smile you’d-love-to-see-this sort of way, which wasn’t 100% terrible, I am glad to report.

I am generally doing pretty fucking well, I should say.

I like working in places that are not explicitly design studios, because then I start to do wierd shit, because I have to impovise with the materials I have on hand (a condition which has, historically, yielded hillarious results). I have yet to get internet in my house, so I have been making do with coffee spots and royally crappy stolen wifi, which is similarly good because it stems the torrent of inbound distractions. I am at Supercore right now, in fact, and it’s beyond fantastic, despite the fact that they plugged all of their electrical outlets up with silly putty, or someshit, thus forcing wifi freeloaders like myself to cling desperately to the last dregs of our laptop batteries.

In a nutshell.

-fish

Figure 1: Phillipe Apeloig.

So yeah, I am totally ripping you off. Really, when you look at my design work since day 1, it’s what I’ve been doing all along; I’m just being as brutally honest as possible about it, for this project. Yeah. If you want me to totally rip you off, or if you have suggestions on who I should totally rip off, do let me know. I find the most satisfying things to totally rip off are things that are already, in some fashion, total ripoffs themselves… like when early tDR starts to creep into Wim Crouwel’s territory, or Bruce Mau shamelessly aping Quentin Fiore; that sort of shit.

Figure 2: Karel Martens.

Naturally I already tried to do Paula Scher’s swatch posters, but I can’t cram the phrase “I am totally ripping you off” into them, typographically. This is fine with me because the Public Theater stuff is so much more fun to emulate. But yeah, using that same phrase (more or less) on all the posters is part of the game; my friend Christian pointed out that this made it into a sort of All Your Base type of thing, which I agree with. I am all about such image-macro meme stuff these days, anyway (see last image here) so that’s just dandy.

Figure 3: Stefan Sagmeister.

Blech. Yeah. Also I was rereading the first half of Design Writing Reseach and it occurred to me that so so so much of the last, oh, maybe 80 years of critical theory is essentially a bunch of fumbling around in the dark towards an understanding of neuroscience. Like, instead of going right to the source and preparing histologically stained cross-sectioned rat brain samples, and all that, people have been content to sit around in corduroys and talk about indexical signs and that sort of shit. Like, you get the feeling that eventually, theorists just might stumble through all the issues and arrive at something relatively demystified, that acknowledges the whole perception-is-cognition thing without quasi-religious rhetoric getting in the way, et cetera. Wouldn’t that be interesting, if that happened? I think that’d be fucking interesting.

Like, there was this one time I was talking to a professor from MCM at a bar, and he was going on about some logical paradox he had claimed to glean from Derrida, or somesuch, and I mentioned something about V1/V2 and how you can’t look at any one part of the brain as the “soul” or “seat of consciousness”, which really I thought was pretty basic, and he was all like, “oh yeah, neuroscience”, and looked at me like I’d taken his toys away, and the conversation was pretty much dead in the water at that point. I dunno. Funny, yes? Maybe. Another angle on the pseudoscience conundrum; maybe the opposite angle, even.

Anyway. That’s all I got for now, I have to go totally rip more people off now, so I will talk to you later. Yes. Salud.

-fish

Yo. Still no progress on writing that galleryfuck essay (as I previously bitched about) but I did see Jenny Holzer talk last week, which was nice because of course she does exactly that type of shit, notably up in the guggenheim, which (the guggenhiem) seems to provde for the best object lessons in galleryfucking. So. Erm. One “bullet point” on that essay down, of many many. Fuck yes.

Anyway so yeah, I purloined all her slides with a digital camera, which if you have any info about these pieces, you should lend me a helping hand and put it in there in the flickr comments, cuz I don’t rightly know all about ‘em. Yet! Because I also taped the whole lecture. I say “taped”, but in fact I used an olympus-brand “dictaphone” which contains no tape, only flash RAM, but there is no convenient verb for “to record audio using a tapeless dictaphone”, really… “Dictaphoned” sounds like you are trying to say you fucked a telephone, so no. But yeah I haven’t transcribed that shit yet so I dunno.

I have been all about the “reportage” these days, cuz of my independant study. Did I not tell you about that?!? Haha, it appears not. The deal is I am sitting in on crits in all the other departments at RISD: glass, architecture, textiles, digital media, et cetera, one new department a week, and taping them, as well as taking pictures and acquiring any other ancillary info I can. Then I transcribe the crits and typeset them all up, and look for all-new, all-singing all-dancing bullshit patterns… it’s pretty awesome so far, except for the fact that transcribing all that shit is kind of painful. But the information to be had is truly eye-poppingly fantastic. I am still in shock that all the faculty I tell about this are into it. Not only are they permissive but encouraging. It’s kind of hillarious.

But so yeah I’m doing that under the tutelage of David Sokol, who is awesome. I made a poster for his panel discussion here last week, see?:

Figure one: 24x36 on bright-white toothy inkjet paper

Figure two: newsprint version, inkjetted directly onto the new york times

… which is the first thing I did this semester I am at all proud of, really, yeah. It cost me too much sleep last week, tho, so now I am in a rather shitty mode. Also I am broke. So send me food. Fuck yes! Food! OK.

-fish

In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994, Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from “the forms of design itself”, and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by “the forms of design”, he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite illuminating at the time.

Figures 1 and 2: Two views of my final Design Principles project, Geometric Confusion.

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City. I’ve always been sort of a fan of this book, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

Figure 3. T-shaped airshaft in some building in the meatpacking district.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be high up to actually see what’s what, or be the architect.

Figure 4. The cover of the book in question.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center. The building is actually a strange mashup of an older building, Sage Hall, and newer construction. When I was a kid, I would enjoy getting lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere, the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn’t get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom’s students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn’t say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I just probably blurted, “oh so now it makes sense” or something like that.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot… one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly, as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago, these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides. At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I’m any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of ‘em. I’m just sayin’. Yeah.

-fish

I saw a picture, the other day, of OMA’s proposal for Park de la Villette. It was in some fancypants hundred-dollar book at spoonbill, of course. and I must say that that shit is completely incoherent. Say what you want about Mr. Tschumi and his wacky deconstruction games… his approach made some sort of semiotic and graphical sense. which is what that shit should be all about, rite? rite. I go for a walk in the park, I am not particularly thinking about the meaning of my context and whatnot. I want pretty flowers, and if they come in the form of a deconstructed cube folly red thing, then hey.

As far as I am concerned these days: architecture is fashion, and urbanism is typography. It kind of kills me that the only work I have come across that highlights anything resembling the latter analogy is that “alphabetical city” pamphlet by Mr. Holl. But it also kills me that you almost can’t get a fucking architect to even say the word “typography”, much less practice it or get the significance. I mean, it is practically a crime that the word, or any of its related conjugants, does not appear on page 216 of “atlas of novel tectonics”. WTFFFFFFF??!?

But yeah anyway. That aside, I like the book, despite the fact that I have heard whispers in the subways that he (Reiser) is a dildo. I have not seen any prima facie evidence of dildoism in the book or on the internet, typographic ignorance notwithstanding, so if you have any such knowlegde please pass it along. Innocent until proven guilty, that’s how it is, yes.

Ok. Yeah. This shit, too, has become incoherent. Time for dinner. Yeah.

-fish