Leaving for Berlin in a couple of days!
Even though I’ll be hanging out on the eastern side of the city (P-berg, X-berg, Friedrichshain, Mitte), after arduous days of cafe-sitting and strolling along the Spree I’ll be laying my head in the slightly more fancypants western neighborhood of Charlottenburg.
How fancypants? I dug up a couple of random doorway snapshots to help tell that story …
No, no, no, not rhino leather — it’s a rhino on leather.
See, a CD package I created for Albino! features a badass rhino on the cover. A friend of the band was so taken by the illustration that he carved it into a leather guitar strap.
He’s pretty new in the world of leatherwork, but I think it turned out great.
Entering competitions isn’t really my cup of tea strong-ass coffee, but I’ve just discovered the massive coolness that is Threadless.com. Whoa.
I knew I’d found a home for my recently-excavated Kung Fu Girl illustration the second I arrived. Some judicious editing, new color selection, and the girl is online with a brand new name: “Can I Kick It?”
People submit designs. Other people rate them. At the end of a week, the highest-rating designs win. Winning means the T-shirt gets printed, and the lucky designer gets a small pile of cash and a slightly larger pile of glory.
I am hoping, dear reader, not only to live this lovely scenario, but that you’ll get the chance to actually wear this T-shirt.
Please click the graphic below, and (if so moved), give me a FIVE!
UPDATE: Dang. She didn’t quite make the cut, but that won’t keep me from dragging out the silk screens one of these days. Thanks to everyone who helped out with a vote!
In anticipation of my annual journey to Germany, an alluring photo of a partially obscured green and white S-Bahn sign — these ubiquitous, illuminated typographic symbols beckon Berliners towards the over/underground network which (along with the U-Bahn) connects the re-unified metropolis with shining, singing rails.
o … sometimes my train of thought leaves from an unusual station.
During my morning perambulations a car cruised past, blasting bass-heavy tunes from enormous speakers. The sub-sonic frequencies made the vehicle’s bodywork vibrate so loudly that the music itself was completely drowned out.
You probably hear this particular kind of sonic sandwich all the time. In fact, this combination — loud, heavy bass combined with an even louder rattling trunk — is ubiquitous: cars just aren’t constructed for this low-frequency assault; a couple of pieces of bodywork are always going to protest by making some extra noise.
The funny thing is, I’ve actually begun to associate the two sounds. Can it be that this awful rattling — a seemingly undesirable side effect — is developing its own positive aesthetic associations? Maybe I’m wrong about the inevitablity of rattling, and people have begun to make it happen as a conscious choice!
It wouldn’t be the first time that technology has influenced cultural aesthetics.
Consider the guitar. Prior to electrically-aided amplification, clarity of tone was the norm. Early vacuum-tube driven amplifiers overloaded easily, though, and over time the distorted sound of those over-driven tubes became an essential component of blues (‘Muddy Waters invented electricity’), rockabilly, and the juggernaut of rock and roll.
This particular tube-distorted, once-unbearable sound has become beautiful. It’s now so essential to music that modern amplifiers strive to digitally emulate the sound of archaic tube technology, and vintage amps sell for a fortune on eBay.
Which led me, naturally enough, right to thinking about typography.
Serifs, the tiny “feet” that appear on many familiar typefaces, are another example of a technological necessity that evolved into an aesthetic standard. These little flourishes were born from the difficulties Roman stonecutters ran into chiseling letterforms into marble. Incising letters involved cutting a V-shaped channel along the length of a stroke, and finishing with a perpendicular cut to square off the end. Making those three planes intersect perfectly was really hard, so these artisans worked out a little trick: just extend the triangular shape past those corners, making any imperfection impossible to notice (an antique example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”).
So. Carving in stone was difficult, and the unintended consequence was that “serifs” have became embedded in aesthetic culture; it’s the way we think type oughtta look. And after centuries of technological repetition, from wood type to metal, to — well, chances are you’re reading this very post in serif type, on a digital display. These pixels are a long way from the stonecutter’s chisel, but here they are — a cultural transmission from Emperor Trajan’s time beamed right into your modern eyeballs.
So here’s the final stop on the barely-sequitur train: since I’m thinking about typefaces, what about Blackletter?
Call it “Gothic” or “Old English”, split the family into textura, fraktur, bastarda and rotunda… the baroque curlicues, spiky facets, plunging verticality, the chiaroscuro effected by its thickest thicks and thinnest thins, the larger-than-life operatic drama of it all … these are the results of technology too. Those angled strokes, thicks and thins, and all the rest of it stem directly from the calligraphic scratching of a medieval scribe’s sharpened quill. Blackletter is the middle-ages, still redolent of parchment, candle-black ink and time a-plenty.
And I just love the face. There, I said it.
I know, I know … most of the planet still despises it. I ran across a gratuitous attack just yesterday — Steven Heller sideswiped it as “ugly and graceless” in one of his historical graphic design collections. It’s hard to read. It has fascist connotations. And worst of all, it’s … ugly.
HARD TO READ: Bah! As Emigre founder and typographer Zuzana Licko succinctly put it, “we read best what we read most”. The first newspaper was set in blackletter, as was the first printed Bible. It’s only difficult to read because it’s gone out of fashion, and our eyeballs don’t know what to make of its spiky, faceted forms. Practice makes perfect, as has been empirically demonstrated, so let’s just toss that one out.
FASCIST: It’s long been damned by association with Hitler and the Nazi regime. And of course they used it, and so did the Bolsheviks, along with everybody else in Germany. It is, of course, an essentially German creation.
What few know, thought, is this: the Third Reich itself banned the typeface as grotesque and decadent, going so far as to issue a official order to use roman type only in all official communications. Ironically, this document itself featured a blackletter headline (stupid Nazis).
UGLY: I’ve think I’ve probably already made my feelings clear on that point.
So. Is the resuscitation of blackletter (my fondest hope) actually possible? It’s still way out of fashion, except in the vernacular ghettos of heavy-metal band names, newspaper mastheads and skateboard graphics.
As a teensy glimmer of hope, though, there’s a movement to rehabilitate the maligned typeface already underway in Germany. In Berlin last fall I noticed a good half dozen fancy-pants design books devoted to the subject, with more on the way. I’ve also started to see it popping up in both high-end fashion magazines and in graffiti (the bleeding edge of design gentrification). So I believe it’s about to make a comeback. Of course, I also believe that one day, the San Francisco Giants will win the World Series.
More to the point, if human ears can learn to perceive the sound of a rattling car trunk as aural bliss, anything is possible.
The work of some smarty-pants at the Alberta Street Co-op — intended to quell the fears of the squeamish, or quash the hopes of vampires straying into the produce department?
Can’t say for sure, but it succeeded in inducing an involuntary chuckle from me.
Guerrilla artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey is world famous (um, notorious) for papering the alleys, underpasses and abandoned storefronts of the world with starkly powerful images limned in black, white and red. I still remember the first “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker I ever saw, somewhere in the San Francisco Mission District in 1989 — and the invisible question mark that immediately popped out of my head.
Shepard is one of contradictory characters who makes graffiti art because he has to, because it’s turned into a nice living, but also to change the world. He fell in love with Obama at first word, and contacted the campaign: Could he please give the candidate the André the Giant treatment?
(Shepard: “He didn’t want the Farakhan endorsement, maybe he didn’t want the Shepard Fairey endorsement either …”)
Silence from Obama … then a quiet yes.
Fairey papered Philly, then put a short run of the posters up on his website for sale: $40 apiece, using the profits to buy (somewhat ironically) legal street advertising space. A copy autographed by Obama is now hanging on Fairey’s wall, they’re now selling on eBay for $1500 and up, and the story has hit the national media like the proverbial hurricane.
Any graphic designer making the front pages gets a smile from me.
Attaboy, Shepard.
“Bring bad design to justice!” So command the Design Police.
It’s already old news that technology has placed the ability to commit design atrocities well within reach of the grubby hands of the masses, but as Sam Clemens remarked about folks who complain about the weather, “no one does anything about it“.
Until now.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but even more potent is the bright red sticker! Scatter that justice around for the piddling price of a color printout.
The five pages of labels are frighteningly on-target … “unnecessary use of a Photoshop effect” popped right out at me, but there’s a category here for just about every offense against design, from abjurations to consult a designer to one of my own hobby-horses, “the inch glyph is NOT a speech mark”.
This is just the latest example of an irritable minority trying to maintain order in the printed public sphere, I suppose. Lynne Truss, grammar-fascist author of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves; The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” has long advocated carrying a Sharpie around for the correction of publicly misplaced apostrophes — and she is far from alone.
Can excess in the pursuit of good design be called a vice? Take matters into your own hands — red-sticker vigilante justice is the kind I can finally get behind.
If you were a schoolkid in the ’70s who like to read, just seeing the words “Scholastic Book Club” will make your heart beat a little faster:
I remember in grade school how freaking fun it was to place an order for these inexpensive kids books, and that there may have been no greater thrill than when those books arrived in the classroom and were distributed.
Like, just electric.
That’s from an incredible Flickr page hosting a fat batch of cover scans, golden-hued elementary school nostalgia of the highest order.
Poring over the newsprint catalog at the kitchen table, carefully penciling in the form in the back, piling my quarters and pennies together and figuring out how many of these cheap-and-cheerful little books I could afford … what a joy! These scanned covers are sort of Proustian madeleines in paperback, and the pulse-quickening thrill is as real today as it was in 1976.
Whether or not “Remembrance of Things Past” was on the catalog’s list, I couldn’t say. — still have to read that one.
