A friend and I wandered through Golden Gate Park one idyllic afternoon. The tree-shaded, tunnel-like paths were the perfect complement to our mildly altered states (this was many years ago), and we ambled along in companionable silence.

The path opened abruptly into a small clearing, and there, perched on a stump and bathed in a shaft of golden sunlight, was Kermit the Frog.

It was him all right, in all his life-sized green-felted glory. Legs dangling, lumpy head cocked to one side, ping-pong eyeballs gazing calmly back at us … we stopped in our tracks, eyes wide, mouths agape, and stared silently at the smiling apparition.

After a few moments, my friend and I caught each other’s eyes and exploded with laughter. It took a few minutes to recover, and then we went smiling on our way — but first I patted Kermit carefully on the head, silently thanking the person who’d set this little scene up for us.

In a nutty way, it was one of the most extraordinary moments of my life. For a split second the shock and delight of seeing a Muppet come to life in a forest glade was overwhelming … and similar moments of surprise and delight have come to be something I especially treasure.

When you find a tiny plastic action-figure doing a handstand on a fire hydrant mirror, I’m the one who picked her out of the gutter and put her there. A stuffed monkey hanging jauntily from your car’s aerial? I’m the one who picked just the right spot to make your day.

You’re welcome.

So why am I telling you all this?

It occurred to me that Kermit helps me solve my graffiti problem.

See, as you may have gathered from many of the photos I’ve posted on this site, I have a certain … appreciation for graffiti. That is to say, in some sense I’m publicly endorsing vandalism. Which of course I (good citizen me)disapprove of.

It’s an uncomfortable situation.

So. Though I appreciate just about every form of visual public self-expression that there is (let’s leave “tagging” out of this), for me there’s graffiti and there’s graffiti.

It’s not that I have no love for the big sprawling wall pieces, the rococo wild style of the ’80s. It just seems that working in those styles is kinda like modern painters who endlessly rework expressionist or cubist styles. I mean, I appreciate the artistry, but c’mon, people — it’s been done!

No, I’ve realized that the graffiti that really gets me, and that allows the easy forgetting about, you know, property damage, is exactly that element of delighted surprise evoked by Kermit the Frog appearing on a tree stump like a green Virgin Mary.

That’s it. Be clever, people. Be artful. Be smart, funny, and ironic. And pick your spots — just like a tattoo should enhance the body part that it adorns, a graffito should actually make the structure that bears it better.

A sudden burst of color, of humour, the appearance of a cleverly placed image can provoke a thought, alter a mood, or just make someone’s day — especially in the concrete coldness of an urban environment,

Just like this bunny I spotted on Alberta Street this morning.

Thanks.

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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.

Rock …

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.

…and Harder Rock.

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.

Blackletter Blues

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.

The Pendulum Swings…

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.

“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.