Letraset, academics and writing

Went through some old notebooks, boxes and piles of stuff before moving here.. and the in the process found my old, precious Letraset book- it used to be a treasure, and a priced possession. Hands up, all who have done plaka lettering; meticulously drawing up and painting letters on awful quality paper. Thought not. Not a common pasttime, exactly. Art school stuff. Initially flicking past the endless pages of sans serifs, grotesks, helveticas, looking at fonts impossible to draw with silly names, flourishes and elan. Basically, it’s a good deal easier to camouflage mediocre penmanship in a swirly, messy font, than in the grotesks… and we where into art, not geometry!

God, how wrong can you be.

(My Letraset was printed in ’88, it was that years’ issue, a study itself in black late 80s design. Anyway, it was a good deal cooler than the previous yellow one, and I seem to remember it was expensive – somewhere between 2-300 kroner, for what was basically a commercial thing.)
Back in the world of higher education.. well… php blog project on track, me and my partner in PHPcrime have most of the database-stuff in place, the photo thing is halfway solved, but at the moment we’re stumbling a little around the admin-part. It will all end well, surely.
Big Assignment coming to an end… for good or bad. I am well and truly sick of it, and it feels meaningless on several levels. But what can’t be cured must be endured, I suppose. It is endlessly frustrating that the ‘academic’ expectations differs so radically from one course to another. In one we’re supposed to write true blue academic articles, and in the other – and I quote: “to write a formal, technically correct but dead boring text is something you should avoid at all costs” … my translation, obviously. Original statement in my notebook on demand. He wants humour, curious facts and tidbits. My writing is too complicated, I’ve been told.
The other course wants nothing of opinions, thoughts, speculations or anything at all that cannot be tracked. Nothing that is not said by smarter people than anyone I know, have ever met, or will ever meet. These are both frustrating demands, even if I understand the latter better. That my writing is too complicated, is an absolute pile of dung. When I want to write for kindergarden, I’ll get out the watercolors.
IT and media going forward, in a slightly wobbly fashion. I suspect it will all make sense and come together at one point, but right now it’s a bit like standing half an inch away from a wall, trying to read what’s written. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t grasp completely, but trying to accumulate as much as possible, and then hoping for a ‘lightbulb moment’, divine inspiration or educated guesses when called for.

And yes, I still do a little lettering, I still sketch randomly – in the margins of notebooks, on bits of paper, on post-its. Beautiful communication. Wacky graphic mind.