Go oooon – guess!

‘…qualities like quiveriness and vulnerability come to mind when I think of creativity… creativity requires a sense of smell, a palate to taste the scents that make brilliance. All life feeds upon the random. Creativity is the haute cuisine.’

-Douglas Hofstadter-

What on earth is it? No one can give a vaguely sensible answer to what goes on in my brain. It is non-stop, it goes on every waking hour, and, I suspect, when I sleep as well. It is a constant rattling, a background noise in my head: constantly having new ideas, judging colours, angles, texture, making connections, soaking up words or phrases in any situation. Connecting bizarre things together; finding some hue, taste or sound that bring unrelated things together in my head, spanning languages, centuries, words, colours, poetry, sounds, materials, buildings, life forms; from teaspoons to magma. It is exhausting, in a way, but it’s been going on my whole life, so I have no idea what it would be like without it.
It makes me able to make metaphors no one understands. How admirable.

Bits of paper, books with notes in the margins, or the last blank pages missing to some long forgotten desperate need for scribbling something. Piles of notebooks half filled out with unidentifiable ideas, but sometimes, sometimes a notebook contains a tiny little doodle that have it. Some magic little quality.

And there it is – a perfect little doodle or a surprising combination of letters or words. Something that it would be impossible to improve on. Adding something would ruin it. A doodle; born perfect. An interaction of letterforms in perfect balance and meaning. Trying to do it again would not work.
Magic.

I can track a meeting through the doodles I make. I remember what was said from little squiggles. People who have not seen my meeting-doodles show me endless post-its with circles repeated endlessly and say, I do it too! No you don’t. Because my doodles – unconsciously – covers and span universes. They are bizarre, funny, sometimes scary, sometimes awful. often abstract. I am sure a psychologist would have a field day, but at least it keeps me awake through boring meetings. The doodles are an illustration of the noise that goes on in my head – forced to sit still and listen to some boring twat go on about strategies for the future and how to fix something that is not broken – the endless connecting process bursts out on paper.

And I am beginning slowly to realise that not everybody have this racket going on. In fact, very few people have the faintest idea what I am talking about.
So I wonder what goes in their heads.

A conference of fontfaces, deciding if Zapf dingbats should be given membership. Ransom interfers, and have taken Courier and Curlz prisoner, threatening to slash off their serifs. And what face saves the day?

..guess what fontface is my favourite..

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3k5oY9AHHM]

The art of looking sideways
Alan Fletcher
This is how it looks like inside my head. It a fountain of musings, facts, the odd, solid, and whimsical. It is design, doodles, unfinished thoughts, images, drawings. It is colours, shapes and wisdom. It is a delight and frustration at the same time – if I could show what goes on in my head, this is pretty much it.
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I should have stayed home
Roger Rapoport, Marguerita Castanera
Very funny. About all the glorious trips and travels that goes wrong. A collections of discomfort, disaster and disappointments. Timbuktu is not like you’d think. Not a homage to the well-planned, but rather an honest picture of how things can go, regardless of preparations.

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the IRA
Tim Pat Coogan
There’s a lot of junk about the IRA out there; a lot of rubbish. This is not without it’s faults and exhausting going-ons, but it is one of the better ones.
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All the trouble in the world – the lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death
P.J O’Rourke
O’Rourke should not be read in one sitting – he can be exhausting and a little too much. But he IS funny, cynical and sometimes, dead on. All the trouble in the world is not always what it looks like, or what some would like us to believe.
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The great war for civilisation – the conquest of the middle east
Robert Fisk
Depressing, informative, exhausting and impressive. It is very good, and the good Mr. Fisk is a relentless journalist, not letting sleeping dogs lie.
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Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Despite this being part of the curriculum, it is very, very good! Hah! Imagine that – a first class book in an educational institution… what marvels…
It gives a good, sensible introduction to typography, without the annoying, sentimental waffle often found in such books.
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The elements of typographic style
Robert Bringhurst
Clearly for the especially interested – but the book on the subject. In-depth, clear and sharp.
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Neither here nor there
Bill Bryson
Mr. Bryson can be a little too much too, and sometimes rather predictable. But his travels around Europe is very funny, and combining his experiences with the ones he had as a youth doing the same trip, is hilarious. Personally, I am fond of the story about the german restaurant, the incomprehensible menu and the threat of calf brain.
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Three in norway by two of them
anon
Hysterically funny, and should maybe belong under fiction for the many tall tales and absolute nonsense. But the descriptions of norway and inhabitants are spot on..

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Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen /Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke
Never mind the film. The book is beautiful, intelligent. Her view on her time in Africa very interesting, and the stories she tells vivid and touching.
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Hidden agendas
John Pilger
Well. Good old Mr. Pilger seems to repeat himself endlessly, so one book will do. He is relentless in his digging for truth, and like a dog with a bone, will not let go. Bless him.
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Those are real bullets, aren’t they?
Peter Pringle, Phillip Jacobson
There is a large pile of books on Bloody Sunday, but this is the best to my knowledge. There is a limit to how interested I am in reading about bullet entry angles over and over, when we all know what went on. They got the new inquiry, and we are still waiting to hear it.
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We wish to Inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
Philip Gourevitch
The awful story of the genocide in Rwanda.
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Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Brilliant thoughts on time.
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Color – travels through the paintbox
Victoria Finlay
This is the book with the annoying language and irritating fancies and guesswork. But the subject is immensely interesting, and her travels to all sorts of odd places entertaining. The myths and stories well researched; the fascinating conflicts and wars fought over colours fantastic.
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The ice master
Jennifer Niven
The mad story of the polar expedition of the ship Karluk and it’s crew. It is a story of survival, cruelty and a mad scientists’ need for self-promotion, but most of all it is a story of how tragedy can split men and bring out the worst in them. The crew and scientists of the expedition survives or dies along social divides, rather than work together. Revealing and terrifying.
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The politics of nationalism and ethnicity
James G. Kellas
Interesting. Don’t think I need to say more than that.

I have been reading Design Observer on and off for a few years. Sometimes it’s desperately navel-gazing, sometimes is preaching to the already converted, sometimes it’s talking to a few insiders. Sometimes, it is good. The last time I scrolled through, though, made me feel despondent.

There is a pathetic sentimentality there, and a wallowing in some mythical “good old days”. Let me tell you a secret. There were no good old days. Those days where normal days. Those days where ordinary too, just like today. It was just different. Jessica Helfand makes a teardripping entry on makereadies.
Oh, that was the good old days, wasn’t it. When printing presses spewed out stuff you could creatively wrap things in, and it would trancend Craft, Art and The Random.

She says she was at a press check, and “…deliriously inhaling the pervasive aroma of ink…”. And, since makereadies are practically gone, she claims, she continues “I confess to a certain amount of personal mourning for the death of the makeready, and what it stood for“.
What it stood for?! Hello! Seriously. It didn’t stand for anything! It was necessary. It was routine. It was hectic, usually. The day cars will fuel themselves, you’ll say that the pump handle stood for something. The stone ax in prehistoric age didn’t stand for anything. It was a tool.

I worked in a printing business for a few years. It was noisy, messy, hard work with tight schedules. It took years to learn to know the whims of the different printing presses, different paper, different air humidity, it was desperate when we only had a few sheets to make the alignments and colour adjustments. I did use some of the makereadies. I made envelopes out of the best ones, and letterpaper. And I liked them. But this sentimentality is pathetic, it is the luxury of those who didn’t have to do the job.

I have set led type, I have mixed inks, I have used precomputer techniques. I have retouched manually, on film, used scalpels and millimeter grids; stood over glaring light tables with a hangover. I have made a mess of positive/negative films. I have seen fellow students missing the door and hitting the wall for all the nasty chemicals working havoc in their brains. I have had teachers severely damaged by chemicals. I have stood alone at my printing press at midnight, struggling with balance of ink, water and paper, knowing I would not manage to get the last bus home. There was little glory there. I have messed up a Heidelberger windmill with white ink. I have washed more rollers, oiled more knobs, cut more paper than I care to think about.
This gives me some bizarre cred among the sentimental DO readers. I don’t care for it.
It was a good job, with good people. But let it go. To remember is not the same as sentimentalising and go all weepy. Save that for the truly tragic.

Other posts in DO goes on about the advertising world in the sixties. And then again, Jessica Helfand pops up with more sentimentality about making new things old. This, I think, is a US obsession. It’s like scrapbooking (which I detest). It is a lot of stupid pretending. There exist a disturbing product called a “Distressing Kit” – a kit with tools to make things look old or worn. Truly stupid (unless you’re in the film industry. I have made pottery to be smashed in a film. Different kettle of fish).

I am not trying to be hip & cool. And after all – I am a bookbinder. The hand craft variety. And a potter. There is not a lot of romance there, either. But at least it has another dimension; the content of the book. I like old things. I photograph structure and texture of old wood and stone endlessly. My ideal home would be a cabin in the woods (I have done that and loved it). But I have no illutions that growing all your own food and wittling all your own tools was particularly romantic. Or can be today. In short, I find Henry David Thoreau a pretentious git.

Kids today have never seen a floppy disk or a telephone with a dial. There is nothing more or less genuine about grandmothers telephone than an iPhone. It is change. Either go amish or get over it. The world moves on.

I finally saw the much-trumpeted film. It was amusing; mainly for the characters in it – and I mean the designers, not the fontface. That helvetica is everywhere is no surprise. It is clean, bland, large, simple and good for signage. Generally.
But the designers was the funniest bits. Some of them are clearly off their rockers, and I love it. Especially Erik Spiekermann is a raving loony, a man with wit, opinions and a careless regards of others. “I am always on time, but always a year late”, he says. He despises Helvetica for having no contrast; no rhythm. He shrugs, and says bad design is everywhere.

The film is seen as a homage to Helvetica, but if you watch the extras, the table turns. Seen from there, not much positive is said about it. And Rick Poynor goes a little overboard with his talk about the psychology of enslavement. Sometimes he is away with the faries, sometimes he is dead on. Paula Sher sees Helvetica as the fontface of war, power and corruption.

Matthew Carter, the man behind verdana, tahoma and caslon, seems to be the one of a few genuinely in awe of the fontface, and Vignellis rants over the “flowerchildren” is both hilarious and serious. Such a sweet, sweet man.

Most of the interviews take place in offices, meetingrooms and those bare, pale designers hideouts. One bizarre  exception is Michael C. Place – interviewed in a spare room in his house, it seems, with two or more hairless Sphynx cats crawling over a spare bed, chewing on microphone cords and climbing over cardboardboxes; green trees and the hint of a garden outside. In contrast to the bareness of designers meetingrooms. Not a coincidence, surely.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones are delightful – Hoefler cannot shut up to save his life, and his endless stream confirms Frere-Jones’s quiet assurances that type designers are bonkers, no exceptions.

Lars Müller, a norwegian gone swiss-german-dutch-english, with a bizarre gray lions mane, points at all sorts of signs. He looks increasingly self-conscious, but it gets funnier and funnier, as he stands beside all sorts of signs, popping up behind them, pointing out Helvetica.

Hermann Zapf – I have always admired Zapf for his calligraphy, but this is the first time I have seen him in moving pictures – he seems the incarnation of graphic craftsman and artist, an unassuming elderly gentleman with enough understatement to go around. If you didn’t know, you’d think him a doddering, doodling anybody. And, in the extras, it turns out, when he cannot say anything nice about helvetica, he refuses to say anything at all. When pushed, he mutters “I have never used Helvetica”. To him, it’s too 19th century. I like 20th century design, he says. Frutiger. There are lots and lots of other good faces around, he says, there is no need to always use helvetica.

Bless him.

David Carson – fruitcake par excellence – a brilliant, silly, funny guy, not in the least bit interested in squares and rules, and a doer of – and fan of – those mistakes others might find deadly.

So what do I think of Helvetica?
I hate the a. I really do. It ruins it all for me. This is a simple, clean face, and then you add that bendy little thing on the a. It’s not a serif, maybe it is to soften the font a little, I don’t know. But the a is fiddly enough as it is. It doesn’t show in the bold, thank god. I know a guy who doesn’t like the k, and for that reason refuse to use it.

Designers are lunatics. They are weird and wonderful. I’m happy to be one.

I live in a shithole. I try to ignore that I live in a shithole.  My sleep pattern gone haywire, my eating habits likewise. Time does funny things, and seems to coil and loop. That is why I drove out last night, at three thirty in the morning to capture the early morning light.

There was not much to capture. A handful of drunk people staggering home.
The light was too flat, the morning to far gone for that magic sunrise.
But I found the moon.
And I saw the town I live in – literally – in a new light. It doesn’t make me love the place, but a little more understanding, maybe.

The internet – a neverending source of weirdness, beauty, brutality and the bizarre. Here is the best of last nights wanderings.
I’ll post the rest later – having himalayan bother with my internet connection.

I love this. It makes sense.

The world is sick, and this is the proof, was my first thought. But then, in a way it makes sense.

This is gorgeous. The colours, the rust, the bulletholes, the guy. Ugly-beautiful.

I love letters. I love decay.

Ugly-beautiful.

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.