Category: other

Random creations

Typefaces and today (Day 42/365)

Posted on by Dale

I love typefaces. I love typefaces. I get an email from this company, and I go all quivery with type-lust. I want to fire up InDesign and make a big poster just to use the font.

Screw Times Roman and Helvetica, and don’t even talk to me about Arial or Comic Sans. Bleagh.

Give me Cyan …
or P22 Cezanne …
or High Society …
or Young Finesse …
or Leaf or…

You get the picture. When I was in high school, my girl friend actually gave me an ITC catalog for my birthday. It’s that bad.

So it was with great anticipation that for Christmas last year I gave myself a daily calligraphy calendar. Its premise was that every weekend it would give you a new typeface, and then the week would be spent lettering words that were grouped thematically. What fun, eh wot?

I should have been tipped off when the description on the back of the box simpered, “See if you can guess the theme for the week!” The typefaces were not very exciting, some of them required a brush and ink, not the kind of thing one wants to deal with in the bathroom first thing every morning, and some of them contained egregious errors, e.g., their attempt at an uncial font had a majuscule A and H rather than minuscule. (And you thought I couldn’t get worse.)

Not only that, but after six weeks, the typefaces repeated! What a rip-off! So I lost interest mid-February and have only desultorily pulled the looseleaf pages since then.

I was mildly curious this weekend, gazing on the umpteenth repeat of a swash style, as to what the theme would be this week, especially for today, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And it was therefore with slackjawed stupefaction this morning that I pulled the weekend’s page and saw today’s word: Airplane.

I am not easily shocked, as most of you know, but that was a weird way to begin the morning. The rest of the week had words like propeller, pilot, that kind of thing, but damn, people, did no one think? I would hate to be their email editor this morning.

I may have to go buy ArDeco or Chato Band just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Another site (Day 41/365)

Posted on by Dale

Go here:
http://blueskystudio.typepad.com/blueskystudio/2006/08/remember_this.html

Take a side trip to the “this” link. Then come back and work your way back through the little series of his non-brush exploration. Very cool.

In many ways I’m jealous of all these artists who are doing the “thing-a-day” thing, because they can scan/photo their results and post them, and then they have pretty colors in their blog. Even if I get something done, it’s all incomprehensible black-and-white marks.

Oh well, I’m off to work , and hopefully finish, sketching out the rest of “Milky Way.” With any luck, we’ll have more incomprehensible black-and-white marks to look at today.

Noon: So close, so close, so close!! I got the rat grumbling, and I have the final stanza sketched out, but the counter-rhythms are all messed up. I want it to be more open, more relaxed than the nervous little figures at the beginning of the journey, but I can’t make them fit. And I’m hungry, so I’m outta here.

5:15ish: Well, after a nice lunch and a visit to Anne Powell for her birthday, that didn’t take long at all to fix. It wasn’t necessarily the rhythms, but the key. It’s all done but the sweeping coda. This is a very strange feeling, to know that by the end of Tuesday night, I’ll be finished with the main composition of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. (Marc would want to know that I just typed End instead of Inn.)

Others doing work (Day 36/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would think that I would have accomplished something on today, the 10% marker, but I didn’t really. I took a stab at adding another line or two to the poem:

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest

this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter.

But I think that hardly counts. (The next line will probably end with matter, of course.)

In the meantime, I explored some sites that have the same impulse as I, only a little more focused and a lot more successful:

Some are more successful than others, of course. Some are quite nice.

A different kind of creativity (Day 21/365)

Posted on by Dale

So this was different: Benjie sends me email, urging me to enter the My Dream App contest, and so I did.

The concept is simple: you describe your dream application, something you’d love to have on your Macintosh OS X computer, and submit it. A team of judges will narrow the field to 24 apps, and then a couple of weeks of blogging and refining, etc., goes on, and then The People vote on the top three. Then the sponsors of the contest actually develop those three pieces of software.

Winners get MacBook Pro laptops and some other stuff (I wasn’t paying attention), plus 15% royalties on the new software. Pretty cool.

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