World Graphics Day

Today is World Graphics Day. It's also the 43rd anniversary for the day Icograda was formed in back in 1963. Oddly enough I can't find too much information on Icograda's own website, however I was able to find some older posts spread out over the last few years on design*notes (2006), Speak Up (2005), and even Microsoft's typography page (2002) mentioning the anniversary.

All AIGA members became Icograda members last year.

Illustrating the letterform

This is a real exciting event. I love the work that these guys do. I sure wish I were in the L.A. area within the next few weeks though to catch it.

"A focus on new ways of seeing the 26 characters of the alphabet and how to use them as expressive tools in a contemporary vocabulary of design is what binds these six letterform artists together in a kind of shared vision."

From April 6th through May 19th the works of Michael Doret, Daniel Pelavin, Tom White, Peter Greco, Tom Nikosey, and Gerard Huerta will be on display at Harolds Gallery at Insync Media. 150 pieces of work will be on display. One hunderd and fifty! Plus concept sketches which will give some insight to the creative process of some of the pieces. You can find links for interviews with each of them here.

There's a PDF available for download that promotes the event.

A name that should be included in this event? Tom Kennedy.

POTUS Typographicus

I don't follow architecture or interior design intimately like some other designers do, but I certainly have an appreciation for it. I've read The Fountainhead, and the Interior Decorators of Texas is actually one of my clients. I also subscribe to Metropolis.

In the current May 2006 issue there's a great article by Steven Heller adressing the issue of the typographical graphics that adorn the background of the President's public addresses. Steven calls it POTUS Typographicus, and makes a great point that due to President Bush's "less-than-commanding oratorical style" the current administration must feel a need to use these visual aids as if they were cue cards to summarize and drive the point home.

Heller does mention that no other president before Bush has done this, yet Reagan had done something similar. Anytime President Reagan was on T.V. or on a stage or somewhere that could be staged, there was always an American flag (or five) in the background. This was a planned strategy by the Reagan administration to use the flag as a branding tool to instill a sense of patriotism for American viewers everywhere, thus heightening Reagan's popularity and removing any doubt as to what came out of his mouth as anything less than American. Frank Miller, in his Dark Knight Returns graphic novel (good luck trying to find any of the four original issues for under $35 apiece), has a futuristic Reagan continuing as President and addressing the nation with (you guessed it) stars and stripes and American flags in just about every frame Reagan is in. I would venture a guess that Miller also understood Reagan's American branding technique, therefore incorporating it into his illustrations.

Heller also touches on the aspect that communication happens even when you're trying not to communicate, such as the use of an "expressionless serif font for the slogan 'Compassion in Action' which actually removes any hint of ingenuousness from the word compassion." I do wish he drilled down a little further and really dissected what the typographics actually communicate (in his words). It's a good article though, so go pick up your copy today.

Inspirational

One of my earliest childhood memories also happens to be a visual one. My father used to hang out at a local gas station to shoot the breeze with some of the mechanics that worked there, and on occasion he'd take me with him. I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old, but I distinctly remember seeing a giant sign on an outside wall with a red flying horse in a circle. I assumed it was a sign for the gas station itself, and not a nationally recognized logo for the Mobil gas brand.

Obviously, I thought this was the coolest gas station ever. I loved visiting the station if only to gaze upon that wonderfully fantastic sign. Staring at it definitely sparked my interest for recognizing objects in a visually intricate way (as much as I could at that young age). My fascination with the logo is probably one of the many reasons I enjoyed working at Pegasus Design so much.

The logo that I'm referring to is the 1965 version that was revitalized by Chermayeff & Geismar (and from what I can understand, Eliot Noyes actually had the commission). Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar were both students of Paul Rand at Yale, and it's possible that Paul Rand had a lot to do with Chermayeff & Geismar getting the commission to revitalize Mobil. Eliot Noyes was the Principal Industrial Designer for IBM and the Principal Designer for Westinghouse. Eliot Noyes hand-picked Paul Rand to handle the identity for both IBM and Westinghouse.

I attribute my early single memory of this vision as the first of many that set me on the path to drawing and reading comics as a kid, and then (re)discovering the graphic design world as my profession. The gas station, which was downtown Austin near the Capitol building, has been replaced by some other local business. The Mobile brand has been replaced by a merged EXXONMobil. The same EXXON logo that many think Saul Bass designed, yet he takes no credit for it. Raymond Loewy designed the EXXON logo in the 1960's (identity rebrand from Standard Oil's ESSO Petrol Stations) and in 1981 Saul Bass actually revitalizes every other aspect of EXXON which includes architecture design, packaging, lighting, and traffic flow. Although Bass streamlined the EXXON signage commencing work on the lettering and/or logotype, he never took credit for it. He could have easliy changed Raymond Loewy's EXXON identity, but in having the ultimate respect for another designer's milestone work, he instead had the stones to tell his client that the communication problem that existed for the company was not in the identiy itself but rather it was everything else that supported the identity. Finding this kind of character trait in a designer is hardly heard of these days.

* Much of this post wouldn't be possible without the aid of DesignMaven's input. Keep the names alive man!

A precious commodity

Some habits are just hard to break, and I have one that I find myself repeating every few months or so.

I stay up late. 

I don't mean until two in the morning, I mean I'm winding down around seven in the morning and then I sleep for a few hours and start my day again between 10 and 11 a.m. I do this for two main reasons:

- I feel like I'm stealing extra time in the day to accomplish things

- I'm stealing uninterrupted time

A big challenge with freelance is you do everything yourself. Everything. There's no one to answer your phone for you, no one to prepare proposals or invoices, no one to meet with clients, no one to help with production work, and no one to bounce ideas off of.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a hands-on kinda guy so I love doing everything, but some days there's just not enough time to do it all. So what I end up doing is mostly administrative stuff during the day, and then I spend some time with my wife in the evening, then at night I throw on a pot of coffee and plant myself in my chair and work on the design and production stuff that I love.

But I can only handle this for so long. I've been in this routine for about a month now and I'm going to have to break out of it this week. My energy and cohesive thought process have both diminished a bit. But over the years of doing this, I've learned something:

Time, not love or money or anything else, is humankind's most precious commodity and everything we do costs us time.

I say this because really, all we can do is spend it. You can't earn it, you can't save it, and you can't reclaim it. We've devised all kinds of ways to try to manage it, be frugal with it, and even delude ourselves into thinking we're saving it. We also devise a way to measure its passing by tracking the sun and the moon and keeping watches and calendars. And so it passes us by at a constant rate and there's nothing much we can do about it except stay up late at night and try to get more done in a given day.

Finally complete... almost

I owe cookiecrook far more than anyone could guess. Without his urging, I wouldn't be on the AIGA Austin board right now. I also wouldn't even be aware of accessibility and how important it truly is for web design.

I also wouldn't have learned about the Lightbox script. It's a nifty lightweight javascript for popping up an image within your current browser window. Say you have a thumbnail image that you want to be clickable to show the image full-size? Opening the image in a new window is counter-intuitive for getting back to the original window. Lightbox script solves that.

Even as James clued me into the script, the author of said script had just produced version two. After evaluating it for a few days, I decided to stick with version one. I felt that the newer script in, all its animated spiffiness, was detracting from the image itself (which to me is the antithesis of its purpose).

So the build-up to all of this is that I've finally completed the last leg of my site redesign: having larger previews of my portfolio samples. The only ones that are link-dead are old websites from the pre-dot.com-bust days and print samples that I no longer have originals of (a hard drive crash and misplacing a box of portfolio samples from moving six times within three years will do that). It's something I still have difficulty discussing.

So now the very last thing I'm contemplating for my site is the gray-to-gray that I have going on with the background and the sidebar. It looks okay on a PC but my eyes get lost in the sea of gray that Safari displays. I've thought about placing a pattern in the background, but who isn't doing that these days? But I like it, so I may still end up trying it out.

Widget

I use an older Mac G4 as my workhorse, which normally does just fine for me. Running Panther was a bit of a strain but it practically sings under Tiger... until I try to use Dashboard.

It's a little slow the first time I launch it (per reboot) and I don't know who would want to use the widgets that support drag and drop (such as Transmit's FTP widget - I just use their nifty desktop script for quick uploads) because switching in and out of Dashboard is such a strain on my system.

Anyway, I'm posting this entry using Blogger's Widget. I can see how this is useful for quick posts. It's many less clicks to jump into Dashboard and just start typing, rather than open a new tab in Safari and navigate through Blogger's home page to get to the "new post" section.

I'll still need to go online to create new posts that are larger and contain images and links. Such as the next one I'm about to start...

Not really

Back in the mid 90's I rode a 1982 Yamaha Virago. It's one of those motorcycles that look like a Harley but doesn't have a Harley price tag. At the time I primarily used Diamond Shamrock gasoline. I never had a problem with it until I starting using it in my bike.

Every time I filled up at Diamond Shamrock, there was always a pinging sound and the occasional hiccup in horsepower. I realized that my bike was in bad enough shape to give indication that the gasoline was bad too. And this was only with Diamond Shamrock and no other brand of gasoline. So ever since then I've avoided using Diamond Shamrock like the plague. I've sworn them off.

And now they've made a final step to ensure that I never use them again. Ever.

Anyone can see this billboard heading west on 183 approaching the Mopac exit. I haven't seen any of the Diamond Shamrock locations switching over yet, but it doesn't matter because they will eventually. They say they plan on retiring the 30-year old Diamond Shamrock brand and using the Valero brand at 2,900 retail locations (which I assume is all of them).

It's not prettier. It's not even good. There's nothing clever to it, not even a trace amount of ambiguity or metaphorical character to give it life. At least the Diamond Shamrock logo had a semblance of that. I think it's the yellow squiggly line that's throwing me off. I could live with the white "V" in the green circle (it would show structure and balance indicating reliability for the company) but I think it'd have to be tweaked for better symmetrical balance (and they would have to lose the gradient on the green circle). Details.

Fibbery

Well this is pretty neat: It seems that April is not only National Poetry Month, but also Math Awareness Month. So a mister Gregory K. has decided to try to get folks to write poems on his blog based on the Fibonacci sequence, and he's calling them "Fibs." I've never been one to be real big on poetry, but a lot of the poems are fun to read. Plus he seems to be getting a pretty good response by posting on Slashdot as well (scroll down for additional comments).

Museum of Printing History

If you're ever down in the way of Houston, and you have a fascination (or even a mere appreciation) for typography and "old-school" printing, I highly recommend stopping by the Museum of Printing History.

I visited the museum a few years ago and gained a whole new perspective and respect for the printing process and how far we've come today. Visiting the museum again is one of those things that I've put on my list for things to do this year.

And speaking of printing history, for the last two years running there is a booth at the Texas Renaissance Festival called "The Gutenberg Press" which also features (you guessed it) a working Gutenberg press. While I have my doubts to its authenticity, it's still fascinating to see something like that in action. If you make it a habit to attend the festival, I recommend finding the booth and casing the joint*. (The booth is usually to the "left" of the jousting arena.)

* Yes I know this terminology is usually reserved for 1920's gangster-speak, but sometimes I give in to the desires to make a play on words even if no else will get it. To "case" the joint... you know, cases in old type shops where capital letters an non-capital letters were stored, hence the name "upper-case" and "lower-case" letters? Okay ahh... nevermind then.

Two for one special!

It looks like I'm not the only one updating my site today. Cameron Moll has updated the online portfolio section of his site. I gotta say, it looks pretty spiffy. Who doesn't like the "worn" look nowadays? Vintage is so in.

I should warn you, it seems like he's getting a ton of hits today because of this. His site is loading unusually slow.

It's alive!

So my new site redesign (v2) is live now. I've been playing with the Blogger feature for a few weeks in March to test it and get familiar with it, so you'll probably see some different layouts in the archives. Someday I'll eventually switch over to Moveable Type.

For a designer who used to dabble in HTML back in the dot-com boom and then somewhat walked away after the dot-com bust (to focus on my original passion: the print design discipline), I'm amazed how easy it really is to learn CSS. Everything in my new site is CSS except the tables and forms. (I'm not a big fan of how CSS handles tables and I didn't have the energy to learn CSS forms.)

In my portfolio section (Graphic Design/Illustration), pretty much all of the thumbnail images won't open into a window with a larger view... yet. That's the next step I'll be working on in the next few weeks.

Other than that, I'm still making some very minor tweaks to the site, odds are you'll never notice. Just some last minute spit and polish. Feel free to kick the tires, check the lights, and take it for a spin.