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The top 15 out of a 28-quip week. Apologies for the lateness.
I will take a leap of faith and think that you haven't yet grown tired of our Graphic Design Referenced posts here on Speak Up. In part, sure it helps promote it, but more than that I think having this relative transparency about the process of making a book is remotely interesting. At the very least, it is highly therapeutic for me to write about it. And today's post, on Christmas Eve no less, couldn't come at a better time and with the most satisfying of milestones completed. Around 3:00 pm today, after three months of 5:30 am alarms at UnderConsideration headquarters, Bryony and I have finished a) writing the more than 115,000 words that comprise the book and b) completed the first pass of laying out 400 pages (which Bryony, by the way, single handedly did) that need to accomodate more than 2,000 images.
The top 15 out of a 37-quip week.
Like any other history I'm sure, chronicling graphic design history is tricky business. There is the written part, relying on correct facts and authoritative sources. But then there is the visual part, upon which graphic design's history relies heavily to tell its evolution. And just as important as fact-checking we've realized that image-checking is just as crucial. This may be a bit of a "well, duh…" but if we've come to rely on the most authoritative resources to gain visual knowledge of our history, well, at least one influential example has been wrongly represented.
Graphic designers, illustrators, artists, and advertisers will continue delivering all of the persuasive, informative, narrative, and poetic visual stimuli we see every single day, but others may seek out inventive ways to create shelter from it. They will fabricate new media to help consumers escape from new media, where we turn off (or worse yet, hide) from the abundance of stimuli.
The top 15 out of a 41-quip week.
Because you clearly have money to spend this Holiday season, I have put together a list of some of the best books of 2008. If you prefer not to buy, I do strongly recommend paying your local bookstore a visit and lingering. All these titles have also been added to our growing (albeit slowly) archive of recommendations.
The top 15 out of a 44-quip week.
Maybe it's just me, but whenever I'm watching Project Runway, Top Chef or Top Design I imagine that a facsimile based on graphic design would be feasible. I am not saying it would be entertaining or interesting for a general audience, just feasible. After all, Top Design, the show about interior decoration, is as lame as it can get (even though I praised its first season) on a channel like Bravo. So a bunch of graphic designers scurrying around with laptops, Moleskines and white earbuds hanging while designing two-hour logos or magazine covers doesn't seem so far fetched. We may soon find out: C.M.Y.K. — America's Top Graphic Designer.
Let me start by declaring that I am an ardent fan of black letter. I understand its connotations and associations to a certain fascist regime. I understand its importance as the type choice for a certain book printed with movable type many centuries ago. And I understand that, well, for the most part it can unreadable in contrast to Times and Arial. I rarely even use it myself. I've tried, to no avail. Still, black letter typefaces display some of the most innovative interpretations on any given character — the F of Fraktur? Drool! — and, as I noted years ago, it is one of the few classes of type that can span any given industry or audience. So, for me, going through the more than 640 pages devoted to black letter in Judith Schalanksy's Fraktur Mon Amour was like eating ice cream from a bottomless bowl: Delicious and satisfying with sudden cases of brain freeze.
