One of my readers has brought to my attention Scott, a guy who wears a name tag every day. Apparently, he started doing so as an experiment, and it has introduced him to the wonderful world of spontaneous human interaction. This name tag has become his front porch that says “Hey! Come on up and chat!” and people tend to be more friendly now that he has his name tag on.
This piqued my interest because I often lament the lack of spontaneous human contact that I blame on the increased use of the private automobile and developments such as strip malls and suburbs. This is especially pronounced in a place like Omaha. People have pushed each other so far from one another that the ice that needs breaking is getting thicker and thicker. The result, in my mind, is that instead of having sustainable social networks, people have compartmentalized their lives and now must resort to dating services to find suitable partners, and “networking events” – specifically for exchanging business cards – to establish business “relationships.” I can theorize so many other repercussions and repercussions of the repercussions that I’m afraid to get any farther into it.
Next time you are walking down the street, and by some miracle, it happens to be a street on which there is another person other than yourself walking in the opposite direction, try to make eye contact with that person. It can be disturbingly difficult. You may want to try one of Scott’s 52 ways to build your front porch.
I would have liked to have posted this at a more appropriate time, but better late than never. If you dig back into your archives of the Omaha World Herald, to the Sunday, September 24th edition, you will see the cover of the AIA Nebraska Architecture insert, which was designed by me. If you missed it the first time around and can’t find it in your archives, this is what it looked like.
I would have posted it sooner, but it didn’t cross my mind until one of my readers encouraged me to do so. Apparently, this is the first of the many years of Architecture inserts that has had its cover designed by someone other than someone in the OWH’s fine staff. Every year, the insert announces the AIA Nebraska Honor Award winners.
One of my readers has brought my attention to a cartoon that is reminiscent of my previous Don’t You Read My Blog? post.
The copyright is from 2002, so I’m certainly not the first one to notice this trend. It’s funny how much someone can know about what is going on in your life without even talking to you, but rather, reading your blog.
For years, my home computer setup has been in need of an ergonomic overhaul. Not able to find any computer workstations that adequately accommodated my non-traditional setup, I have been using an art table for my computer. To say that it has made computer use undesirable would be an understatement.
During my studies in Italy, I took this photograph of an inscription inside of the Amphitheater of Pompeii. It dates to sometime shortly after the restoration of the Amphitheater after the earthquake of 62 A.D.. This is a fascinating specimen to me because I think it exhibits the relationship between medium and form in type design.
In Fred Smeijers’ Counterpunch: Making Type in the Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now, he implies that serifs such as those on the typography of Trajan’s Column are a product of the form derived from brushing the letters on the stone (the type was brushed on before being chiseled in), and trying to complement the one-sided serif that inevitably showed up at each stroke’s terminus (p. 53). This may very well be the birth of the serif, but I think at least for this inscription, the limitations of the chisel spawned the serifs.
One reason I believe the form of these letters is derived from the chisel rather than the brush is the lack of weight variation in the strokes that a brush would yield from changes in pressure. Another reason is that the serifs only appear where a stroke doesn’t terminate into another stroke. You can imagine how unsightly the terminals of a stroke formed by a chisel would look if the designer hadn’t turned the chisel perpendicular to the stroke for a finishing touch. Notice how the “D” doesn’t have serifs, such as would be the case on a brush-derived letter such as Trajan. This may have been the first sans-serif type design were it not for the limitations of the chisel.
Of course, a digital type designer doesn’t have this concern, and it makes it easy to wind up designing a typeface that doesn’t have the rational beauty that tool-derived forms have. This can be difficult to achieve when you’re designing by drawing the outline of a type design, rather than using a tool to draw the individual stroke.
Starting with a two-page spread, draw diagonal lines from one corner of the spread to the other (A1, A2).
Draw diagonal lines from the top-center of the spread to either bottom corner (B1, B2).
Draw a box with the same aspect ratio as your full page (C1), and place it so that B1 intersects the top-right and bottom-left corners of the box, and A1 intersects the top-left corner of the box. A good way to acheive this is to first draw a box the same size as your page, group it, and then scale it proportionally.
Once you have achieved margins that are to your liking, copy your box, and position the copy on your opposite page so that it satisfies the critera from step 3 (C2).
C1 and C2 are your live text areas.
A variety of margin-to-whitespace ratios can be achieved with this method, from the economical to the luxurious. You now have beautiful margins. Best of luck with filling in the rest.
