“This place cracks us up,” Ms. Kress continued. “All the fake memorabilia. It’s like trying to look like it’s old, but it’s only been here a year.”
no. confessional/ironic love of suburban blandness will not be tolerated. it is to be stomped upon, ground into an oily spot with the heel of a blahnik pump, incinerated with a $300 troika lighter, then promptly forgotten about.
pull yourself together. put on some stupid designer whatever you bought on credit and have insipid technicolor cocktails and fun fusion served by steroided waiters and bulemic waitresses while you sit in a threadbare (shhh!) velvet booth—the way city people should.
if you’re going to be trash, make it fun. don’t fucking torture yourself trying to pretend there’s something cute about lowering your standards. you know what i mean?
does anyone remember the manhole? yeah, it’s yet another shiny happy boy bar now. and look: you can be part of the magic!
compensation dependent upon skill, i’m sure.
kind of a weird article from WIRED news describing how prettymakers (like myself) will inherit the earth. ultimately, i don’t know if i buy this—artists tend to be curiously unmindful of their business. i’m thinking the marketing directors will probably be the big fish in a few years.
…or rather, making shit is an art.
commodity is what i call a “naive constructed geometric family.” i’ve been working on it for just over two years.
it is created with the notion that the computer’s mathematical and logical nature can generate beautiful results with very little human intervention. this is a notion i see used frequently among young design students, but never with the degree of finesse necessary to create anything terribly flexible. commodity is my attempt to make something beautiful from “dumb” type-creation techniques.
the font’s underlying geometries are based heavily on a display font i created called bad excuse, thus named because i felt the font was simply a bad excuse of a typeface. commodity refines bad excuse’s notions into a much more usable format.
all of commodity’s characters in the roman versions are created on a grid with very little variation - much as a bitmapped typeface would be. it’s a method of font creation that is explicitly digital in that strict grids, monostroke characters, and right angles are all inherent to the computer.
commodity’s italics counter their digital romans with scriptlike forms inspired by pen-drawn letterforms. unlike pen-drawn italics, however, commodity’s italics retain the digital monostroke default.
differences between weights are created by optically halving the stroke-weight of the next-largest weight: extra-light’s stroke width is half of light’s, light’s is half of regular’s, and so on so that characters are spidery and open at their lightest weight, blocky and solid at their heaviest.
the family’s height is created by simply moving ascenders, descenders and x-height strokes up or down as necessary to keep a constant height. in this way, related characters’ counters and angles distort between weights.
commodity will soon be available in a family of five weights and true italics from thirstype.
kathy mcginty, i love you. kathy’s work is a studious reconstruction of what men want from sex objects—reconstructed through a disturbing, robotic series of sampled sound files. similar in construction to adolescent phone pranks, kathy’s work adds an edge of control and revenge, thus exposing gender expectations. brilliant, brilliant performance work.
buffy the vampire slayer’s over. the final episode showed sunnydale’s destruction and powers—previously only available to the show’s heroine—given to thousands of girls around the planet. and the show ends. right?
wrong. several fans have taken upon themselves to keep the characters running online via an intricate network of livejournal sites. i’ve read fanfic before, but never anything this wide-ranging. definitely not high art…but cute. and a nice occasional read for those of us who miss the show.
“no, i would not like your special low-interest rates.” the national telemarketing do-not-call registry is now active. register your phone now. for full details from the direct marketers’ associateon, check this out. for state-run don’t-call lists, look here.
interestingly, the first time i hit this link the authors had eulogized (complete with photographs) miss audrey hepburn by mistake. which was confusing—i had a party called “truman’s mourning” when she actually died in 1993. seems odd for the new york times to make such an obvious blunder. then again…maybe not so much.
