Posts Tagged ‘typography’

I love type, but I find that most days, I don’t get much of a chance to really play with it like I like to. I miss the luxury of school (any­thing that costs more than a pair of Louboutins is a luxury), where we’d be given typo­graphy assign­ments that let us play around with let­ters and words, cre­ating inter­esting pat­terns with them.

Typo­graph­ical arrange­ment for the NSLC’s annual report. I made up this fact. They tell me that the number is totally insane.

I’ve been wanting to get back into doing things like this, mostly as cre­ative exer­cises to keep me inter­ested in design. Of course, cre­ative exer­cises in and of them­selves are also some­thing of a luxury; it seems like that pesky work keeps get­ting in the way.

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Everyone who knows me at all knows I’m a fan of a good typeface (and a nice bottle of wine, and a pretty pair of shoes). Less common know­ledge is my fond­ness for public transit.

Sure, it’s often dirty, loud, crowded, and out­moded. Often­times it’s a good way to run into people you’d rather avoid. But it’s an excel­lent measure of the vitality of a city—its public transit system is the lifeblood of its “common” people, and a reflec­tion of how it treats them. Of course, the city in which I live has one of the most miser­able public transit sys­tems I’ve come across. I sold my little Honda Civic just before I left for five weeks in eastern Europe last summer, and I’ve been strug­gling to get by without it ever since. (Winter’s going to be fun.)

A year ago I found cheap air­fare to Mexico, and have since been taking off on a reg­ular basis, trav­eling about and becoming a bit of a digital nomad (which is another story entirely). I’ve been lucky to do a decent bit of trav­eling since then, and I’ve taken buses, trains, sub­ways, fer­ries, and trams in various cities across nine dif­ferent coun­tries, most of which spoke lan­guages unin­tel­li­gible to me. Given the lan­guage bar­rier, the fact that I was almost always solo, and the fact that I can get lost in a three-foot-square glass bubble, I started paying a lot of atten­tion to way­faring signage.

Malostranská sta­tion in Praha

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I’ve been doing some work with email news­let­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Ser­i­ously, one of these days, all these com­panies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sist­ently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­panies like the fab­ulous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our eco­nomy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, ser­i­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, how­ever, provide this handy little “val­id­ator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been dir­ectly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Liber­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a freel­ance job posting. It was quite an exhaustive pro­cess, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the examples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!) (more…)

Dear God, I wish I’d made this web­site: Butter London. It’s pretty much my holy grail of web­site design. I love the typo­graphy, I love the way they actu­ally found a “butter” colour that’d work in the back­ground, I love the varied tex­tures and the scroll­work and the slightly old-wallpaper feel of the whole thing. The subtle anim­a­tion effects are great (that’s how Flash ought to be used, if you ask me, and I love that there’s a little skull and cross­bones used to offset the foliage. (more…)

I feel like I’m somehow failing as a self-professed typo­phile when I admit that I only man­aged to net a 30 score on this test. Note to self: time to start studying up on my fonts.

Damn, you look fine.

Where’ve you been all my life? Or, more accur­ately, where’ve you been the last four years of my life, during which I never once wor­ried about prop­erly citing an essay penned by three authors quoting a stage play by an unknown play­wright? I mean, the Virgo-perfectionist in me really loves style manuals. And I really need to work on my typo­graphic cor­rect­ness. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve only VERY recently come to learn about using my proper em-dashes (I’m still a little unclear on en-dashes). Cli­ents who didn’t auto­mat­ic­ally smart-quote their own HTML (read: all of them) for a while were the bane of my exist­ence, until I cajoled a pro­grammer friend into writing me a block of reg­ular expres­sions that does it auto­mat­ic­ally. I’m making progress.

Anyway, I know it’s been a while, but boy, have you ever kept your­self in shape. What a typo­graph­ic­ally pretty website.

It’s been offi­cially a year today. A year of no paycheques, no health bene­fits, no vaca­tion time. No nine a.m. starts, no staying indoors all day staring at a com­puter screen, no mon­strous amounts of unpaid over­time. (Okay, I lied, all of those things have happened, and worse.) I love that I can say that I’ve been run­ning my own busi­ness for a year and I’m still in love with it.

I’ve had the chance to work with a huge range of com­panies and people over the past year, pro­du­cing a range of dif­ferent pro­jects. I’ve done news­paper ads, illus­tra­tions, resumes, and a whole slew of web­sites, logos, busi­ness cards, and bro­chures. I’ve learned how to use Quick­books, I’ve stream­lined my pro­cesses, I’ve learned some AJAX tech­niques, I’ve rewritten my CMS code base, I’ve read about grids and typo­graphy and golden ratios. I’ve lost out on con­tracts, and I’ve taken on pro­jects that thrilled and chal­lenged me. I make an awful lot less money now than I used to, and I prob­ably work harder. But it’s just so much fun.

How­ever, my one-year-mark is a time for ser­ious con­sid­er­a­tion. What’s my goal here? Where am I going? How is my little busi­ness going to grow up? And, most import­antly, how can I keep doing what I love, stay sane, and make enough money to keep me in chocolate and red wine for the rest of my life?

I am coming to realize that:

1. Del­egate, del­egate, del­egate. I am a creature of many tal­ents, but I am not any of the fol­lowing: Salesman. Accountant. Pro­grammer. Mech­anic. Stop thinking you can do everything, and start spending more of your time doing what you are good at and do enjoy.
2. Nothing comes quickly. Pro­jects will take longer than you expected to reach com­ple­tion. A two-minute fix will turn into a two-hour ses­sion of slam­ming your head against the wall. Some­times you’ll put an inor­dinate amount of time into researching an estimate for a pro­ject you’re not awarded, only to be handed a bigger and better pro­ject a year down the line. A lot of what I do is investment.
3. It is great to be a work­aholic, but make sure you get at least three seconds of fresh air every day.
4. Stop taking things so per­son­ally. Not everyone can think you’re the next coming, and some days, you will just suck. This does not neces­sarily mean that you are a total failure in all areas of your life, and it is cer­tainly not cause for a mental breakdown.
5. Nancy Reagan was right, sort of. Some­times, you should “just say no”. As a small-business owner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of jumping at any­thing that dangles a cheque in front of you, but that’s not really why you’re in this busi­ness, anyway, and it’s cer­tainly not the most important factor to consider.

These are my mon­sters. I’m hoping that, by this time next year, I’ll have mas­sacred at least half of them.

So here’s the thing. I realize in advance that I’m going to come off as a crazy cat lady here. I’ll admit I’ve always been a little nervous about the crazy-cat-lady thing. People tell me that three cats is enough to make you a CCL, and given my pen­chant for losing my beloved famil­iars, I’ve always man­aged to stay far away from that line.

Of course, I forgot to spay my kitten, and she hit puberty one day when I wasn’t home. Sud­denly she was weighing about ninety pounds and her belly was the size of a foot­ball. Bob Barker would have my head.

So Kal­liope is a young, unwed mother. She gave birth to three kit­tens on September 28^th. She was con­sid­erate enough to choose my bed as her birthing room, so I came home to find three tiny closed-eyed little rodenty creatures in a pile on my duvet, a bloody mess on my pillow, and a still­born under my sheet. I did a lot of laundry.

I’ve always been infatu­ated with cre­ation. Given the option, I’d almost always rather create than con­sume, which is why I tend to grav­itate towards writing, drawing, painting, Lego sets, etc. Watching another life be cre­ated, though? That puts everything else to shame. I sup­pose this is the sort of thing people usu­ally realize when they have chil­dren, but, well, I’m too much of a child myself to ever go that route.

While I’ve been feeling unpro­ductive because most of my pro­jects are stalled in some mid­phase, or they’re behind-the-scenes sorts of pieces that I can’t really add to my port­folio, Kallie’s been raising three beau­tiful, healthy, and only mar­gin­ally psychotic tiger-striped felines.

And I’m trying hard not to get attached, but I’ve watched them quad­ruple in size. I was there when their eyes started to open, I knew them when their ears were closed flat, and I taught them to eat solid food. Two weeks ago, they all had earned names.

This is Coper­nicus at about three weeks old:

Sabine, today, posing with her favourite plaything (after her Mum’s tail):

And Mat­ilda boning up on her typography:

More crazy-cat-lady photos can be found on my flickr page, if you’re really so inclined.

Oh, and in actual news, I’ve added two new pro­jects—digitaledge.ca and a logo for Com­fort & Joy (web­site in pro­duc­tion!). But, really, neither of those attack my shoes when I walk into the room, so they really just seem less thrilling, somehow.