Should you be on the internet?

Back in 1995, Eye asked: should you be on the internet?

Most new users find themselves initially addicted, forget that they are paying for a phone call and sometimes even forget that they have commitments in the real world. This reveals the immaturity of the technology. We don’t use the telephone because it is there, and are rarely even aware of it as a technology at all. When we are able to say the same about the internet, then it will have become truly useful.

Still waiting for the useful bit to kick in.

House Industries

Few type foundries display as much love for their craft as Delaware's House Industries. Established in 1994, they've amassed an impressive collection of fonts, and created all manner of type-related products along the way (clothing lines, furniture, toys – not to mention their exquisitely-designed catalogues). They've recently launched a new font collection, Eames Century Modern, inspired by the work and design philosophy of Charles and Ray Eames. I caught up with co-founder Rich Roat to pester him about the new collection and the craft of the type designer.

You recently launched the Eames Century Modern collection, and jolly lovely it is too. How did the project come about?

We started talking to Eames Demetrios, Charles and Ray's grandson and current standard-bearer for the estate, in the late 90s about doing a set of typefaces based on the Eames oeuvre. We went off on a lot tangents between then and now, but the stars finally aligned a few years ago and we made a deal.

It seems like a dream project. Was there a lot of pressure to get it right, to do Charles and Ray's legacy justice?

We always put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get things right regardless of the legacy we're working with. I don't think anybody can say whether we got it right or wrong, but we did create something new that promotes and honours Charles and Ray's work.

There must always be the temptation to keep on tweaking, to keep on perfecting a design – how do you know when a collection like this is finished and ready to be set free into the world?

That's the dangerous intersection where art, design, practicality and commerce come together. One of our strengths has always been driving through that intersection without dinging the fenders up too badly.

When designing a collection, how much of the work is done off-screen, using traditional crafts?

We don't like to think of on-screen vs off-screen time anymore. It would suggest that the computer affords us some sort of advantage in the creative process, which it does not. Everyone has access to the same tools. What's in our heads and hearts makes or breaks the design.

Once the design process works its way onto the computer, is it a challenge to maintain the organic, hand-crafted feel of a font?

Yeah, well that's the challenge. With Eames we could look at what Charles and Ray did with bent plywood and incorporate those organic cues into letterforms.

Do you ever reach a point where a design becomes too tidy, too digital?

If I could quote myself, I think I wrote a really poignant piece about Eames on the House Industries blog, particularly when referring to type designer Erik van Blokland:

If you’ve ever had the occasion to sit next to Erik van Blokland while he’s serial doodling a quirky synthesis of strokes, shapes, spaces, and counterspaces that bleed from drafting pen to cocktail napkin, you’d want to work with him too. Doodling is not an exclusive skill, but translating those random inked thoughts into a synthesis of control points, curves and corners that define filled and not-filled shapes of digital type is a rare talent. This crucial point is where mere mortals lose their way. This is where typography crosses the bridge from function back to form, and nobody makes that transition quite like Erik.

The answer to that question really separates good designers from great designers. Can you transcend the tools and the medium to create something truly unique?

What would be your desert island tools of the trade – what are the things you absolutely definitely couldn't live without?

I'd want Ken Barber there with me so the large help signs we created with flammable materials looked their best for the aerial rescue team. Seriously, the tools are insignificant. On a desert island I'd just want to have my mind intact.

You work in wood, fabric, metal. In an industry of digitisation, where your core product is essentially a computer file, how important is it to keep type as tangible, as physical as possible?

You answered your own question. Even in the pre-internet floppy disk days we wanted our customers and followers to have a tangible House Industries experience. It just as important now as it was 17 years ago.

Is there a typical genesis for a new collection? Does someone excitedly burst into the office having just driven past a gorgeous bit of motel signage?

I don't want to over-intellectualize it, but our thought process runs much deeper than that. The ideas and the concepts are easy. Most of our focus is on execution, which can extend over months or years. I really can't think of a single event that led us to the Eames project.

The image of House Industries is that you make what you want to make, not following any particular trend or external demand. How do you manage the tension between creative freedom and profitability?

It's never easy, which explains why House Industries is just a slightly more sophisticated version of the original hand-to-mouth operation.

The majority of people who use type on a day-to-day basis are perfectly happy with the free fonts that come packaged with their computer. Do you ever find it difficult justifying your prices to people who take your product for granted?

We've always been passive marketers in the hopes that our customers will draw their own conclusions. I personally am the worst salesman in the world and will go out of my way to convince someone not to buy something they don't need. So I feel pretty good about our customers because, perhaps naively, I think that we've provided them with something they can use or enjoy indefinitely.

You've made and eclectic range of fonts, childrens toys, even a chair. What's next for House Industries?

Our next big push is to release Photo-Lettering, which will give a nod to some of the most influential type and lettering in the world while hopefully creating a new self-sustaining market for itself.

Written for Gym Class Magazine

Ben Kay reports from Inside The Writers Room With Mad Men panel:

Interestingly, the tiny chat I had with Robert Towne involved me asking if he had really been one of the writers on Bonnie and Clyde. He told me he had. Is his name on the credits? No. Did he get paid? Yes. Did he get pee'd off and cry in the corner? No, he wrote Chinatown. Write Chinatown.

Portlandia

Soon or later, all of this appears on Portlandia.

Each tech sketch serves as a kind of worst-case scenario for all the products and services that touch our lives. The owners of a feminist bookstore attempt to confront a negative Yelp reviewer in real life. A sharing economy startup implodes spectacularly. Patton Oswalt plays a man who becomes famous for his witty Evite responses. The city buys a 3D printer, as if this might be the answer to all civic problems — ‘Portland is finally a world-class city!’

Stack

Steve Watson (Stack) in conversation with Danny Miller (Human After All):

I think there’s something in the ease with which people can express themselves these days. Everyone takes it for granted that they should be able to communicate with a mass audience, whether through blogging, tweeting, Instagramming, etc, but that has led to a lot of noise and the concern that digital doesn’t last. If you’re spending a lot of time creating beautiful photography, lovely illustration or thoughtful writing, it makes sense that you want that content to live somewhere that will last for a long time. Print magazines are the ideal vessel for all that content, so I think that, perversely, the digital tools that have made it possible to bypass print have actually contributed to making print more attractive than ever.

David Balzer on curationism

David Balzer on curationism:

Contemporary curating has become an absurdity. Outfits are curated. Salads are curated. Twitter feeds are curated. Bennington College in Vermont invites prospective students to curate their applications. Lorde was appointed ‘sole curator’ of the most recent Hunger Games film’s soundtrack. Everyone is a curator these days. … Yet to examine the etymology and history of the word ‘curate’ is to find a direct, fascinating link between the professional curator and her pop culture counterpart, engaged in the activity of selecting and displaying. It is also to discover important, perhaps unsettling things about how we currently understand value, and ourselves.

Avaunt

Polar explorer Ben Saunders on new adventuring magazine, Avaunt.

An enduring memory from my childhood is the huge faded yellow shelf of National Geographics my uncle had, and I used to spend hours picking them out at random, and reading them cover to cover. Then, as a teenager, I discovered titles like GQ and Esquire. Until that point, as a kid growing up in rural England who wore clothes my mum bought me, and who loved riding my bike and playing computer games with my mates, fashion and style were totally abstract concepts, so magazines have always been both escapism and education to me, little doorways into parallel worlds that I never knew existed.

Charlie Brooker has been reading the Mr Men

Charlie Brooker has been reading the Mr Men:

Revisiting the books, I was surprised to discover that despite forgetting most of the storylines, the visuals felt so familiar, they can't have ever left my mind. When I was young, I wanted to be a cartoonist. As a teenager, I even managed to make a career of it for a few years. Back then I figured I'd formed this ambition thanks to the comics I'd read when I was about twelve. No, looking back at some of my ham-fisted drawings of the time, I realise the Mr Men must have kicked the yearning off years before that. I was unconsciously sampling and regurgitating whole sections of Roger Hargreaves' visual repertoire. The way Roger Hargreaves drew a shoe is still the way a shoe looks when I picture it. Same with a house. Or a hat. Or a butcher. Or a wizard. Or a cloud.

Hillary Clinton's big pointy H

Sol Sender, designer of Obama's 08 logo, on Hillary Clinton's big pointy H:

If you boil it down it's really a symbol of forward motion. On the Obama work we were really conscious from the start about where he was vulnerable — we knew Obama critics said things like, ‘He's not American.’ So we thought going strong with a patriotic theme was quite important. Hence the red, white and blue colors in the Obama logo. In terms of vulnerabilities, Hillary always seems to get dragged into the past by her critics. Therefore, you might argue that a symbol like this, which is so aggressively pushing forward, could help counterbalance any negative energy that is directed at her past.

The secret lives of elevators

Fantastic long read from the New Yorker on the past, present and future of elevator technology. A lot more fascinating than it sounds. For example:

Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit, a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit …

I think maybe I'll take the stairs.  

The inside-out city

As London continues to be hollowed out by absentee owners and the "buy-to-leave" market, this observation from Jonathan Meades' Museum without Walls seems rather pertinent. 

What we are actually witnessing is an abandonment of the North American model and an espousal of the French model. The embourgeoisement of the inner city combined with a dereliction in the matter of building social housing to replace that which was so carelessly sold off is effecting an economically enforced demographic shift. Social polarities are not going to disappear. The sites of income-defined ghettos are merely being exchanged. They’re swapping with each other. A new hierarchy of place is being created. The haves move inwards. The have-nots move, or are forced, outwards. There is a significant population who cannot afford the affordable. Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal. It can be summed up like this – in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road.

Basically, every now and then, we turn the notion of the city inside-out. Me, I'm playing it safe, nestled indecisively between York's inner and outer ring roads. 

Whitney

From the New York Times review of the new Whitney Museum of American Art:

The new museum isn’t a masterpiece. But it is a deft, serious achievement, a signal contribution to downtown and the city’s changing cultural landscape. Unlike so much big-name architecture, it’s not some weirdly shaped trophy building into which all the practical stuff of a working museum must be fitted. It clearly evolved from the inside out, a servant to pragmatism and a few zoning anomalies.

The Brazilian Indian Telephone

BLDG BLOG unearths a fascinating article from 1898, on the Brazilian Indian Telephone.

These natives live in groups of from one hundred to two hundred persons, and in dwellings called "maloccas," which are usually situated at a distance of half a mile or a mile apart. In each maloccathere is an instrument called a "cambarisa," which consists essentially of a sort of wooden drum that is buried for half of its height in sand mixed with fragments of wood, bone, and mica, and is closed with a triple diaphragm of leather, wood, and India rubber. When this drum is struck with a wooden mallet, the sound is transmitted to a long distance, and is distinctly heard in the other drums situated in the neighboring maloccas. The blows struck are scarcely audible outside of the houses in which the instruments are placed. After the attention of the neighboring maloccas has been attracted by a call blow, a conversation may be carried on. … The communication is facilitated by the nature of the ground, the drums doubtless resting upon one and the same stratum of rock.

Inside the Netflix war room

Inside the Netflix war room:

There is a ring of television monitors circling the giant conference table, each hooked up to a different device that can deliver Netflix and each tuned to a different market. At the stroke of 12, a ceremonial switch is flipped and quality assurance is checked in each market and on each device. It is official: Daredevil is live. The mentions of Daredevil and Netflix start humming by on TweetDeck, coming so furiously it is impossible to read them. Many of them are from rabid fans of the comic book just typing, “Daredevil!!!!!” It’s the social media equivalent of the screech that greets One Direction whenever they step out of a hotel lobby.