Newsknitter
What a tangled web we weave.
Today included the crossing of two trajectories: poetry and art. Both have been constants in my life, rising and falling in importance since I was a child. Through sheer coincidence, the Poetry In Motion collection I ordered a month ago from the MTA museum arrived today alongside the Graphic Design The New Basics volume from yesterday’s Amazon trolling.
My head is swimming with text and images.
I came across Processing in GDTNB. Processing is a data visualization framework (as far as I understand it upon cursory inspection). I had a sudden urge to see if I could program a visual representation of the complex systems of meaning inherent in poetic language. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of poetry generators ever since I wrote some (very rudimentary) code on a MOO nearly 15 years ago.
One fascinating application for Processing is Newsknitter which is like Missoni for data visualization. As an American, my first thought was MUST HAVE when I saw these amazing garments. Sadly, there is no convenient Amazon Prime for these sweaters. The idea of taking something as cold, arbitrary and ephemeral as a news headline and weaving into something personal, sensual and tactile is mindblowing.
Please enjoy.
Future Projects
I’ve started work on a 2010 campaign website that is still in stealth mode with an anticipated launch date of January, 2009. I’m having fun looking at active campaign sites, as well as other media like CNN and even The Colbert Report. It’s tough to balance the ideas of patriotism and politics with integrity, honesty and gravitas without ending up with something bombastic. TV graphics are, by nature, completely over the top, and I’ve noticed that influence in most of the campaign sites I’ve been reviewing. Err on the side of subtlety and restraint, however, and you end up with something rather anemic.
It will be an interesting journey.
More Delightful Business Cards
In my quest to design the übercard, I came across this site. Many fine examples, most of which are antithetical to the Guy Kawasaki imperative.
The Art of the Business Card
Guy Kawasaki has a nice post about his new business cards designed by Justin Ruckman. I was very inspired by the design and took a shot at something for myself.
I don’t really want a black business card, so my immediate thought was to try red. The slab serif font (Serifa) felt right to me. Overall, I’m pleased with the result. I wanted it to feel a little edgy, but still professional. I think I’m going to try another version in a different color with a sans serif font (Officina, I think) and will post the result.
The Manual of Style
This is the first in a series of posts/rants about written & visual communication, and the intersection of the two. I’ve been thinking more about what it takes to produce successful writing, particularly when it will be read as a digital communication, and have come up with a few ideas.
The Mac is Not a Typewriter and Other Niceties
My husband shared this wonderful idea, book and author (Robin Williams) with me in the early ’90s, and it has changed my life. Perhaps the notion that a computer is not a typewriter is obvious to the graphic designers amongst us, but just about everyone now is a graphic designer of one sort or another. I mean this literally. If you think of everyone in their prosumer roles, almost all of us are producers of both writing and design at home and at work. Our products may be simple emails or homemade greeting cards, but almost all of us produce enough documents to have made the term “desktop publishing” all but obsolete.
It’s time for us to realize, then, that we can safely throw away the mannerisms of the typewriter. I’m not sure if these habits are limited only to those of us who didn’t grow up “texting” our friends, but they bear repeating.
Robin Williams gives you twenty or so rules. I give you five.
Five Rules to Live By
- You don’t need to hit the space key twice after the end of a sentence. Really.
- You have the em and en dashes available to you in both HTML and Microsoft Word. Use them.
- Figure out accent marks and key caps. If Mötley Crüe can, so can you.
- You can break up your paragraphs using a double hard return rather than an indent.
- Think about capitalization. The only people allowed to use caps for emphasis are your grandma and Germans.