Designer and Texan
I’ve been working on a new typeface — off and on, mostly off — for more than a year now. At one point I even used it to try my hand at a linoleum carving. Thanks to a little downtime, I was able to clean up a few rough spots over the past couple of […]
Books don’t just furnish a room. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.
— Michael Dirda in his farewell column for The American Scholar
In information parlance, the enemy is “noise”–a perfect word for all the random interferences with what man or nature is trying to say. Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page and the caption that doesn’t quite explain what’s happening in the picture. Noise is handwriting that’s hard to read. Noise is distortion on the TV screen. Noise is the lapse of memory, the slip of the tongue, the wrong neuron fired by the brain–anything that brings disorder to the intended order of a message.
— William Zinsser in Writing to Learn, first published in 1988
Generally I don’t like to quote this much text at once, but the following paragraphs from Michael Dirda are too good to overlook. They get me to thinking about what I really want to do, and really isn’t that what good writing is about (the thinking part, I mean, not necessarily what you want to […]
I also hit 30 years of age; an appropriate time for reflection.
“If you are interested at all, as I told you I was, in whether there are designs and shapes in the passage of events, then design is very important to you. It’s very important whether the design or shape or form of a series of events is really in the thing or whether it’s something that you, the artist, have manufactured. It’s important to me that there is a design and shape to quite a few things that we do in our life. So I’m very, very careful. I don’t want to be cheating; I want to get the design as exactly as I can, in itself, not from me.”
— I’m on a Norman Maclean kick.
Bob Livingston provided an all-around fantastic read and first-hand insight to the creation of an iconic Texas album. If you have any interest at all in Texas Music, you should read it. So, we played it a second time and the audience knew what was coming. You think “Redneck Mother” had a great crowd reaction? […]
Interesting thoughts from a report published by brand consultants Wolff Olins: […] products aren’t finite and they might never actually be finished. In fact, the product is less important than an experience of dealing with a company. Companies are only valuable if they prove themselves useful, time and again. Just might be the inspiration you […]
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.”
— From music theorist John Cage’s list of ten rules and one hint.
Gridmaster Mark Boulton tweets on the limitations of mobile: “Columnar grids are used to create *horizontal* connections between content. On 300-odd pixels, there isn’t enough horizontal.” I was happy to see a number of friends from The 9513, and writers from other blogs in general, included in Nashville Scene‘s 12th Annual Country Music Critics’ Poll. […]