lukegilman.com : High on the Hog Blog

Purveyor of Idle Observation

Daily Heller, Take My Business Card … Please!

American Psycho Business Card Scene from Baran Akkus on Vimeo.

Invisible Business Card from tyggy on Vimeo.

Video: Yves Behar: Creating objects that tell stories

In addition to helping to design the $100 laptop, Aliph’s Jaw Bone
and Herman Miller’s Leaf Lamp, Behar is credited with one my favorite quotes on advertising: “Advertising is the price you pay for being unoriginal.”

via ffffound and todayandtomorrow

Cameron Adams hit upon a pretty interesting notion with this question -

If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces … how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note?

Not satisfied with the thought alone, he took it one step further and mailed away to these imminent typographers to get samples from the field. The results, I think are fascinating - posted with samples Handwritten Typographers

from Design You Trust.

Why do I love Design Observer? Because not only will they write a scholarly article about it, they will have a full-on conference about Tables of Contents.

Jason Fagone’s oddly intimate revelation of font-nerdery in Slate’s YouType: The strange allure of making your own fonts highlights Fontstruct, “YouTube of typography” which allows you to… well, make your own fonts. It lead Fagone to wax nostaligic for his bootleg Fontographer days:

I was a minuscule part of the great grunge-font craze of the late ’90s, ignited by the bad boy of graphic design, David Carson—an ex-surfer who took over RayGun magazine and turned it into a punk-rock version of Rolling Stone, a bible of the ugly/pretty/ugly aesthetic. Carson’s movement was fueled by hundreds of young dabblers like me. In our dorm rooms, we churned out distressed versions of workaday fonts: smeary Helveticas, grimy Garamonds. The self-seriousness behind it all seems strange when I look back, but it was actually in keeping with the manifesto-laden history of graphic design. One of the most famous designers of all time, Jan Tschichold, famously issued a diktat against the use of serif faces, decreeing that the only honest letterforms were sans-serifs. The Nazis, who preferred “blackletter” fonts with heavy, ominous down strokes—what came to be known as “jackboot grotesques,” according to art historian Stephen Eskilson—put him in prison.

As for myself, I created an A…. then decided I was an important, busy person, with the stick-to-it-ness of a gnat. Someone else can be Frutiger. I just want to use his fonts.

First lolcats, now this. Lo, the Internet has seen fit to bestow another …. dare I even dignify it as a “trend”? The premise is all too simple - (1) take a photograph of a man and child (2) swap the heads in photoshop (3) publish.

Horrifying, isn’t it. Somehow the most disturbing aspect of this is how well a manbaby hangs together, visually and cognitively. The notion of a woman-baby is silly and ridiculous, scarcely worth entertaining. A manbaby, however, is somehow plausible and frightening.

The maniacal expression, the visible lack of self-control, the joy of idiocy. We have not grown up we have merely gotten bigger.

Here in as much as the composite image is vaguely disturbing, deciphering the underlying image is appalling. But unexpected? No. This is you, this is me. We are all manbabies. Via BoingBoing.

I really don’t have time to read anything besides law books anymore and my time as a graphic designer now seems a far distant memory, but I may have to pick this one up on looks alone. Yes, yes, I know, so it turns out you can in fact judge a book by its cover.

One of my favorite illustrators, Jordan Crane, has designed a beautiful and elaborate package for Michael Chabon’s new book, “Maps and Legends.” This new McSweeney’s publication lives up to the standards of high production values and design aesthetics McSweeney’s Publishing is already known for.

via Karen Horton and Boing Boing

Curiously enough, perhaps predictably, as the book deals largely with critics misunderstanding and underestimating the genre writer, Maps and Legends is excoriated in this Publishers Weekly review:

You would hardly think, reading Chabon’s new book of essays, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about comics. Rather, he is bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility. No self-respecting literary genius… would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an ‘entertainer,’ Chabon writes. An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing ‘She’s a Lady’ to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underwear up onto the stage. Chabon devotes most of the essays to examining specific genres that he admires, from M.R. James’s ghost stories to Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic work, The Road. The remaining handful of essays are more memoir-focused, with Chabon explaining how he came to write many of his books. Chabon casts himself as one of the few brave souls willing to face ridicule—from whom isn’t entirely clear, though it seems to be academics—to write as he wishes. I write from the place I live: in exile, he says. It’s hard to imagine the audience for this book. Chabon seems to want to debate English professors, but surely only his fellow comic-book lovers will be interested in his tirade.

Reeeeowwwww! phfft! phfft!

These infographics verge, nay careen, into the realm of the artistically sublime.

• Boing Boing Gadgets: Amadana’s Wonderful Cautionary Infographics