Helvetica: The Movie

I watched Helvetica last night. Again.

My initial viewing in my Beginning Design class left me with impressions only, and I wanted to revisit the film after a few months of dealing with typography, grids, and visual hierarchy. I’m assuming that I don’t differ from most fledgling graphic designers (an acceptance of reality that undoubtedly does separate me from the majority of fledgling graphic designers) and I’ve been using Helvetica as the default font for every project I’ve taken on.* As many of the eccentric pillars of the design community** mention in the film, Helvetica is clean, ubiquitous, and safe to use on just about any project. It won’t make waves and you’ll appear to know what you’re doing. Really, if it’s good enough for the majority of corporate America, it’s probably good enough for my homework assignment.

Now, if you’re reading this and not a graphic designer, then you’re probably scratching your head at this point and wondering if it’s even possible to make an hour and a half movie about a font. I assure you it is. Helvetica is such a powerful cultural force at this point that whole books have been devoted to it (in a cultural critique kind of way, not in the sense that it is the font for the book, although there are those examples as well). One of the most interesting things my instructors stated in the afore mentioned design class was that an understanding and appreciation of typography is “what separates the designer from the desktop publisher.”

Statements like this seem to be bandied about in the design world all the time. As Helvetica points out, designers are an opinionated lot. Ironically, they are all right in some way so, like most heated debates, the question over Helvetica’s prominence and use will continue ad nauseam. In the meantime I will be sharpening my typographic vocabulary (ascender, serif, x-height, et al) and compiling three fonts that will work for every*** project, and three fonts to perpetually vilify. Watch out Comic Sans, I’m coming for you.

*But I only used Helvetica in the beginning: in every instance but one (when I was designing a movie poster for Helvetica, appropriately enough) it was transformed into a different font that seemed to better suit the content. I don’t want you thinking I’m a one-trick pony so early on in my career. Becoming that pony takes at least a few years in the professional world.

**Old skool Massimo Vignelli, naughty David Carson, and the chillingly astute Stefan Sagmeister to name a few.

***Ahhh, type crime! You never just hit the bold button to fatten up some highlighted text. Big design no-no! This just adds weight to all the edges of the letter forms without a commiserate handling of the white space between the letters. Such an action brands you as the amateur that you are. It’s akin to using iWeb as your web design and blogging program.

Storm

The storm came to me in a dream. In this dream I was at my teenage home again and the whole world had dropped into black and white. The house was dramatically lit from above but all around it was a great expanse of darkness. I wished to tell my father that I was going to walk a friend home but, for some undecipherable reason, felt slightly afraid of doing so. I opened the screen door to call into the house but then shut it. Working up my nerve I opened it again, and promptly shut it. The air was warm and damp outside. From far off in the darkness I could hear claps of thunder closing in on the house. A third time I pulled on the screen and my father, alerted to some noise at the door and perhaps suspecting one of the cats wished to be let in, appeared in the kitchen with an inquisitive look. I told him that I would walk my friend home and be right back. He nodded ascent and went back to work on his project.

I do not know which friend it was that waited for me on the lawn; her head up watching the sky as it flashed intermittently around us. The thunder came closer. She was familiar and yet unidentifiable as any person from my past or present. I walked this woman into the dark and out of the light illuminating my house. After some time I returned from the darkness alone. Somewhere in the darkness my friend had returned home safe just as I now was.

I entered the house and my father beckoned me to sit down on the sofa. He had made something for me— fashioned it out of clay. It would be an aid to me in the days to come. Whatever it was glowed brightly in his cupped hands, and he told me a brief recounting of the creation of the world as he held this strange light. It wasn’t a creation myth from any culture I recognized but, somehow, it seemed plausible. My father is an unfailingly honest man and I knew that this story must have been something he’d encountered in his studies.

He walked carefully with his gift over to the sofa and set it down on the cushion next to me. It seemed to glow from an inner light as it lay on the couch: a living light that flickered in strength. Here was a tiny sculpted baby such as you might see in a seasonal creche with closed eyes and rounded terra cotta form. But unlike those static devotional sculptures this one held its own light within it. I looked closer. There was something else. . .

It seemed that the storm was on top of us now. The thunder rattled the branches of trees and shook the windows of the house. The muggy air had become a conduit of electrical current.

It was breathing.

In the flash and snap of lightning I could see the little chest rise up and down. What sort of gift was this that my father had fashioned? I could hear the wall of rain coming out of the darkness, moving across the neighborhood roofs towards our house; carried on a wave of sound and energy.

I woke with that dream rattling about my mind and the old Victorian house I call home creaking and popping under the power of a summer storm breaking the night.

Speaking of Lists

I find the strangest things sometimes. I’m no Davy Rothbart mind you, just someone with a tendency to stare at the ground.

More often than not I find lists. One of my more recent finds was this scrap of paper next to the library catalog. It instantly made my typed inquiry of “Volvo repair, brake light” seem a bit prosaic. I tried to conjure a picture of the woman who wrote this: respectably edgy, tattooed, pixie-like PDX mama (recent mama) concerned with jump starting Junior’s cerebellum while traveling the globe in dodgy hostels full of “real” people. As the portrait became more and more vivid I realized that this fictitious hipster parent that I was creating said more about my perceptions of Portland than it did about the actual person who might have penned the list. Almost immediately I began to feel a tad arrogant. Portland isn’t just a hotbed of young, Leftist, caucasian urbanites, and only a blatant elitist would state such a thing.*

I turned back to my search for car repair manuals. Naturally, all the Volvo items were checked out.

* A blatant elitist or Dave Hickey, who proclaimed Portland the land where, “the White People won” at a speech he gave here a number of years ago. Every person in the audience was mildly outraged in a socially appropriate manner.

The Art of Efficiency

Everyone I know grapples with efficiency in some way or other. Efficiency is a slippery construct that promises more reward in just about every aspect of life if only we knew how to be more masterful with our time. Now, as many a sage person has pointed out, it is really our perception of time that is the problem, not how we micromanage it. As I cannot profess to being a particularly wise person I’ll just overlook that line of thinking and continue with analyzing efficiency.

It has been my experience that one only considers their efficiency when they are already overwhelmed. This would be an example of inefficiency. Caught up in the panic of potential failure lists are made, priorities set, and sleep minimized in order to realize the unreasonable. But the truly organized person rarely finds themselves in this state; they’ve already made the lists, set the priorities, and consequently enjoy a high level of operation with grace and time for sleep.

I’ve met a good number of people and most of them fall somewhere between hyper-efficient and criminally incapable. While the criminally-incapable are better fodder for scriptwriters in Hollywood I’ve always focused my attention on those rare ubermensch that I encounter. What is it that makes them so productive?

Thus far I’ve only come up with a few observations. The most efficient people tend to display these common behaviors:

1. THEY LISTEN TO BEN

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” quoth Mr. Franklin who was, by all accounts, a powerhouse of productivity. Everyone I’ve ever known with remotely comparable intellectual prowess to Mr. Franklin has risen early and gotten straight to the day’s work. The flip side to that obviously being by 9pm they’re ready to pack it in, making them miserable bar hoppers and lightweights of late night conversation— but I hardly need to state the inherent disconnect between beer-steeped evenings and productive days, right?

2. THEY DO THE HARD STUFF FIRST

Nobody wants to hear this but it’s true— the most productive people tackle the difficult tasks early on in the day when they’re most rested, alert, and capable. Every corpuscle of your being may pull you towards checking your My Space page upon first waking to see who has been at Your Wall, but really, shouldn’t you finish that business plan first and then reward yourself with some mind-numbing internet drivel?

3. THEY SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE

Some people make lists and other write plans. A select few (whom I’ve never encountered) are rumored to keep every aspect of their lives neatly inventoried and prioritized in their head. Chances are you aren’t one of those people. Like other mere mortals you should write what needs to be done down. The simple act of committing your commitment to some tangible form, be it paper or pixels, grants it importance and helps establish what should follow what. Every highly efficient person I’ve met follows this rule in some form or other.

Now some people turn making lists and establishing priorities into yet another monumental chore that has to be done. I’m sorry for them but, if they have to be chores, then do these chores first (see THEY DO THE HARD STUFF FIRST above).

4. THEY HAVE A UNIFORM

This one will be an affront to all cool, hip, and creative people out there but I’ll type it anyway: the most productive people seem to wear a sort of uniform. They find one outfit that they like wearing, or they find an outfit that will work for nearly any social occasion, and they stick to it. They buy many copies of this get-up and keep them together in one place. Like a chef or hazmat worker, they are all business. No time waisted shopping, browsing Cosmo, puzzling over what to wear, or sorting clothing for the laundry. It’s worked for personalities as disparate as Einstein and Pollack so it may work for you. Head on over to the craft store and purchase fifteen white tees for twenty five dollars to complement your fourteen pairs of pleated khakis—

It’s time to get productive.

Road Trip Proofs

Flickr and I have been strangers for too long. Therefore, I spent the morning culling a few images from my recent jaunt to the Bay Area and offering them up to the masses.

As I was traveling with adolescents I felt it safer to bring my hearty SLR with Lensbaby as opposed to my frail but versatile digital SLR. Such foresight was rewarded when my camera was mispacked atop a mound of duffel bags and fell out of the back of the van before we even left the school driveway. Twenty minutes of personal panic ensued when my shutter failed to work, but eventually I realized that the batteries had been jarred in their housing and needed to be reset.

One of the most amusing things about using only a Lensbaby on a trip is that you are constantly explaining to people why you can’t take a group picture in front of the fountain, forest, waterfall, wild animal, etc. Despite many profound insights into the history of lenses, the artist’s vision, and the ingredients of the sublime I’m inevitably given a frustrated “what’s the point” look that silences any further explanation. I’m not offended. People are welcome to want prosaic group photographs just as I’m welcome to photograph moss and lichen. In the end, who can say which will provide a finer recounting of experience?

Absence

After feebly attempting to coerce comments out of you and coming up with so little response you may have believed you’d been party to my leaving the blogosphere for good. No such luck! I have been absent, to be sure, but for many a good reason which I will present in brief:

1. I had to produce nine painted paper-mache Commedia dell’Arte masks.*

2. I was uncovering the mysteries of “layer styles” in Photoshop in order to finish my assignments for the dubiously named Photoshop Expert class I was taking. To date, I would characterize myself as more of a Photoshop user than expert.

3. I was planning a graduation ceremony.

4. For nine days I was part of a class road trip in which I guided eight adolescents down the state of Oregon and into the Bay Area.

5. I only just returned from a three-day teacher retreat on the Salmon River.

6. I was finishing a web site for a client that had to go live before any other computer-related activities could take place (such as writing this for you to read).

My hope is that these will all serve as adequate excuses for my absence. I wouldn’t want to set a bad example and have you decide to disappear for the next few months. After all, this summer has big things in store for me and mine— it would be a shame for you to miss out.

* With the help of family and friends who were guilted into service by a desperate and sniveling moi.

Five More From CNET

Some time has passed since I decided to foist my musical sensibilities on you. Even Portishead came out of hiding since I last wrote about CNET’s repository of free music. The next five songs also drop from CNET’s completely legal server-trove of MP3 tracks. Apart from my subjective taste there’s not much that unifies them. The first two are more on the electronic spectrum whereas the last three eschew technology for good ol’ fashioned instruments. I don’t know if any of these songs make good on my promise last time to reveal “how I’m five years behind the times.” But don’t worry, I remain resoundingly behind the times.

1. Black Cat by Ladytron

There’s an early-90’s industrial earnestness to this track that I really dig. The synths and bells offset the faux-severity of the German— if you could pick the music for a club scene in an overly sincere indie vampire movie from fifteen years ago you’d be hard pressed to choose between this and those nice KMFDM fellows.

2. We Own the Sky (Maps Remix) by M83

When M83’s DeadCities, RedSeas, & LostGhosts was released in 2003 it showed plenty of promise but little restraint. Every track was a wall of sound extravaganza that even My Bloody Valentine would have found overwrought. While it did have moments of profound beauty there was no rhythm to the overall set; no resting points to break up the wash of sound.

Time seems to have remedied this tripping point. While I haven’t rushed out to purchase M83’s new Saturdays = Youth I’ve been encouraged to do so by the three fabulous tracks offered up on CNET. Here the aural bombardment is tempered with more employment of the human voice and well-considered movements within tracks. This remix hints at what Moby might have become if he’d pushed himself to continue exploring the stylings evident on Everything Is Wrong.

3. Fake Empire by The National

The voice. The melancholy. The adolescent triumph over the night. All your best summer evenings have been distilled into The National syrup.

4. Albert Hash by Hezekiah Jones

Sometimes I just want to listen to a simple duet with guitar. It should have a sweet hook and little pretense. I’ll allow a bit of navel-gazing but I don’t want ponderous sound scapes or drug-induced jam sessions. Albert Hash is just such a song. It tells a brief tale and demonstrates that a song can be layered without being “produced.” Its traditional sound is matched by a very traditional play time. I guess there was a day when it was possible to create an entire world in a little over two minutes.

5. Is a Woman by Lambchop

One of the hottest debates in high school was whether or not there were more strong female vocalists or male vocalists in modern music (for those of you interested in entertaining such an inane question we defined modern as the 1960’s to the year of said debate, around 1993). At that time I was firmly in the female camp but as my musical tastes change I find that the deeper notes of the male voice resonate better with my adult moods. Kurt Wagner’s voice is so adept (download the alternate version of The Distance From Her to There to get a sense of his range), so magical, that I believe he could craft an appealing song for nearly anyone’s ear.

And while I tend to think of music videos as a scourge to the music industry I must confess that the video for Is a Woman stands on its own as a wonderful work of animation. 



So ends the new five. I shall stop before I become the sorry embodiment of a Nick Hornby character.

Venetian Spectre

If there’s an introductory course to Photoshop you better believe that there are going to be at least a few watered-down Dave McKean homages to emerge during the semester. It can’t be helped.

When asked to create a Photoshop collage this week for homework I found myself floundering. After all, I’m an accidental photographer and a scavenger of images; I don’t create them from scratch! Not since art school have I been required to generate something from nothing! Then, to my horror, I realized: I am in art school again.

Because the possibilities within Photoshop are limitless I decided to set some parameters. Firstly, I would only use imagery from my recent trip to Italy and secondly I’d create something “in the style of” the aforementioned Dave McKean. This seemed fitting considering that for many who came of age in the 90s McKean’s covers for Sandman where the first indication of the imaging power promised by Photoshop.

Furthermore, I’ve been slowly building up a repository of sketches for larger drawings inspired by the artworks and heritage of Italy. Venice left the deepest impression. It exuded an odd allure coupled with a mysterious foreboding. This underlying sense of dread was cemented by a startling nightmare I had during one night of our stay. While the image above isn’t a part of these initial sketches it does manage to capture some of the same unsettling qualities. Here is my footman for that opulent epicenter of decay. He seems a fitting guide for the quiet narrow streets and crooked, shuttered, homes.

Indy Adapted

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation might be one of the most profound cinematic experiences for a person just beginning to consider making films. An obsessive recreation of Spielberg’s classic created by three Mississippi adolescents over the course of seven years during the Eighties, The Adaptation proves that inspiration and determination are the only requisite ingredients to making a movie. Using a home video recorder, a host of friends from school, and a tremendous amount of handmade decor Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb managed to re-create nearly every shot in the film. The massive rolling boulder that chases Indy out of a South American ruin: they have it. The fire-fight amid a bar engulfed in flame: check. That crazy series of scenes where Indy wrestles a truck containing the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis and he falls down the hood, slides under the truck, and is drug along behind as he slowly crawls back on to the speeding vehicle: its in this movie, and it was done by a group of teenage boys without stuntmen! The sold-out audience at the Hollywood Theater gasped, cheered, and clapped at every iconic scene!

The Portland audience was comprised of a predictable demographic: the nerds were there, ready to bask in the achievements of fellow nerds who’d made good. The younger families were there so that parents might share a movie of their youth with their children. The hipsters were there, coiffed and hungry for another helping of elitist irony. They were perhaps the only ones disappointed. Those seeking a postmodern confirmation of a guilty pop-culture pleasure would find no support here. This was not a statement— it was an homage; and every minute of it was wonderfully sincere.

One left the theater aglow. Here was a validation that anything was possible. Life could be as large as we witness it on the big screen. We are all stars— if only we love something enough.

Slush

I returned to Timberline last weekend and spent one day being abused by the slopes and the second day contemplating their rough beauty within the lodge. There were times that first day, while sliding through the driving snow, that I felt horribly lost— there were no landmarks and there was no horizon. The sky and ground were equally cold, hard, and grey.



Whiteout. That’s how my students referred to it.

* * * *

From within the lodge it seems less menacing. Around you people laugh and chatter, oblivious to the fact that the snow presses twenty feet up every side of the lodge. The windows on the first two levels are darkened by the wall of snow, its wooly grey giving way to blue as it thins towards the third floor and the wan daylight begins to sift through. People sit by the highest bank of windows and watch as the weather is thwarted by thick glass and thicker walls.



From this vantage all the flurry is just confection. A television dribbles out the news as pop songs bounce against the timbers. A few sniffling skiers sit at the bar getting sloshed.



It seems less menacing but I can’t concentrate. The wind is still blowing. The trees are bent under a terrible weight. The white noise doesn’t warm me.

Were I to stay longer I don’t think the snow would stop. It would rise like a slow tide over the lodge and all the trees. The white would consume everything on land until there was no land left— just a vast emptiness between heaven and earth: a whiteout.

www.stain-drop.com

It’s open! My wife’s online store of handmade plush creations and unique fashion accessories has entered the electronic ether and I was quite pleased to use this auspicious event to guide the aesthetics of my final project in Photoshop Essentials at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA).

What’s that? You ponder how I might also be taking classes at PNCA while working full time as both artist and educator? That makes two of us. Or three of us, if I count the entire readership of this blog and myself. But it happens to be true. I’m enrolled as a Certificate Student in PNCA’s Graphic Design program (which is apparently going to be renamed the “Communication Arts” program this fall when PNCA decides to add some direction and objectives to this cash cow).

I’ve had a mixed experience with the Certificate Program thus far, having joined it (as is often my fate) in the midst of a major overhaul in structure and cost. Having had both inspiring classes and profoundly frustrating experiences I would say that the jury is still out on whether I will ever recommend it to anyone. Had I not been the product of an exceedingly rigorous and well-considered art program I might be less critical but the truth remains that OCAC will be a hard act to ever beat.

The final assignment for Photoshop Essentials required that I fashion a multi-layer image composite from a variety of images. Clean selections and believable integration into a single image seemed to be the primary criteria for the instructor. I went so far as to add a criterion of my own: the resulting image had to accurately portray the inherent charm and charisma of my wife’s creations. After all, I wanted to please this most important of clients. Isn’t that what a degree in graphic design should really emphasize— customer satisfaction.

Maybe I should let PNCA know that.

Wake

My wife and I braved some foul weather in downtown Seattle last week to take a quick walk through the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) new Olympic Sculpture Park. Many of the usual line-up were there: Calder, Oldenburg, Smith, and Serra. Calder providing the evocative color punch that the gloomy skies and grey city skyline so dramatically demands. This same color coated all of the chairs that rested along the descending paths of the park and I was thrilled to see that the chairs were free of any constraints— they could be moved about at will to accommodate any sort of gathering. No ungodly park benches designed to discourage transients from sleeping (McMakin’s Bench may be an exception; the jury is still out). No utter lack of seating to encourage consumers to spend money rather than sit and chat.

I can only assume that Oldenburg’s presence was requested because you can’t have an expensive sculpture park without an Oldenburg. The object Claes chose to enlarge was a most obscure and nearly forgotten curiosity from my childhood: the typewriter eraser. I recognized it immediately and it tickled me to think of such an antiquated bit of practicality being memorialized in a city known for its close connection with a certain software giant.

Who also made an appearance. Naturally.

Tony Smith’s pieces were the macho geometric forms one would expect but a nod of appreciation is in order for the insight that situated these polished black crystals amidst a grove of young aspens. The trees will grow to create a startling seasonal contrast with Smith’s forms and it is this relationship that is worthy of praise.

The most surprising work was Serra’s Wake which follows the conventions of much of Serra’s work: large curving walls of steel situated carefully to create dichotomies of enclosed and open space. They rose up like the hulls of the container ships that plow through the Puget Sound; rusted and stoic in their push forward across a gravel sea. From a distance you witness them listing ever so slightly in the wind and up close you stare up to where their profiles meet the sky and you feel a momentary bought of disorientation as the scudding clouds interact with the curve of the steel to create a rolling sensation. Having never experienced a work by Serra in person it was rewarding to realize just how effective such minimalism can be and, furthermore, that it can be employed to completely different effect in different locals. For Seattle these forms are ships. For New York such forms were barriers.

And while I’ve devoted plenty of text to a few of the most notorious sculptors* represented by SAM’s park I want to end with an image of the sculpture that I personally felt the greatest affinity towards: Roxy Paine’s Split. Stark, steely, and subtle— much like the Sound itself.

*I’ve chosen not to even address the works by Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, or Ellsworth Kelly; all of whom are equally well known as the gentlemen discussed above. Bourgeois’ Father and Son would require a few stiff drinks and an entire post of its own which, I’m sorry to say, would be giving it more attention than it deserves.