FF Chartwell

May 10, 2012

FF Chartwell

A font that makes graphs? How cool is that!
Introducing FF Chartwell by Travis Kochel. Take a look.

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Death of a Novel

April 22, 2012

This post from Granta.com on The Reader and Technology, by Toby Litt, seems to concur (or at least converge) with my post from a few days ago wherein I speculate why Young Adult fiction is so popular:

Novels have always belonged to aristocrats of time; not, I say, merely to aristocrats, although they have been disproportionately represented, but to those subjects who have freedom of choice about how to act within time. The Fordist factory-line workers, performing a repetitive task all day, cannot interest the novel for more than a few moments whilst they are at work. It is only when the machine stops that the story begins. (David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King attempts to make a novel out of the dead time of insanely repetitive deskwork; and it fails, at least in the form of it he left us.)

Where I must begin to disagree is at the next sentence:

Proposition: ‘The human race is no longer sufficently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.’

All evidence to the contrary. No? This seems so obvious that I feel no need to bore you with the details.

Perhaps novels will continue, but instead of the machine it will be the connectivity that stops, or becomes secondary.

What we’re going to see more and more of is the pseudo-contemporary novel – in which characters are, for some reason, cut off from one another, technologically cut off. Already, many contemporary novels avoid the truly contemporary (which is hyperconnectivity).

Here I think the author is talking about something else entirely: the structure of the novel itself. And again, I must respectfully disagree. I think the next generation is going to handle cell phones and IM’s and connectivity between characters just fine – case in point, Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, if you want to see how it’s done. Half the conversations in the book take place via text messages or IM, and the authors manage to inject as much angst and disconnect as any novel needs. Proving, if anything, that human beings are capable of misunderstanding each other just as much when they’re within cell phone range as not. So I think the novel is safe, for now…  (dum, dum, dummmm).

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Lucy’s Fried Chicken

April 19, 2012

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As seen on Art of the Menu

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Design Roundup

April 15, 2012

Here are a few things that caught my eye this week!

Above: “Greetings from Saskatchewan” by Chris Dejong.
As seen on the We Wish You Were Here site.

Above:  Brooklyn Curated by BAM on Paddle 8 (requires login)

Marian Bantjes Valentines 2012

AboveMarian Bantjes’ Valentine’s Day cards, 2012

Hark! A Vagrant

AboveKate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant. Cool Canadian comix.

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The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

I thought this was such a cool book cover. I love the high-contrast photography, the way the shadow’s used to highlight the cigarette, the way the colors play off of each other, the gritty texture, the typeface choices.

Now – not having read the book, this may not be a fair assumption, but – can you even compare it to this alternate cover (below)? It looks wispy, and wistful, and like something badly needs to be vacuumed or cleaned up after being thrown up by the cat. Not knowing the book, or the stories behind the design and production (there’s always a story), this is not intended to be a comment on the designer (or illustrator) who created the cover below. But that cover above – man, that’s gorgeous.

The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

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Goodreads review of American Psycho

April 10, 2012

Quote: it is so easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to this book, it is, but it isn’t even the most disturbing book on the block: joyce carol oates has a book called zombie, and there is of course cows, which caris has just endured, the one boris vian book i read was pretty rough. it’s not [...]

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The Gaming Addiction

April 8, 2012

From the New York Times: Some people argue that Zynga’s signature games — FarmVille, FishVille — shouldn’t even be called games. As Nicholas Carlson of the Web site Business Insider wrote: “They are click-machines powered by the human need to achieve progress by a predictable path and a willingness to pay small amounts of money [...]

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What’s with the YA fiction all of a sudden?

April 4, 2012

This is what the New York Times asked recently: “Why have young adult books become so popular so quickly – even with not-so-young adults?” A rather well-respected blogger posted a critique of the answering essays called, “This was a debate?” – it’s a good read, well worth your two minutes. I started posting a response in the [...]

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Garden of Love Stamps

March 15, 2012
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I bought these stamps when I was in Arizona in February. The illustration, by “award-winning illustrator José Ortega of New York City and Toronto, depicts an abstract garden of bright flowers, a butterfly, a strawberry, and doves, interlaced with vines that run from one stamp to another.” I would have loved to look around at [...]

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Leaping into the Unknown

March 14, 2012

I don’t know if there’s anything really worthy in Julien Smith’s How to Change Your Life: An Epic, 5,000-Word Guide to Getting What You Want, except for this part, which is a little bit awesome: So you have to start convincing your emotional brain that beating the flinch is no big deal, and you can only [...]

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