What Am I Doing? (Jun 2008)

You realize time really flies when you see the weather gets nicer by the day and you start writing “6”’s in dates.

This past month, I’ve moved forward with my career planning by continuing my ambitiously comprehensive website, mainly in the type experiments section. I’ve also started looking into getting a wide-format, individual inkjet cartridge printer so I can have large and nice prints for my print portfolio.

Finally, I have a tiny photo shoot gig for my aunt’s business. If all goes well, I will post the completed pieces.

Even as the country continues to go downhill economically, there is still that ray of hope in my personal life emerging in the past few weeks, believing that things will get better; I just need to be patient, continue to work hard, and persevere.

Flush.

Typexperiments Title Block Test 1

Here’s the first test of my Typexperiments page title block. The original concept came from the old school type cases that people use for the printing press. This is the digital version/take for the new way most fonts are created. I’m still looking into whether I should go all the way with that concept and layout my content in those type cases or just do a different layout all together.

The image above is pretty much a demo of how the type floats and stacks as you shrink your window. Yay CSS.

Notes on the current state of the page:

• The background color will change.
• The legibility of the “type pieces” is not of main concern.
• The color of the “type pieces” will change, but the legibility will not be the reason for that change.

Flush.

Typexperiments

So I’ve slowly settled into my job at Peet’s, which leads me to having more time to get back to my website. The above is a process snapshot of the title block for my Type Experiments page. I’ll explain the concept more in a later post when the page is created, but I wanted to point out how the middle three rows turned out. They make really good type experiments and are why I enjoy creating new type so much.

Flush.

“Not My Type,” The Designer’s Dating Game Show

This is just a random idea, mainly to play on the title. What if there’s a dating game show called Not My Type where a designer picks among three contestants by having them describe their favorite typeface and associate their personalities to the typefaces?

This is totally nerdy and will never make it on TV (unless there’s a TV network for graphic designers), but it could be a mini-skit/improv thing, something similar to Command X, which was a program at last year’s AIGA Design Conference in Denver, except Not My Type would be much less productive and more for entertainment.

Flush.

Why Don’t We Use a Chinky Font?

Happy Chinese New Year to those who celebrate it! I didn’t plan on posting anything about Chinese New Year today until I saw this a few minutes ago.

I don’t want to seem ultra-sensitive or too politically correct or whatever, but really? This font? I’m not going to go too deep into it in this post, but it still needs to be mentioned.

My request is simply this: can we just not use this type of fonts? At least for sites like msn; I can see it (and I have seen it) being used on the Simpsons, but there’s a difference. And while I remember being fascinated by doing lettering like this in handmade school posters in middle school to show my roots, I have since known better that this more or less perpetuate the old stereotype of how Americans have thought of Chinese and Asians.

While it is a nicer version of the typefaces in this style (maybe just the “2008”), I still think it’s too much. If I had to think of a visual substitute right off the top of my head, I would suggest Optima. It’s a significant downgrade, but it still gives off that essence without jumping at your face.

Here’s my disclaimer on this post: While I am an Asian American, I do not represent all Asian Americans. I’m sure there are some who do not find this offensive at all, or that some don’t even care. But as someone who does care, I think this is not appropriate for institutions like msn, not anymore at this day and age. I’m speaking as someone who is concerned about this topic, because I feel that if I don’t say anything, no one else will.

Flush.

X’s and O’s

The X’s

A few weeks ago I read a post on AIGA’s web site regarding the abundant amount of uses of “X” in our culture yet that wealth of usage reflects extremely poorly in the dictionary. I couldn’t believe how many ways the X is used. The common, traditional “X marks the spot” and the roman numeral for 10 were easily mentioned in the post, while the all-too-frequent substitutions for “ex-” words in marketing culture like “X-treme” were not left out, either.

What I didn’t realize was that X was also used to indicate “experiment” in aerospace: NASA’s X-33 Program and X-15 aircraft. Come to think of it, the letter X just adds some sort of futuristic mysteriousness to new technology that gets your imagination going. Even cars, a modern-era technology, can have names with “X” in it, suddenly making it more “cool”: “Xterra,” “Turbo X,” and “X-Type” (Jaguar has the most amount of cars that I’ve seen with X-names)

If we were to talk about the amount of unique, stand out, unusual uses for a character, I think “X” is the most used character in our culture, after “O,” of course.

And the O’s

As we cruises along the last month of 2007, I couldn’t help but to start thinking about what to do on New Year’s Eve. Then I remember watching people in Times Square on TV, celebrating with their goofy, unoriginal glasses where the two middle zeroes of Two-Thousand-Whatever for the past seven years circled (no pun intended) the eyes. And then it hit me. Next year (or in less than a month), there will be two more circular frames on those glasses, not that they’ll be used to see through, but they are circles nonetheless, zeroes nonetheless, O’s nonetheless.

I’m actually surprised that I haven’t seen any 2008 calendars where they hungrily took advantage of those two extra circles to make some sort of bubbles galore. I mean, that’s where I would go first for design ideas, but I know that as a freshie designer learning the craft, I must resist the most obvious and therefore most unoriginal solution. Still, that shouldn’t stop the amateur calendar designers to get someone to turn that 8 into a designer’s eyesore. I mean, so many people did it for 2000, and they had only three circles! Think of what you can do with four!

As we get past the New Year’s celebration and the calendar buying frenzy, there are still occasions where the number 2008 will be typographically manipulated to death throughout the year. Think of all the special annual events and conferences and awards shows that will have to incorporate 2008 into the logo. Most people will have thousands of variations of one circle concept, where one or two look decent, while some just don’t even try to dignify that trend with any typographic solution. But there will be that one or two pieces where the circular forms of “2008” will escape expectations and display a composition that no one has thought of, and design will win another battle.

So watch out for the O’s next year; you’ll get tired of round design and then everything will be flat and sharp.

Flush.

Winchester Type Machine

While looking around at the gift shop, waiting for the tour of the Winchester Mystery House to start, I saw this Type Machine that casts type onto a piece of metal of some sort. I wanted to get one printed but I didn’t know what it should say. After returning from the tour, I came back to the machine. I thought that just putting my name would be lame, so I considered putting “I like naps.” but I thought it was too dated.

Then it came to me. What more nerdy string of characters for a designer than the alphabet? Since there were 32 spaces available, I would use 26 for the alphabet, but what about the rest of the 6 spaces? I could put numbers, but it wouldn’t be the whole set. Zero’s pretty much similar to O, so I could take that out, but which else? Since I couldn’t fit the entire set of numbers, I decided to just put the date of my visit: 071116.

So I went for it. It was kind of fun physically making the characters one by one, but I couldn’t actually see it. All I could do was turn the dial to the character I want, then pull the lever to cast it onto the piece of metal. There were a few times where the dial didn’t point at the character exactly and would make it point back to the previous letter like the steering wheel turning back to straight if you let it go from turning left or right. To prevent that, I stopped pulling the lever halfway to prevent the punch from striking the metal, and then I continued. And this is what came out.

Notice that you can’t really tell where “A” and “B” are, and on the spots where “A” and “B” should be, it’s a little muddy. Turns out that when I pulled the lever only halfway to prevent a miscasting, it still counted as one space. As you can tell, after “I,” “T,” and “V,” there’s a space. And since I planned on casting 32 characters, the type went back to the beginning and covered “A” and “B.” I was somewhat disappointed, but I still thought it was cool. It’s one of those things where I don’t get to experience everyday at this day and age anymore, and it’s good to see that back then, you can’t just change something but pressing a “delete” key; you have to start over if you want it to be just right.

Flush.