Thing-a-day.com

I made a small poster tonight and matted and framed it, as well. It features one of my favorite phrases:

It’s from Horace’s Odes and it translates as “Now is the time for drinking”. As in, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” As in, get up out of your seat and do all the things you want to do!

I also made a companion poster which shows the proper response to “Nunc est bibendum”:

It means “neither delay nor rest”, also saying, “Fool, get started now!”

out traversing the streets with leslie and joren all day.

this is what i have to show for it.

Some months ago, I ordered the deluxe Helvetica film DVD pack. It finally arrived this week, oh joy! We watched it on Saturday night and wow, it was good… It’s a full-length feature documentary on the Helvetica font, it has a great soundtrack, some bits were slow, but altogether informative and refreshing. I truly didn’t realise how ubiquitous the Helvetica font really is. I enjoyed the different perspectives of various designers; geez, some of them are really font-geeks to a level that I don’t understand, yet admire at the same time because the work produced is so… beautiful, rhythmic, visual poetry really.

My Helvetica film DVD pack is a limited-edition package with the retail DVD, three letterpressed mini-posters (I think I will frame them and hang them in a row), a color C-print of a still from the film (street scene of a LADIES toilet sign in helvetica) signed by director Gary Hustwit, two love/hate Helvetica buttons, and the letter n/u of actual Helvetica metal type.

Pictures below of my Helvetica DVD pack

I couldn’t resist trying another CD cover (here’s my first one, with the rules of this meme). This time, it took me, like, fifty tries before I got a CC-licensed photo that gave me permission to alter it. I lucked out, though, finally getting this photo of a new Apple //c by dansays / Dan Budiac.

After I posted this on Flickr, a kind commenter pointed me to a page he made which shows only CC-licensed random “interesting” photos from Flickr. It’s just what I need, because this game is totally addictive.
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I picked up this meme from my friend Cindy’s blog:

“The CD Cover Meme group has only three rules: (1) The first article title on this random wiki page is the name of your band, (2) the last four words of the very last quote on this random quote page is the title of your album, and (3) the third picture here, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.”

As Cindy points out, you really ought to make sure that the image you’re using is CC-licensed, with remixing allowed. I refreshed the image page three times until a usable image came up as the third item.

I think it’s funny how in sync my random band name and photo are; the image was even square! The album title? meh, but I can live with it. I’ll probably try this again at some point when my Internet connection is less floppy. It’s fun, and I never get to use blackletter at work.

Photo: Martenmount by Éole; some rights reserved.

Type: Albo and Musée by Dino dos Santos.

Today’s project took a lot longer than an hour, and it consists of design and artwork that I didn’t make, but I hope you will agree that it was a worthwhile activity: I pulled out a bunch of cool images from this public domain book—

English Literature: An Illustrated Record in Four Volumes. Volume II: From the Age of Henry VIII to the Age of Milton. Part II, by Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905)

—cleaned them up in Photoshop, posted them to Flickr, tagged them, and typed out the captions and all the text that I could make out within the images, so that it’s all searchable.

Here’s a more detailed blog post about this project: A thin slice of history

Working on this for a while, so hopefully between earlier and this it covers today and yesterday. Still, I can’t let it defeat the purpose of setting aside time every day.

I find graphic design very challenging - it doesn’t come naturally to me. But when it does work, it’s very satisfying. I’m working on a web page for a friend, and decided to start with the header and logo. As it’s a site dedicated to Marlboro, NY, the only appropriate typeface was Goudy Old Style, as Goudy lived in Marlboro for quite some time. The logo on the left is a classic gooseneck pot still as used in distilling for hundreds of years.

Title: Word.
Description: Typography collage
Inspiration: This day in history, the Oxford Dictionary debuted (1884)

most of the drawing i make on here will probably be drawn on the subway so i apologize in advance for any poor quality/shaky-ness, etc.