This is a lovely rememberance of the hugely influential graphic designer/printmaker David Lance Goines, someone we studied in art school for both subjects. His was a singular visual voice, and he had a passion for typography (as most printmakers do).
Once I hit on a tiger, of course, it was great—cats and I have a certain rapport, so this was a very natural fit for me. Maybe Hobbes could have been some other animal, but he arrived as a big cat, and that expanded my connection with him. Hobbes was as much my alter-ego as Calvin was.
Bill Watterson gave a rare interview as part of a career retrospective, and apparently it’s only available in bound print. The The Washington Post has a brief excerpt, though.
Interesting…
McSweeney’s on Roald Dahl’s books being censored years after his death. Many F-bombs, but all of them are worth it. Here’s the best part:
Here’s how art is supposed to work: Someone writes a book. They write it with passion, with abandon, with honesty and lyricism and even a bit of recklessness. It is of their time, using the words of their time.
Readers respond to this recklessness, this abandon, this rawness, this timeliness. The only books that ever mattered to anyone are raw, are unbridled, are risky, and timely. Then, if a parent or teacher reads the book to a kid, and there’s a part that’s risky or controversial, discussions can be had. If the book is old, then the words and sentiments of that time can be taken into account.
It’s not hard.
That is how we fucking learn.
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Font nerd alert: Fontsinuse.com does archeological digs on interesting fonts in the wild; there’s a blog with deep dives on subjects like the font used on the original printings of the Dune series (a modified version of a font offered by one phototypesetting shop in New York City) and the origins of the SEGA logo.
Long ago in 1995 I was watching MTV while making my dinner and saw a clip featuring a scruffy-looking Portland band playing a killer song. I just happened to have a copy of the City Paper and saw that they were playing the 8×10 on a weeknight, so naturally I roped my roommates into going down and seeing the show, where we all had a great time and I bought a copy of the CD and a T-shirt. Any resemblance to my dog’s current name is purely coincidental. But this song rips.
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My friend Rosie, who I hired at WRI and subsequently got hired away by the Wall Street Journal, had her very first byline last week, a story on coaching trees in the NFL. Yay Rosie!
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Here’s some new tasty font goodness from an old-school design/web hero of mine: Dan Cederholm put up a storefront with some excellent display fonts and design-nerd merch.
When we were in New York before Christmas, one of the things we showed Finn on our way past Madison Square Garden was the big sign on the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street where I’d designed the billboard for Deutsche Bank back in the day. It was blocked by scaffolding when we walked past—we kind of had to point around all the construction to show her—but I think she understood the scale of the thing.
Over the weekend, while trying to replace a power strip behind our office cabinet, I found a couple of Addy programs from 2009 that had fallen behind other books. Figuring we’d saved it for one of Jen’s projects, I thumbed through it and suddenly remembered that we’d won Silver and Gold Addys for that campaign. I don’t see anyplace on my LinkedIn profile to add awards…
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In the meantime, I’m about 75 passwords in to a migration away from LastPass and into Keychain. I’m doing it manually because I don’t want to go through Chrome to convert everything, and also because I have to change all the passwords out anyway. And having used LastPass for 7+ years, I have a lot of old records that I haven’t used in years that I’m happy to delete. It’s a slog but I’m telling myself it’ll be worth it.
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The red bus got a new ’63-’64 grille yesterday (on the bottom), which is actually correct for the truck. It’s a bit wrinkly but I think it fits. If anyone needs a ’65 grille, hit me up—it’s boxed and ready to find a new home.
Out with my girls for birthday dinner.
Some pictures of a rusty old truck.
I parked next to a fellow survivor from the 70’s this morning.