some day my home will be plastered with posters as awesome as this.
i heart the library of congress. these WPA posters are just one reason why.
holy shit, dfw fans—someone made a poor yorick entertainment website (a.k.a. proof that there are people in the world more obsessed with infinite jest than me). revel in all that is the totally fictional filmography of the totally fictional mad stork.
those “great ideas” book covers that i love/covet oh so very much? you can see all 100 of them on penguin’s site.
holy shit, cloud atlas fans—the wachowski brothers (the guys responsible for the matrix films) are making a film adaptation, with hugo weaving starring in multiple roles.
there are now awards, complete with their own fancy ceremony (“formal wear suggested”), for book trailers. the event was yesterday, the trailers are all linked to here.
not to be outdone by marvel, which seems intent on “rebooting” their biggest movie franchises (e.g., x-men and spider-man), dc comics is going to restart ALL of their comics with issue 1 later this year.
Just after the color Nook had been released, there was a lively debate in the Ortler household about the merits of electronic readers versus printed-and-bound books. I’m something of a traditionalist when it comes to owning books, and I steadfastly denied any interest in owning an e-reader. I argued that there were just so many problems with electronic books.
First and foremost, they were damn expensive. $250 for a color Nook. That’s a car payment. I could stock my beer cellar for the rest of time. With $250, I could go to a handful of Twins games, and with my newfound largesse I could even afford the delicious $12 steak sandwich from the Twin Cities’ famous Murray’s Steakhouse.
Then there were all sorts of other issues. The problems with formatting (how the hell would they deal with line breaks in poetry? Or a photo-heavy layout in a field guide?) And then there’s the problem of portability and ruggedness. (I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be bringing my Nook in the fishing boat to ID my catch.)
And perhaps the most important issue of all—in my mind, a book is important as a thing in itself, a phrase we owe to our good friend Manny Kant. Like lots of other literary Luddites, I love the tactile heft of a book, the characteristic smell, and I’m a sucker for a good cover and interior design. I even like the sound of a page turning, which has been somewhat hilariously reproduced on the Nook.
E-readers, I argued, stripped books of all artfulness and reduced them to their basic content. And that’s problematic, because we don’t just buy a book for its text; we buy it for the whole package. The same is true in cuisine. We want our food to taste good, but to look decent too. Presentation matters. Given the choice, I argued that the artfully designed and tasty dish should win out over one that tastes the same but was just slopped onto a plate. That analogy seems to ring true. Instead of carefully-chosen typefaces and other garnishes, you get one of a few options on the e-reader. Instead of a well-wrought cover, you get a rescaled Jpeg.
My wife agreed with all this, more or less. A year later she betrayed me: she asked for a color Nook for Christmas.
Over the past week the WS editors had a fun task: hunt down animated videos of poetry and prose. In this search we discovered some really wonderful sites devoted to rethinking the way we process literature. Below I’ve included some of my favorites along with short descriptions of the sites. What was most surprising during the search was how successful collaborations between film makers, designers and poets can substantially improve the ‘reading’ experience. How words accompanied by visually stunning work resonated deeper, so much to the point that I felt them climb the back of my spine, and left me sincerely happy/depressed/hopeful/existentially drained- depending on content.
Here are two of my favorite links. The first is an adaptation of “Render, Render,” by Thomas Lux. The second is a German Translation of “The Chimney Sweeper,” by William Blake. Hope you Enjoy!
Has anyone read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes? I haven’t (yet), but I’m totally fascinated by the idea of it. To my understanding, what Foer has done is take Bruno Schulz’s short story collection The Street of Crocodiles and chop it up to form a new story. This means literally cutting words and sentences from the original text. In the book itself, every page is die-cut with just a few words or phrases on it. The places where the rest of Schulz’s prose has been removed are vacant space.
To me, this project sounds 1) impossible 2) bat shit crazy and 3) so freaking awesome.
A couple of years ago, a crafts-inclined friend of mine got really into taking old books (usually text books or encyclopedias) and reinventing them as “objects of art” by gluing photos onto pages, drawing with sharpie over text, and blocking out words to make new meaning from the existing sentences. Following her lead, I tried this a couple of times. It’s a fun game. But it’s also incredibly challenging to craft something coherent out of just one page of someone else’s writing. To think of Foer doing this with an entire book and ending up with a story that’s not just understandable, but actually enjoyable to read is baffling.
In a statement for The Huffington Post, Foer said he carried a version of The Street of Crocodiles and a red pen around with him for a full year, stripping away the original story bit by bit until he had something he liked. He said that The Street of Crocodiles is his favorite book, that he’s “never read another book so intensely or so many times.” No big surprise. What he’s done with Tree of Codes is more than just an act of love or of homage. Think about the intimate knowledge of the text Foer must have of The Street of Crocodiles to have been able to do this. Clearly, there’s an element of obsession here. But isn’t there always with the best art? Like, if something isn’t just a little bonkers, how interesting can it really be? Read more »
fair warning: you might have to be a huge nerd to appreciate this. a while back, the geniuses at coudal partners (a creative agency which seems to spend an inordinate amount of time doing things for fun instead of for clients) invented a game called layer tennis. though you can sign up for “season tickets” with your e-mail address, this is not a game you go anywhere to watch or pay to see. it’s a head-to-head competition between graphic designers, but it’s something that happens on the clock, at a very specific time, like a real professional sports game. the gist of it is, two designers will square off, passing files back and forth, with each individual getting 15 minutes to add/respond to the work as they see fit. and just like in real athletic contests, there’s a winner and a loser.
these matches happen pretty regularly on fridays, and you can see some previous matches (including the color commentary) in the lyt archive, but today is a special friday. it’s the playoffs, baby. a single elimination tournament. they got brackets and everything. the first match starts off at 11am central time today, with the day’s second match at 1pm, and additional matches every friday until the championship on december 17. head on over to the layer tennis site to get in on the fun.
I’ve been working on updating my vita this weekend. My resume is in fantastic shape having just landed me a job, but I’ve been spending some time helping out at my undergrad campus lately, and it got me thinking that I haven’t actually updated my vita since 2008 and that I should probably get on that, since you never know. Part of this process has involved finding files from my old computer and transferring them to my shiny iMac, which, unfortunately, ended up needing a large handful of fonts I used in the older files. So before even touching the text, I spent a good hour digging up old font files, which got me thinking about how long it took me to pick fonts in the first place, which got me thinking about the different reasons I had for finally settling on the ones I chose (myriad pro, mamma gamma, and rockwell, if you’re curious), which got me thinking about fonts I don’t like, which, naturally, got me thinking about comic sans.
Let me be perfectly clear here. I hate comic sans. I despise it. And it’s everywhere. On billboards, in commercials, handouts. I cut it out of a document at work the other day (although I’m not sure I actually have that authority so maybe when I see the final product it will still be there). I see it in mailings, on signs. It’s all over the Internet. In fact, when LeBron James announced he was headed to Miami, the Cavs owner posted an emotional letter to Cavs fans in Comic Sans…and was promptly ridiculed by typography geeks like myself who feel that, in design, every design choice should say something about the message you’re trying to communicate. And comic sans says, “don’t take me seriously.”
I was asked recently to speak to a group of writers about standard manuscript format. I turned them down because I have nothing to say. Yeah, I felt terrible declining the opportunity, but there’s just not that much to it. There are pretty much four rules: Use an easy to read, normal font (Times New Roman, for example). Make it 12 point. Use consistent margins (1″ all around, or 1″ x 1.25″). Double space it for readability’s sake.
And that’s pretty much it.
So why do I end up with query letters and book proposals that look like this?
Great literature, poorly designed.
Here’s rule number one of sending in a submission to a reader: make it readable. People who review manuscripts don’t want flashy colors or right-justified layouts or triple-spaced 16-point text. It confuses them. It’s distracting. Colorizing text and using multiple typefaces is not typographic design–it’s annoying.
Expanding on above, there are really only a few things that people need to know about typography unless they’re in the biz. (The publishing biz, not showbiz; everyone knows writers can’t act, and vice versa.) Serif fonts are easier to read on paper, and sans serif fonts are easier to read on screen. (Generally.) Don’t use script fonts. (Pretty much ever.) Use a font that (almost) everyone has: Times New Roman, Helvetica Arial/Verdana, etc. (Boring but guaranteed to not be a mess of rectangles and dingbats on the end user’s screen.) Use 12-point or something very close to it. (Please.)
That’s the very, very thin surface of what to do, type-wise, and it’s as much as most folks need to know. Don’t try to get fancy with your manuscript submission or your query letter or whatever. It is almost guaranteed to distract the reviewer from the work itself. Because I had a rough day at work, here are some layout/typography issues that give me headaches, from “mildly irritating” to “crawl under a rock and stay there, and take your manuscript with you”:
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