Month: November 2006

Holiday Festivities

Fear not, true believers, I’m still here and still kicking. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks at school doing workshops in greek and Indic scripts, which involved an awful lot of work with a few impromptu social events throw in for mental health.

MATD Thanksgiving

At the last minute, the American posse here decided we didn’t want to let Thanksgiving go uncelebrated, so my flatmates and I donated our generously proportioned lounge so we could invite our classmates over for a some Indian take-out. (Because Thanksgiving is all about Americans and Indians coming together, right?) Even though it’s the one holiday I get really sentimental about, I’d mostly forgotten about Thanksgiving, and in the end I was glad we were able to celebrate it properly. By properly, of course, I mean that it wasn’t about the food so much as about family, and this year my family is effectively the ragtag group foreigners I spend every day with now.

I was beginning to note that Advent seems to be a much bigger feature of the Christmas season here in the U.K., and then it suddenly dawned on me that they need Advent more than we do in the States since they don’t have the day after Thanksgiving to open up the season for them.

I’m also thankful for the generosity of an old pal, who’s taking me out this Friday to kick off the Christmas season in the best way possible. (Here’s a hint!)

I won’t be going home for Christmas this year. Or rather, I won’t be heading back to visit on relatives or friends, since I technically have no home of my own to which I can return. We’re expected to keep working through most of the month-long Christmas break, so I decided that it would be too stressful and exhausting to fly to the States for a few days of madness and sentiment, only to race back and hit the books. I’m sure I’ll have a lovely Generic Midwinter Holiday with the other expats, and best of all I’ll have a few days to just sleep and slack off.

Wrap Me, Read Me

I know that Dave from Helveti.ca is finishing up his first book design project over here, so I am shamelessly scooping, and shamelessly stealing these pictures of awesome typofabrics from India, Ink.

Helvetica fabric Condensed numerals

Even though I can barely sew on a button I’ve been fantasizing what I could do if I bought up every stitch of it that this eBay seller could get her hands on, especially once I discovered that she has other kinds as well:

Serif text Newspaper text

Friends, students, admirers, and mockers already know of my vast collection of type-themed t-shirts, but now I’m imagining myself wearing a full suit made out of type cloth. Perhaps all Helvetica, with a nice shirt made out of the serify stuff, and a tie and pocket square made from the numbers? Or at least some sheets and pillowcases. What with the tattoos, the t-shirts, and flights of fancy like this, I realize that I’m on the verge of becoming a Batman villain, albeit one with much more style than this loser. Still, if anyone can make this happen I will be your slave for life.

Of course, I’d much rather have a Cooper Black leather jacket. (Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.)

You Can Judge a Book by Its Counters

Now that we’ve started drawing and sketching for our practical work, I’ve been spending more and more time thinking about the kinds of forms that might work well for the problems I’ve been talking about so far. In many ways, it’s a very open-ended question: it’s not a unique problem to want clarity and legibility in type for dense text situations that may not be produced well. For the kind of technical publications I’m targeting, a certain kind of “classical” or “traditional” feeling would probably be received well, but I’m determined to sneak in as many technical adaptations (addressing issues of reproduction quality, optical sizes ranging from titles down to elaborate superiors and inferiors, legibility of individual letters as well as words) as I can.

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