Category: ultrapersonal

The many faces of Sparky

My career seems to be at the point where I rarely need to tailor or tinker with my CV (or résumé in the American parlance), but I need to rewrite short bios over and over again. That’s a good sign, right?

It basically means I don’t have to look for work all that much, since it tends to find me through more casual channels like momentum, word-of-mouth, networking, yadda yadda. (It’s the actual money that’s hard to pin down, tragically. The work keeps piling up.) The trick is that now I only get a couple of sentences to sum up everything as well as highlight the relevant details for the task at hand, rather than letting a amore complete picture come together from the full details.

For instance, here’s one for my current job:

Daniel Rhatigan, a 2006 recipient of a Monotype Imaging Ltd. scholarship, is working at Monotype Imaging Ltd. as part of the UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership. KTP is a country-wide program that allows graduate students to partner with industries to help improve business productivity and competitiveness. Rhatigan is working at Monotype Imaging’s Salford’s design office under the direction of senior designer, Robin Nicholas. Rhatigan is chartered with applying his academic experience to a commercial project, while Monotype Imaging intends to benefit through Rhatigan’s development of intellectual property.

But here’’s my bio for the teaching gig in the Netherlands I’ve had for the last couple of years:

Dan Rhatigan is a graphic designer from New York City, now living and working in London. He has worked as a designer and consultant for arts organizations for over 15 years, and has taught and lectured at the City College of New York, Central St Martins, and the University of Reading.

Dan Rhatigan, grafisch ontwerper uit New York City en woont en werkt op dit moment in Londen. Meer dan 15 jaar werkt hij als grafisch ontwerper en adviseur voor organisaties in de kunst- en grafische branche. Verder heeft hij les en lezingen gegeven aan het City College in New York, Central St. Martins en geeft nu regelmatig les aan de Universiteit van Reading in England.

But I do freelance work, too, now and then!:

Daniel Rhatigan worked as a designer and typographer in Boston and New York for 15 years before coming to study typeface design at the University of Reading. He also lectures on typography and branding in the Netherlands and here in the UK. You can look at some of his previous design work at ultrasparky.org.

And then there’s the occasional bit of writing:

Dan Rhatigan is a typeface designer, graphic designer, teacher, and long-time blogger at ultrasparky.org. He received an MA with distinction in Typeface Design from the University of Reading in 2007, and he’s now working with the Typography Department to research and design non-Latin typefaces for Monotype Imaging.

Once in a while, too, the emphasis shifts to my little side project:

Daniel Rhatigan is a typographer and typeface designer, originally from New York City but now based in London. When not teaching or working on a vast family of Indic typefaces, he publishes a zine called Pink Mince — “for the confirmed bachelor of exceptional taste”.

Root canal!

So much fun, right? Who doesn’t love a nice root canal now and then? Well, maybe it;s not the most pleasant way to pass the time, but it sure beats the hell out of an infected broken tooth that flares up into incredible pain whenever you get on an airplane. Which I tend to do a lot. (Aside: It’s a good thing I don’t have kids or a car and that I recycle diligently, because all the flying I do eats up all my carbon offset points.)

Having a root canal was a lot more pleasant with Teen Dentist back at the NYU Dental School than it is with the NHS. There, you get discounted versions of thorough, cutting-edge dental treatment performed by eager, cute (and thankfully smart and capable) youngsters. Here, my dentist sees me for 20 minutes and explains exactly what corners are cut if you pay NHS fees instead of the exorbitant private-practice fees, and then leave you to ponder how much you;re willing to pay for your vanity. It’s grim.

(And since I am employed but poor, I’m in that uncomfortable middle-range where I still have to pay but can only afford ghetto treatment. Be sure to ignore my silver molar next time you see me, or I’ll cry.)

May Day!

Oh, nothing to fuss about. that’s not “May day!” as in, “Help!”; it’s “May Day!” as in, “It’s the first of May and after a solid four months of working almost every waking hour, money has last started to flow back into my coffers, allowing me to rejoice, pay many bills, and indulge in some long-overdue infrastructural upgrades.” So you can understand the need for the exclamation point, clearly.

So that picture can be considered a bit of a status update. I just took it with a new camera that is making me squealingly happy, now that I can at last retire my trusty but aging point-and-shoot and switch at last to an SLR. In that photo I’m wearing new glasses (well, some 10-year-old frames, but with a new prescription) that allow me to see clearly again for the first time since I smashed my old ones three months ago. And I’m not scowling, despite the absurb workload of the last few weeks, which means I must be in a good mood overall, probably due to the onset of longer days and the seasonal readjustment of my energy levels.

So yeah, it’s Saturday and I’m working, but I think I may be out of the woods soon, and I’m practically starting to function like a regular person again.

Hi-class operations in the ’hood

While enjoying this teeny article about the cost structure behind designer clothes that sell for seemingly unreasonable prices, a little bell went off in the back of my brain as the writer mentioned the Martin Greenfield factory, where they were making manufacturing some designer khakis that eventually sell at Bergdorf Goodman for $550. A quick search confirmed my suspicion: that’s the place across the street from my old loft in East Williamsburg, where I lived for two-and-a-half years. I knew it was one of the few buildings in the area that was still a working factory rather than a dumpy building full of artists in search of cheap space, but had no idea they were doing the high-end stuff.

Sadly, I assume that Tenochtitlan 2000, the tortilla factory around the corner, was not operating with the same profit margins.

[And wow, it’s been a long time since I looked at the online slideshow that I linked to in that old post about my place. Damn, I miss that place, even though the loft — and my life — really went to shit eventually.]

Oh Coney, My Coney

The start of Summer always makes me long for Coney Island, especially now that it’s so far away and I’ll probably never see it again before it finally gives in to all the pressure and becomes something else.

Wonder Wheel

But there’s so much to love. If you haven’t been there it may be hard to see past the decay and appreciate the real charm that comes from the liveliness of the place, and the visible signs of a long, colorful history. I’ve always had trouble putting my finger on my love for the place, although it’s such a goldmine of lettering and kitsch that it’s easy to understand what first sucked me in. But it’s always been more, somehow, too.

Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.

[Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.]

Shoot the Freak

Let me pass

passport photos

New passport photos, at last all sorted. Hilariously, there’s a place down the street form the studio that does them. Well, it wouldn’t have helped to get them last week since I’m still waiting for a paycheck deposit so I can end in the fees for the new passport anyway. And then I just start hoping this all gets fixed before I have to fly to the Netherlands to teach at the end of May.

Oh, and don’t get even GET ME STARTED on the headaches that are going to be involved with securing a visa renewal by December. I’m going to be nagging a lot of people all summer long if that shit’s going to happen.

Bitch, please

You’ll have to pardon the whining, but sometimes a guy just needs to let it all out, OK? Here, in no particular order, is a brief list of bad things that happened yesterday:

  • Woke up to an email informing me that a collection agency that is annoyed about my insolvency is escalating things to the lawyer level. (Thanks, freelance clients who didn’t pay invoices for months at a time while I was looking for steady work.)
  • Left my US checkbook at home so I couldn’t throw a sacrificial pittance at them to get them off my back for now.
  • Did not wake up to discover that large fees for other freelance work had finally been deposited in my bank account
  • The new glasses I ordered last week did not show up at the optician, like they were supposed to, so I’m still stuck wearing the old pair held together by messy gobs of Krazy Glue.
  • The optometrist checking the fit of my contacts informed me I have crusty eyelashes.
  • Fontlab crashed a bunch of times, but that’s a daily occurrence.
  • I finally did my taxes, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough money to pay them. (I don’t, because of those invoices that haven’t been paid yet.)
  • But I couldn’t even finish preparing my return because TurboTax refused to let me enter credit card information that’s not tied to a US address.
  • I got a photo for my emergency new passport, but it’s not the size that the US requires, so I have to run around and find another place that takes a proper set instead of using one of the stupid booths.
  • I already whined about how I have to have my passport replaced, but that’s still making me mad.
  • I was finally informed that the mysterious kidney problem that my doctor has been trying to identify is acute interstitial nephritis. I can’t feel anything going wrong, but apparently it can become suddenly life-threatening.
  • That means I have to switch from my regular meds (which always leads to days of feeling shitty), and take a ridiculously huge stack of other ones to deal with the kidney thing and then manage all the side effects that are likely to happen.
  • I will probably be suffering from severe indigestion, weight gain, and acne for the next few weeks, as if I wasn’t self-conscious enough already.
  • Got stressed about today’s deadline for an ATypI proposal, an indefinite but urgent deadline for stuff I have to write about another ATypI thing, the presentation I’m giving CSM next week, a regular client’s ongoing needs which they never plan far enough in advance and hence are always rush jobs, and the massive family if Indic typefaces I’m still trying to finish for my full-time job (the success of which will determine if I get another job by the time my visa runs out).
  • My Gujarati is not progressing well, and that pissed me off.
  • There was probably some other shit that went wrong, too, but I can’t remember it now. It was a really bad day.

Thankfully, Ian made me a nice cuppa tea and some dinner while we had a productive, encouraging chat about upcoming projects for The Colour Grey, so really helped me relax before I came home and fell asleep. (And sleep is good because that’ss when things go away for a few hours and I like that.)