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Fun Little Video Interview from Semi-Permanent!
Posted April 20, 2010//Comments (20)
Filed Under: Conferences / Talks / Shows, Press / Blog Features
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My students are awesome.
This year I had the pleasure of teaching at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The class was called Personal Viewpoints, which is a Junior / Senior class split between three teachers (myself, Katherine Streeter, and Jon Krause this year) each taking a five week section. The students have to actually apply to get into the class, so generally Matt Curtius, the UARTS faculty member (and dear friend of mine) who curated this bunch, picks a good mix of people with different styles but all with excellent work ethics. This was my first real teaching gig (I had a very brief stint at Philadelphia University before moving to New York) and definitely my first time working entirely with illustrators (I went to school for design so didn’t quite know what to expect). Because I only had five weeks with the students, I decided to assign one main project with multiple components — book cover design + endpapers, titlepage, and bookplate for a special edition novelization of The Wizard of Oz. This was literally the first time some of the students had worked with type, so I was expecting to have to do a lot of hand-holding. But, after a very brief lesson, they returned the following week with shockingly amazing type treatments! Seriously, across the board they were great! See for yourself below, and feel free to click on the student’s name to go to their personal site (not everyone has a site link but most do). The students’ names are set in Nelly Script Flourish, a really fun typeface by Tart Workshop. Buy it!
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mom, this is how twitter works:
I made this handy jpg explanation of twitter for all of you that need to explain it to your parents / friends. Twitter pats itself on the back quite a bit for being “easy” but there is a lot of nuance to understand that they don’t really explain well. Click here for the full size image which is much more legible.
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A Proposal for the English Language
he more I communicate online, the more I realize how difficult it can be to really express tone / emotion through typing. As an avid exclamation mark user and semi-anti-emoticon person, I have a proposal: Let’s appropriate the upside down exclamation point, “¡”, for the English language to use for things that are extremely bad. This character is currently for Spanish speakers only, but there is no reason why we can’t give it a new life in English. Because it is so ubiquitous in Spanish, every font (save for some crazy display typefaces) will have this character, which means it could very seamlessly integrate into English writing. “What if it is mistaken for a lowercase ‘i’?”, you might ask. The character usually drops below the baseline, making it easy to see it isn’t an “i” or if it does not drop below the baseline, it is usually tapered as an exclamation point is.Why a new character? Exclamation points are great for things that are exciting and fun, but I’ve always felt they fell a little short when I wanted to express real anger, frustration, or panic. The only current option is a mix of question marks and exclamation points, e.g. “what!!?!?!?!” or some sort of emoticon, and we all know the only acceptable emoticon is the happy face and the very seldom wink. This new mark, “the panic mark” is a single character solution which will solve all of these problems (and is very twitter friendly).
I realize that most people will continue expressing themselves through whatever means they feel the most comfortable, but because people do more communicating online now than in person, it’s fun to think of ways to tweak the way we type without destroying the English language. I certainly don’t think vast debaucheries of language like “text speak”, or whatever you want to call it, communicate anything other than “I am lazy” or “I am a 14 year old girl”, but small smart changes (or proposals like the left slanting font for sarcasm) might help us better express ourselves online.
