No Limitations to Creativity

If you are someone who has faced personal challenges and limitations in life, then artist Phil Hansen wants to hear your story. Phil has faced his own personal challenges as an artist when he began to experience numbness and tremors in his hands after years of repetitive motions. When he was told he had permanent nerve damage in his hands from years of making pointillist illustrations, he soon chose to quit art school. 
     In a defining moment, a neurologist later encouraged him to "embrace the shake". Then it dawned on him that he could look at his limitation as the source of his creativity rather than the end of it. By embracing his limitation, he soon found liberation, and has since pursued a variety of accomplished artwork in the interim.

Soon after telling his personal story at a TED talk this last February, he had many people willing to share their own accounts of struggle and success. For the last month, Hansen has been sharing these narratives of personal struggle in a 9 x 13 foot artwork created entirely of text with his sharpie. He is also soliciting more stories by phone and on his website, and in a Kickstarter campaign to fund this artwork. With less than 3 days left to go, his Kickstarter campaign has been fully funded, but you may still contribute and show your support. And take in his TED talk and be inspired. As Hansen so elegantly reminds us, "limitation can also be liberation." It's just how you look at it.
  

Living Letters

"Blümerant", a temporary public event staged in Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt in 2007, was designed by the art group, msk7 in an effort to stimulate communication. The group of 7 women artists transformed a large public square into a walk-in crossword puzzle. The enormous letters, made of mats of sedum, grass, lichens and moss vegetation, comprised words absorbed into local Berlin slang from the French Huguenots who immigrated to the area 300 years earlier. I can't speak about the actual outcomes of this crossword event or if the puzzle was physically completed, but I imagine the first sight of all the giant living letters must have been puzzling for many. My first reaction was...do they need weeding? And where are these letters living now?

Ephemeral Books

I'm rather intrigued by the ice book projects of Basia Irland who is an environmental artist concerned with river and watershed restoration. She works with research biologists, botanists, stream ecologists and community groups on various conservation projects to promote healthy watersheds. As part of her river restoration projects, she works with participants to hand carve ice books of frozen river water and embeds each with local native seeds which become sort of an "ecological language or riparian text" as she calls it. As the frozen books are launched downstream, the ice melts in the river's current and the seeds are released. Theoretically the seeds will grow into plants and trees which help to stabilize the river banks and provide shelter for fish and wildlife. I imagine this could happen, but it seems rather overly simplistic to me. I do appreciate the concept however and think her ephemeral books are beautiful. They promote an awareness of watershed preservation and restoration, and oh yeah, it must be really fun to watch ice books float downstream. You can watch a video of Irland's ice book project Receding/Reseeding here.

This ice book weighed 200 pounds and included seeds of the mountain maple, columbine, and spruce. It was released in Boulder Creek, Colorado in 2007.

A young ice book reader wonders why there are no pictures. 

Irland makes other materials in the construction of her environmental books. The one above is Barnacle Book II on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington state. Below is a text of sand dollars in what else, but sand.

The Book of Drought is made from parched field notes and dehydrated paragraphs. The pages are dry from being sun-baked.

Faux Snow Job

It snowed outside today and blanketed the city in white for the first time this Winter. Just in time to share some very recent snowflake work from a few of my Experimental Typography students. I know it may seem contrary, but I had them each design snowflakes as a warm-up exercise on the first day of class two weeks ago. Actually, I call them "word crystals". I assign students to design three snowflake-like crystals from a list of words about winter, snow and ice. They must use just one word and one font per flake, and are asked to work quickly and be playful with each. Just as the single word requires the students to look closely at the shape and the structure of it very carefully, the word alone is also responsible for creating the structure of the snowflake once a repeat pattern is defined. Most were symmetrical, but not all, and I continue to be pleasantly surprised by their varied outcomes.
      The three snowflakes in the top row are designed by Sarah Ervine. Words used in each (from left to right) are Glacier; Avalanche; and Blizzard. Second row from left is Marisa Tanji: Chilling; Sarah Rudback: Silence; Jeremy Grant: Glacier. Third row is Jeremy Grant: Winter; Sarah Rudback: Exquisite; Marisa Tanji: Sledding.

The three feather-like dendrites above are designed by Susan Schumacher. Each were created in Photoshop using the three words, Silence, Snowangel, and Snowbird. Reversed out of black, they would more closely resemble a starburst of fireworks because of the beautiful contrail of letters she created. Such fine flakes have greater detail to reveal, so please click away on all.
      Although Brendan Lattin's work below is more like a snowstorm than a snowflake, it is a beautiful texture none-the-less. We will soon be doing more experiments with lettering, texture and typographical patterns so I hope to be sharing more of my student's work here in the near future.

ReCycled Printing Ideas

This is an idea whose time has come again. Recycle this cycle printing idea from the streets of 19th century Paris by strapping a container of some water-based ink to the back of your bike, fitted with a self-inking device, and the streets could be your canvas. I love this idea. It is the latest fashion in moveable type.  
      This tricycle printing sort of reminds me of Jonah Kessel's brilliant invention of his tricycle calligraphy. On the streets of Beijing, Kessel wrote such Chinese proverbs as: Create a good environment for minors to grow up healthy; Virtue shows through long term persistence, civilization reflects by actions; Civilization comes from every individual, to contribute from every little thing. I still marvel at his invention. 
::As seen at Ptak Science Books.

A bicycle-driven "resistance press" from WWII. I believe this press is from the Netherlands where many underground presses flourished during the later stages of the war. It is difficult to see from this lone photo just how this press was operated by the bicycle, but I presume there was a strap-pulley system somehow connected to the flywheel of the press and the press operator fed the paper in the front seen on the left side of image.
      I read somewhere that Orville and Wilbur Wright once designed and built a printing press and the two brothers ran their own job printing shop for a short while. Eventually they settled on managing a bicycle repair shop and building their own bicycles. Always the inventors, I have to wonder if they ever strapped a bicycle to one of their presses. If anyone knows more about this and bicycle-powered presses, please let me know.
::Photo by Krista van den Bos via Bibliopolis.

Book in a Bag

NY artist Trong G. Nguyen provides his own interpretation of a library in his ongoing series, Library. Beginning in 2007, Nguyen has used rice kernals, ink, gold paint, gold leaf and clear mylar to record entire books on grains of rice. He writes one single word in ink on each grain of rice, until he completes an entire chapter and places them all into a clear mylar bag. To distinguish the books' titles, he paints the rice grain with gold leaf. The book's title and individual chapters are noted in the top corner of each mylar rice packet with a due date card inside. His project gives new meaning to food for the soul.
:: Via Blessé par le mot 

The Other Great Wall of China

The hand of Niels Shoe Meulman of Calligraffiti has left his "ununcompromising" China ink mark on a brick wall in Beijing, China recently. The repeat pattern of the four calligraphic strokes of the "un" letterforms create a visual texture that is undeniably striking. Shoe states that these thick brush strokes symbolize the power of reversal and they draw attention to themselves equally as much as the space between the strokes. The ink is to the absence of the ink just as a positive is to a negative, black is to white, or yin to yang in this case. Shoe is every much a believer in these dualities as he is in the beauty of the letterforms themselves.
      We live in a world of opposites and Shoe admits, "we can't truly be comfortable unless we were uncomfortable before. To be alive is only to be undead." Furthering this notion, he adds, "when science proudly presents its universal laws, some of us know that they are ununiversal. If you don't understand this, ununderstand."
      Say what you like (or unlike), but I think his work is unbeatable.
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Post postscript: It just dawned on me, today is 11.11.11 and this work of Shoe's with all of the vertical calligraphic strokes is the perfect calligraphic metaphor for this date. It's a great day for wearing stripes!

Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Blackletter in Fall Colors

The newly published Fall issue of T Magazine, a supplement of the Sunday New York Times, commissioned the work of Los Angeles landscape designer Judy Kameon and photographer Erik Otsea for their monthly T design. I couldn't help but notice how handsome this iconic blackletter T looks in the beautiful Fall colors, and it reminded me of its' elder gothic cousin, the rustic old growth T you see just below. I've included a snapshot of other extended family members of this woodsy gothic alphabet as well. I'm no genealogist, but I'm quite certain this family tree has roots that go way, way back. ;^)

:: Rustic Old Growth Gothic Alphabet via the Letterology Archives.

Text Appeal

Readers, writers, typographers, and printers take note. The 6th annual Text Ball—the lettered stepchild of Portland, Oregon's annual literary Wordstock Festival—will take place on October 1st at p:ear Gallery. The theme this year is In Poetic Fashion and it is a benefit for the non-profit Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland which promotes literacy through DIY publishing. There will be live music by indie-folk heroine Laura Gibson and poetry readings, word games, giant crossword puzzles, dirty limerick challenges, a silent auction and more, including a parade of well-lettered fashions and prizes for the text-dressed. Come dressed as your favorite poem, book, letter, story, or word, enjoy the letterati and support a great cause. Advance tickets for $12 can be purchased here or $15 at the door.
      The photo above is last year's grand prize winner for Best Text, Erica Hijazi. She constructed a fashionable bow from a 1939 Williamette College newpaper she unearthed while picking up a VCR purchased on Craigslist. Soooo Portlandia! Her date wore a tie constructed from the same newspaper.

Mark Anen came dressed as a Government G-Man.

Aimee Pedretti's vision of Hell was Dante's Inferno.

Runner-up for Most Literary is writer and author Myrlin Hermes, featuring the entire text of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action..."
::All photos from the last year's text-dressed are taken by Georgia Perry.

Moss Poetry

After the previous fern post below, I can't think of a better segue than moss lettering. This enviromental graffiti is the handwork of Anna Garforth who plants poetry around the urban landscape of London. The final artwork below is to spell out Grow beyond what you know with each word planted in a different location.

:: Photos above Via Crosshatchling and BumBumBum. The Photo below via Webponce.