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Published February 12, 2010

Something for the Weekend

[A quick note about the poll: thanks to everyone who voted, left a comment or sent me note this week — I really appreciate it. The feedback has been great. I’m going to shut the poll down at midnight tonight, but please let me know if you have any further thoughts about the direction of The Casual Optimist.]

Lauren Kaiser’s Little Red Riding Hood seen at Type Theory (pictured above).

liza-pro-underwareThe Oscars of Type — Ellen Lupton’s list of the year’s top typefaces at Print magazine. “Best Actress” was awarded to Underware’s Liza Pro (pictured above). My interview with Ellen Lupton is here.

Happiness as By-product — Jessa Crispin founder of Bookslut interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, author of Booklife (which Crispin was critical of interestingly):

I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you… Not that we should all sing songs around the campfire and braid each other’s hair, but there has to be a combination of the two, forward motion and goal planning, but while taking a look at the people around you.

Comics Studies Reader — Jeet Heer on comics and comic scholarship at Books@Torontoist:

I think there’s a wide variety of things that can be done with comics, and I think we’ve only scratched the surface… One of the interesting things about manga is that kids are reading translated manga that reads right to left. Part of the reason that’s possible is because comics are both words and pictures – half of the translation work is already done. So you can look at a comic book in a language you don’t know and you won’t get everything but you can still get a fair bit of what it’s about. And so they have this sort of function as cultural ambassadors. You can actually learn a lot about a culture just by looking at the comics.

The New Yorker 85th anniversary covers by Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes, and Ivan Brunetti seen at the Creative Review blog (Adaptation by Tomine pictured below).

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly (art editor at the aforementioned New Yorker) discuss The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics with (a particularly gushy) Michael Silverblatt for KCRW’s BookWorm :

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Published February 8, 2010

Clutching at Straws

Some time back in September 2009, The Casual Optimist turned one-year-old. I didn’t actually notice until later — I had other things going on at the time — but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, especially since Joe Sullivan decided to put The Book Design Review on hiatus.

Compiling The Casual Optimist is an amazing experience. I learn something new every day and I meet some incredibly talented, smart people because of the blog. But for better, or worse, The Casual Optimist hasn’t exactly grown as I imagined it would and I often wonder if I spend to much time on the wrong things in one way or another.

The posts about the book trade — the posts that take longest to write — seem to generate the least interest (at least in terms of traffic and comments). The most popular posts by-the-numbers are the interview with designer David Pearson (which I totally get by the way!) and the list of inspirational vintage cover sites. It makes me curious who is visiting and why.

With this in mind, I thought I would hold a straw poll to find out what you want to see more of here. I promise there is no ulterior motive — this is not about boosting traffic, selling ads, or anything sinister — I really am just curious. And I want to make the site better as we move on to Year Two.

So please take a look at the poll if you have a minute (FYI: you can check more than one answer and submit the form more than once). Or, if the poll doesn’t really work for you, leave me a comment, ping me on Twitter (or Facebook), or drop me a line by email if it makes more sense. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks. :-)

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