The genuinely new things are really hard to imagine. When you do imagine them, they’re very hard to relay in anything like a sense in which the people who are totally used to them would use them. There’s always this factor in future-tech science fiction where somebody, be it the characters or the narrative voice, is really kind of wowed by future tech. It’s a powerful impulse. You want the reader to get a wowie. But there’s a way in which it’s not naturalistic; it’s not a genuinely naturalistic vision of the future, because that would be one in which people take it utterly for granted.
[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).
The 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.
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).
Bring the Noise — Toronto illustrator Michael Cho (known locally for his much-loved signage for the now defunct Pages Books & Magazines on Queen Street) discusses his jacket art for the Penguin Graphic Classics edition of Don Delillo’s White Noise. I ‘m very happy to hear that D+Q are publishing a ‘petit livre’, Backalley Drawings, [...]
Ellen Lupton, author of Thinking With Type (interviewed by me here), interviews graphic designer David Barringer about his new collection of essays There’s Nothing Funny About Design over at Design Observer today. It’s a wide ranging interview — mostly about design unsurprisingly — but a couple of paragraphs about books caught my eye: I do [...]
“Ellen Lupton makes this industry smarter. If graphic design has a sense of its own history, an understanding of the theory that drives it and a voice for its continuing discourse, it’s largely because Lupton wrote it, thought it or spoke it.” – Katherine Feo, AIGA Dedicated to raising design awareness, Ellen Lupton is the [...]
