words I’ve had to teach my computer
dystopia
dystopia
I guess I can see why ESPN killed Grantland, but it was so good! I don’t even like sports outside of tennis and distance running, but I read Grantland each day like I read the NYTimes daily. And, no, not like I read the NYTimes – I never hate-read Grantland. Goodbye, good writers. (And, what will become of what was Grantland?)
I hope he’s still at Grantland, too (well, maybe not; I am the only dope who likes having more than one gig at a time…) Ooops. Guess not.
from The Year We Obsessed Over Identity (or “Who Do You Think You Are?”):
The bitterness of the sketch made me wonder if being black in America is the one identity that won’t ever mutate. I’m someone who believes himself to have complete individual autonomy, someone who feels free. But I also know some of that autonomy is limited, illusory, conditional. I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment. So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived.
I am smiling from ear-to-ear and cannot stop: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015 MacArthur Fellow
5:52am Start of astronomical twilight
6:19am Start of nautical twilight
6:46am Start of civil twilight
7:09am Sunrise
7:16pm Sunset
7:39pm End of civil twilight
8:06pm End of nautical twilight
8:33pm End of astronomical twilight
from Reputations: Adrian Frutiger in Eye:
Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin: You developed the first drawings for Univers during your studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule [Arts and Crafts School] in Zürich. Why a sans serif and not a roman face? Was this the influence of Bauhaus?
Adrian Frutiger: Typography in Switzerland was more oriented to the sans serif than to Roman type. At the school they worked with Akzidenz Grotesque and Neue Haas Grotesque and I lived for about ten years in this sans serif environment. But we didn’t like the Bauhaus much; the work was too constructed and rigid. We needed something more contemporary, nearer to the roman.
YS-S: Emil Ruder wrote that Univers, as Roman-Grotesque, ended the ideological struggle between Roman and sans serif.
AF: Ruder only said that this font links up again with the Roman. He wanted to emphasise the contrast with the Constructivist idea, where the ‘o’ is simply a circle and where there is no differentiation between the horizontal and the vertical. Univers is nearer to Roman than other sans serifs, since it displays a visual sensitivity between thick and thin in the up- and down-strokes, in the verticals and the horizontals.
YS-S: What was the main impulse for Univers? Was it the schools, Charles Peignot, phototypesetting technology, rational French thinking…?
AF: It was everything together. First of all, my studies with Walter Käch. He showed us, after making rubbings of Roman inscriptions, that an up-stroke is thinner than a down-stroke and that in the curves you can find beautiful variations between thick and thin. He always compared carved inscriptions with the sans serif, since these were not contrast-rich thick/thin Roman typefaces. He taught us to transfer these forms to Grotesque fonts. When I came to Deberny & Peignot in Paris, Futura (though it was called Europe there) was the most important font in lead typesetting. Then one day the question was raised of a grotesque for the Lumitype-Photon. Peignot felt that this has to be Europe [Futura], without question. It ran so well in lead typesetting, so why not in phototypesetting?
I asked him if I might offer an alternative. And within ten days I constructed an entire font system. When I was with Käch I had already designed a thin, normal, semi-bold and italic Grotesque with modulated stroke weights. This was the precursor of Univers.
At that time I could draw quickly, so I drew the letterforms on scrap card and stuck them together. I developed the font style by using the short word monde. Here I had an ascender, an ‘o’, an ‘m’. It came together quickly and I also had a good draughtswoman to help me. We made about sixteen variations of monde and I assembled them in the form of a star. When Peignot saw it he almost jumped in the air: ‘Good heavens, Adrian, that’s the future!’ He grasped at once that a multi-faceted tool was suddenly being placed in the hands of the advertising industry. I then appointed two Swiss draughtsmen, Bruno Pfäffli and André Gürtler. Within two months the entire system was in place.
Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated itself…
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