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06 March 2010

[Out 122nd Way] Angel of Ferrari Destruction Identified - What a Comedian

2340.
Meanwhile, out 122nd way, in my back yard, KGW has released the identity of that lady who tried to mess up all those Ferraris at Ron Tonkin Gran Turismo – and turns out that Ferrari Hating Girl is a comic.

Former comic, as the KGW headline says.

Well it certainly quit being funny for everyone involved.

Francesca Lavezzo is a 33-year old woman who in the recent past, anyway, was involved in a San Francisco sketch comedy group called The 11th Hour. Here's the bio. Excerpted fair-use picture right. 6 feet, 160 pounds of Ferrari-hatin' funny woman, she appeared in one video that I can find, credited as "film crew".

Exclusive to this blog (and everyone else who figures out where it is and links to it, here's Francesca Lavezzo, in "The Outtakes of the Christ" (Serious content advisory: irreverent attitude toward religious icons and themes. If you are offended, easily or otherwise, by an irreverent attitude toward the Passion, DO NOT VIEW THIS CLIP!!!. I'm NOT kidding! Do NOT make me get out the blink tag!)


Did you catch her? I sure didn't. But she's in there somewhere; she's listed in the credits.

What was it that Oscar Wilde said, about the only worse thing than being talked about is being not talked about?

I love living out 122nd way!

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[liff] Edward "Trolololol" HIll: In Soviet Russia, Rickroll Plays YOU!

2339.
They call him the next Rickroll or the Russian Rickroll, and he will drag what's left of your sanity straight to Hades after this worms your way into your bean(Important And Serious warning – if you were the kind who was nearly driven to insanity by Numa Numa, then UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU CLICK THE VIDEO; IT IS INDESCRIBABLY MORE DESTRUCTIVE OF YOUR SANITY!):



He's Edward Hill, or Edward Anatolyevich Hill, or Eudard 'Khil, and he's pretty much crawled up into everyone's beans and is going to lay there a while, so, here's the mystery revealed:

Of the last list item above there is some very intellectual verbiage considering the vokaliz nature of the performance. Particularly chewy food for thought:

Hill's version seems nothing if not perverse, but what a bit of contextualization helps us to see is that this is not at all the result of his own innate weirdness, or of the innate absurdity of the song he has undertaken to sing.

About 90% of the recent commentary on Hill's performance maintains that it is so bad it's good, while the remaining 10% maintains that it is, simply, good. To my mind, if there is a stroke of brilliance in this performance, it is the genial wave Hill gives to the audience as he exits whence he came. He bids farewell as if we have just experienced something genuine together. But what could that have been? He hasn't even said anything. I thought here of Tolstoy's cranky reaction to the Moscow debut of Wagner's Ring Cycle, in his incredible work, What Is Art? Echoing a concern about what it is that art is supposed to do, raised already by Pascal (who encourages readers of poetry to imagine a state of affairs in which a person actually has the properties a poet attributes to them, e.g., a girl who actually has cherries instead of lips), Tolstoy wants to know why those people on the stage are singing instead of talking if what art is meant to do is to capture something real about human experience, and why, once we reduce their sung words to their mere content, we should be at all interested in what they have to say (mostly childish fantasy stuff about forest spirits and valkyries). 

Hill hasn't said anything, yet he bids farewell as if he has. What bit of reality is this meant to reproduce? What kind of perversion of that original reality does it involve? It's hard to react like Pascal or Tolstoy, since the art hasn't told us anything about the reality that's been transfigured. One can only say, in the manner of a YouTube commenter, WTF. Magomaev never invites you to say this. His interpretation makes perfect sense: he is a man in a night club enjoying himself, so much so that he feels inspired to use his very voice as a musical instrument. Hill is doing something altogether different.


The first takeaway was of the almost surreal, somewhat spooky oddity of it all. I'm repeatedly listening to Roxy Music's Avalon to wash the edginess of it away, and to a degree, it's working. I'm not necessarily arrogant about the art I'm familiar with being somewhat better, but it is familiar, and therefore relatable to.

Well, this is how one stretches one's enevelope, yes.

Still it leaves me with the "uh-oh" feeling a little. And since you're going to be directed, Rickrollingly, to this clip at one time or another, well … forewarned is forearmed.

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05 March 2010

[web] An A-Plus Tutorial On Adding Social Sharing Buttons To Your Website

2338.
I read a whole lot of tutorials all the time on design and art, whether or not I mean to use the information. And lately, I've been reading tutorials on how to do web image design and coding, just as part of my self-imposed Adult Education program. And I've seen a lot of tutorials via Twitter.

Twittering designers show that it's possible to create a website design in Photoshop, which is possible if you're doing conceptualizing work, but transferring those to Web code is another matter. Few, if any of these tutes, however, provide you with a way to translate the design into code, which is kind of a cop-out, in my perhaps-unfair opinion … sure, you can mock up a great website concept in Photoshop (or even Illustrator, and Pariah Burke's showed me how you might translate that Illustrator design right into web code), but is what you just mocked-up translatable?

Richard Darrell has just done the necessary. It need not be mentioned that sharing websites and blog posts get Tweeted, Dugg, Delicioused, etc, etc, all the time. Your content might be more likely to go there if you provide buttons to make it easier for the reader. I found the button at the bottom of each of these posts by going to AddToAny.com and embedding code in my Blogger template (the service of which is less satisfying these days … but that's for another program).

Richard's tutorial, hosted at his site Raster Rebels, shows you not only how to create some pretty spiffy looking buttons (don't click 'em, they're like nipples on a dude right now):



With all the fashionable gloss and clever take on the symbols (I like the way they're all tilted 45 degress right), but … and here's the best part … he also provides you with the code that will enable yout o make the buttons truly yours. That's something few tutorialists bother to do, and that's why I commend this to anyone curious as to how to make it for themselves.

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[signs] Pedestrian-Street ROW Blades In Seattle

2337.
Ben Lukoff, a Seattle area dude of no small renown and a fellow street-blade obsessive, posts some nifty shots of Seattle street blades at his flickr stream. One which caught my eye details how New York Alki signifies pedestrian ways that are aligned in street rights-of-way.

My fellow Portlanders may be aware of how we do it. A simple standard street blade is erected at the place where a street would be if it were built there, leading to the interestingly-dissonant scene of what looks like a walkway with a street name. Some, in the west hills, align with staircases.

As I recall, Oregon City's famous Municipal Elevator downtown was, at some time or another, designated a right-of-way called Elevator Street, but that's a digression of height as well as breadth.

Anyway! Via Ben's Twitter stream I found he'd posted this picture, which really caught my eye:



There he is, the little Crossing Guy on the end of the blades for E Mercer Street and 31st Avenue E, indicating that the city ROWs go through, but just as pedestrian paths (and, perhaps, terminating at the corresponding Open-For-Travel streets.

The font seems to be Clearview, but it seems a little off somehow.

A notable addition would be the st superscript next to the number 31 on the 31st Avenue sign. Standard Seattle style up to now will have been to use for 31 Ave E, eliding the superscript.

But it's the Crossing Guy that I really like to see there. Makes quite a statement.

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04 March 2010

[branding] The Mouse Sets The Oregon Duck Free

2336.
The status of the Oregon Duck … the Donald Duck-oid fellow who's represented the Universitatis Oregonensis all these years, via a most unique handshake agreenment between Walt Disney himself and the then-University of Oregon AD Leo Harris (and later qualified by a ton of provisos) has undergone a seismic change today, as reported by the Eugene Register-Guard.

The image was allowed to be used by the U of O in certain ways and in certain venues only. This included the mascot costume, which essentially belonged to Disney though the U of O had to build it and pay for its upkeep. The mascot was only allowed to appear at games, which is why the Rose Bowl booster video by a YouTube Duck consortium calling itself Supwitchugirl almost became as famous. Off-license uses of the Duck tended to put the unique agreement between Eugene and the Magic Kingdom (no, not the Oregon Country Fair) in jeopardy, and I'm certain nobody needs to be clued in on just how jealously Disney guards its symbols, marks, and copyrights.

Well, those days of dancing around Mickey and the gang are over; Disney has entered into an agreement with the U of O that says, essentially, the Oregon Duck costumed mascot and Donald Duck have diverged enough that the aren't the same thing anymore:

… The UO/Disney licensing agreement remains in effect for the printed logos on sweatshirts and the like. But the costumed Duck mascot now answers only to the university.

In an agreement finalized this week, Disney acknowledges that the “current incarnation of a costumed character featured at the University of Oregon’s athletic and promotional events (the ‘Oregon Duck’) is not substantially similar” to Disney’s Donald Duck character.

So, now, Supwitchugirl – and anyone else who wants to use the Duck mascot in a video – can go ahead and do so, inasmuch as they can either get the Athletic Department's permission, or, heck "borrow" the costume for a few hours (hey, it is a college. These things happen).


Clearly not the same thing.
Representation of Donald Duck © Disney. Still.

Congratulations, U of O. I mean, I'm a Beaver fan and all; I'm not exactly uncorking the champagne here. And the Beavers are still gonna be all up in your act this next season.

Not even the spirit of Uncle Walt can keep that from happening to you.

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03 March 2010

[art] Local Web Publication on NW Native Plants Uses One Of My Photos

2335.
Wallace W. Hansen's NW Native Plants is a Salem nursery in what I've detected to be an emerging trend of marketing flora native to this area to area gardeners. I don't know how profitable it is yet, but it seems to have been carving itself a bit of a niche. Certainly it's a timely thing, and a delightful thing besides (Ivy is a problem, and did you know that they found kudzu in Oregon a while back?)

Last month the webmaster of Wally's site, Jennifer Rehm, contacted me about using one of my photos of our trip to the Mission Mill Museum in Salem to illustrate the NW Native Plant Journal, an issue about plants along streams (both of which you have a surfeit of here in NW Oregon). This one, to be particularly exact:



Particularly appropriate for living along streams. This is a view down Salem's Mill Race, which is a canal which diverts some of the flow from Salem's Mill Creek to a propitious place for the early Oregonian European colonists to start one of Salem's first major commercial enterprises – The Thomas Kay Woolen Mills. The location is now a wonderful museum.

I consented to allow use of the photo in return for credit and linkback, and Jennifer is indeed a lady of her word. It appears on Page 23 of the current NW Native Plants Journal:



Good layout, appropriate type. And my photo. What's not to like here?

If you want to get a closeup looksee of it, go to NW Native Plants and download the NW Native Plants Journal, and turn to page 23. And if you're a Oregonized gardener, consider buying from NW Native Plants, because, speaking as one Oregon native about others, you just can't have too many of us around!

Thanks, Jennifer!


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[logo] Ubuntu Has A Nifty New Logo

2334.
Just peeped via something somehow, with version 10.04, the open source (and free-as in beer) Linux OS Ubuntu is getting a keen new look:

Here's the main logo versions:




In my opinion, the Ubuntu logo has always been one that hit a home run. But this new, more typographical approach for me was love at first site. Drawing its inspriation from a bunch of type design I've seen lately, such as Myriad and Clearview, coming up with a simple clean sans-serif (provided this wasn't an off-the-shelf font solution) and making the lovely graphic Ubuntu logo mark a sort of supersciripted typographical mark, sort of like an asterisk with a whole lot of extra meaning.

All of the Ubuntu marks are getting the treatment, and in others parts that aren't strictly OS, such as the Kubuntu projects, spatial positioning and that beautiful font they're using do the job. Canonical's website is reportedly getting an update too.


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02 March 2010

[web design] So, Who Says I Have No Impact? My Blog Postings Get Used In Web Design Classes.

2333.
I haven't gotten a great deal of feedback from a lot of my web writing. It's a happy thing when I do.

So you can imagine that, a few days ago, my day was brightened considerably when a couple of older artcles over at Designorati were referenced by this blog posting, which belongs to a college level art course called ART 1359: Design for the web. It's completely obscured as far as which college it does belong to, but plugging the class name and title and the words "Cedar Valley" gleaned from the text indicates that the Dallas (TX) County Community College District teaches such a class.



The articles regard the difference between internal and external CSS files and what exactly the "Cascade" in CSS is and what it means. They must have been pretty acceptable if a design instructor decided to offer them up as reading via the class's blog, and remember that feeling I've talked about betimes, when you find that something you blogged about wound up answering a question someone had that you never knew would be asked? Got that feeling here.

So, hey, I was happy to offer it up for the common weal. I'm glad it seen as useful, and how many of you have had your blog articles used as fodder for classroom instruction?

So, see? Pretty nifty!

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01 March 2010

[art] Fool Brittannia: Brit Photogs Like to Take Pix In Public? You'll Love This …

2332.
… and by love,  we mean, of course, hate. Looks like the Her Majesty's Government is out to get photographers, mostly by making copyright much harder to maintain, and by making it impossible to get pixs in public without going out and getting releases from pretty much everyone you might meet.

I don't know what it is about politicos sometimes. The Intarmets makes them crazy. I personally acknowledge that some tweaking might be necessary in the age of drag and copy, even though I think the DMCA is used more as a bludgeon than a shield, but that's what you get when you let 19th century thinkers in the 20th Century try to define the landscape of the 21st.

The DMCA has its flaws and its strengths. But if you think the DMCA is bad news, you'll probably take it in a choice between it and the UK's proposed Digital Economy Bill thats making its way through Parliament right now, though what I've read of it will do more to strangle whatever digital economy they have there – at least amongst the little guys.

This article at the web site Photoactive portrays two millstones that the Lord Mandelson is trying to hang round the necks of British photogs right now. Both are pretty obnoxious.

The first one is bad enough: it will effectively strip copyright from works photographers create unless they register each one – and each version of each one – with a government agency that is yet to be created. That runs counter to all conventional wisdom about creative ownership – and that CV seems to echo the Berne Convention, which is a fairly-commonly accepted international standard, which boils down to, essentially, when you create it, you copyright it automatically. That's a very clear, understandable, and common-sense standard that anyone can wrap their beans around and seems quite reasonable. Of course, you can't charge for that; that's probably the rub.

The second one is, if it could be possible, even worse. One of the things about taking public photos is that you don't have to get permission from everyone in the photo to publish it. There is a principle called a "reasonable expectation of privacy", which essentially boils down to if you don't want to have a picture of your face taken in public, don't show your face in public. That's why they call it public. I shudder to think of all the epochal photos of people that would never have happened if the proposed UK standard was in force anywhere … I think of The Kiss (excerpted illustration right, used under fair use) by Alfred Eisenstaedt, the famous photo of a grateful sailor bowling over a pretty nurse on V-J Day in 1945 in Times Square.

Under the Digital Economy Bill proposal, any picture taken in public will be considered to contain private information on anyone in the frame. That means you can take a picture in the street but you can't publish it unless you either pay or get a release from anyone who'd of been in the shot?

Could you do that? I couldn't. I'm willing to bet that, no matter what resources that any UK photog has, they don't have nearly enough to secure the rights to take entire street scenes. And I doubt The Kiss would have ever happened.

More locally, some time ago, PMerc's Matt Davis (if I correctly recall the sitch) snapped a picture of a fellow reclining on his stoop in NE somewhere, maybe it was up Alberta or something, and when it appeared on his blog, the subject demanded compensation.

While the area of his front porch might be physically sacrosanct, since you can be seen by God, Zeus, Horus and everyone on your front porch, you don't have the right to demand payment from anyone who happens to snap you. And the picture itself was kind of charming in a disheveled, slatternly way. How much of life would we all miss through the eyes of inspired photographers if we decided that just because you were in a public place you really were in a private one? Or how little sense that actually makes?

Of course, the Lord Mandelson probably thinks nothing of it. And Britain is, sadly, a country where there are so many CCTV cameras that even George Orwell's house is famously under scrutiny by several. And some English songwriter made a song that was about what mad dogs and Englishmen do.

Well, this law is about as daft as it gets, and that's before you even try thinking about the curtailments of civil liberties – a subject I'll leave for the reader to deduce.

As far as dogs go, this sure looks like one. It's to be hoped that cooler UK heads prevail.

You don't promote a digital economy by preventing the proles from taking part in it.

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[liff] RIP T-Bone Wolk: "Like Losing My Right Hand" – Daryl Hall

2332.We strike the low note today and hold it long, because the legendary Tom "T-Bone" Wolk, bassist, Hall and Oates sideman for thirty years, and bassist of the NBC Saturday Night Live house band during the G.E. Smith years, has passed away at the incredibly untimely age of 58.

No further comment should be necessary
.

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[pdx] Become A Fan of "Portland Was Built On An Ancient Unicorn Burial Ground" On Facebook …

2331. … and not just because the graphic I made in this chapter is the front page graphic for it.



Although, IMHO, it's a very good reason to.

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25 February 2010

[design] KWHSS: A Logo and Website Header For A Medieval Club's Conference

2330.The Society for Creative Anachronism's College of Heralds – the group within the society that does work announcing at tournaments and events, researches and documents names and designs for coats of arms – in my not-so-humble opinion, the closest thing America has to a true Heraldic college, one that grants coats of arms and such in the manner of the English College of Arms – is having a symposium coming up in June, the Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium, or KWHSS. I've spent a bit of time designing for that effort (disclaimer: The Wife™ is the "autocrat") and I'm going to spring this on her, this combination of header image and insular uncial-style font that I've just bashed together:




The logo – gold crossed trumpets behind a a dragon's head emerging from a red quill pen – combines three essentials. The trumpets are the traditional SCA emblem for the College of Heralds, the quill represents the scribes, and the dragon's head represents the Shire of Dragon's Mist – the hosting branch. In the SCA, the membership is organized into nineteen territories or "Kingdoms": "An Tir" is the Kingdom comprising Oregon, Washington, the Idaho Panhandle, and a great swath of western Canada (from BC all the way over to Saskatchwan).

The character of the An Tirian lands has long been compared to that of Ireland, specifically the area the conference is being held in (Dragon's Mist comprises Washington County) so the Irish-style Uncial type seemed a natural. I was fortunate to find the font at FontSpace, it's called Irish Unci Alphabet, and while all the Gaelic-themed fonts there are very good, very few of them have numerals in the set. This one does, and I recommend it. It's free (as in beer), by the way, and the license allows for commercial use.
* No Relation

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[design] The Museum of Forgotten Art Materials

2329.I'm a little dismayed. I thought that art materials were evergreen. I mean, an eraser doesn't stop erasing just because you do all your design and art work on a computer. And these:



… rule, baby. You just don't know! In the meantime, scoff if you will, but if The Change happens, or it gets past peak-whatever, I'll still be happy drawing, and you'll be crying about it. Oh, yeah, laugh while you still have electric power, bee-yotches!

In the meantime, the entire museum is very charming, and it's here:


Enjoy, seriously.

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19 February 2010

[web] A Great Website Design – Marred By Comic Sans

2328.It's easy to complain about Comic Sans, I know, but when you see a website that could have hit it out of the park without it … well, you cry and die a little inside. Something must be said.

I give you the front page for Short Run Cards, one of the many purveyors of fast, inexpensive and (we assume) quality business cards you find today. There is nothing not to like about the website … almost.



Use the link in the previous graf to get a good close look in your browser. But, really, the graphic style is a home-run winner. Retro style, limited palette working it like a champ … and if you watch it long enough, the capital R in the dead-clever sign flickers. The message on the drive-in screen (a clever reference to the name, drawn from the world of movies) flickers and changes.

So, you move down to the text – and there it is. Comic Sans. Overused so much that it's tired even where appropriate.

Now, I don't have a specific beef against Comic Sans except that it's overused. It was originally developed by Vincent Connare for the late, rather unlamented Microsoft BOB user environment (the one which, famously, Melinda Gates was project manager on before she married Teh Bill), it was, as legend has, inspired directly by comic lettering for an appropriate application (one meant to make a user-friendly front end program all that much more chummy and cozy).

Comic Sans has been used in circulars, flyers, warning signs … in as much as this isn't such an inappropriate use, it's fine, but in this context, what it says to me is that the design stopped at the site layout. Every part of a website communicates, and if a little more care were chosen in choosing the font to support the design, this would have been completely kicked up to the next level, rather than almost made it.

So, suggestions. It's one thing to carp, it's another thing to offer an alternative. Happily, there are alternatives for Comic Sans out there! A few of them are even free!
  • Visit:  Ban Comic Sans for this list of free fonts for both Mac and Windows. BCS has adopted a kind of Vandal-storm-the-castle approach, but they do offer alternatives for the overused font. Many of them are quite pretty and are designed well.
  • Visit: Blambot http://www.blambot.com/. Blambot is nothing but comic-style fonts. There is a range of free fonts amongst the even-larger range of retail fonts. There's a lot to like here too.
  • Visit: Fontscape Comic Sans Alternatives at http://www.fontscape.com/explore?9BU. The top three alone are more than able alternatives to CS that look good, have about the same approach, and by simply not being CS send the message that "hey, the designer thought about the font and didn't just go with the default.
  • Visit and Read: Chris Barr's "The Comic Sans Effect" at http://chris-barr.com/entry/the_comic_sans_effect/. Also writes about Papyrus, the thinking man's Comic Sans. And suggests alternatives.
Point is, even where it's appropriately used, CS can communicate a lack of imagination, and on a website as good-looking as Short Run Cards's is, that's a pity. It makes a great website just a teensy bit less great.

(hat tip to DesignThatRocks, who pointed me to this website via one of his tweets)

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18 February 2010

[logo] Gaijin 4komo KIRO-FM

2327.The Reaction Guys on the KIRO FM logo rework:






They like it … they really like it.

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[web] Advisory: Firefox 3.6 Doesn't Do Preview From Dreamweaver CS3

2326.This is something that may impact your workflow if you use Adobe Dreamwever CS3 (and maybe CS4).

Dreamweaver designers are well-familiar with the quick-preview button on the Dreamweaver interface, and with the increasing presence of Firefox in the browser market, more and more web designers have a reason to have it point at Firefox.app.

I had just installed FF 3.6 earlier tonight and was designing along, working on a website, and clicked for the preview ... nothing. Firefox came to the front but no web page loaded.

I tried re-pointing the preview in Preferences – still no joy. I tried repairing permissions – nothing. The edited HTML file was there, all right – but Firefox wouldn't quick-preview from DWCS3. Searching teh Google showed me that it wasn't just me: a fair number of Web designers had turne up the exact same thing.

Right now the solution that works the best is just downgrading to Firefox 3.5.8. Skinnable Firefox is nifty, but it isn't a deal-breaker. I'm going to watch to see if Mozilla can give us a workaround that's less work than pointing the web browser at "file://Sundial_Four/Websites/Whatever".
Or, if you're not bothered by this problem, just Dreamweaver CS3-away. Just remember, if you want a preview in Firefox 3.6 (which is otherwise quite sweet) then you'll have to work around.

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[logo] KIRO-FM Updates That Logo …

2325.… and it's better. Still not great, but better.

Lest you think I'm simply belittling it, let's take a tour … A three-logo tour.

Some time back, Seattle's KIRO was AM talk radio, and they had this logo:



… and I fairly rhapsodized about it. And why not? To align the slanted end of the red stripe with the leg on the front of the R is cleverness of the highest order. The well-done Space Needle icon is just icing on the cake here: the alignment trick sets up an internal structure that makes the whole thing hang together just on the alignment alone. This was a logo done right.

Well, KIRO moved to FM, and debuted this:



Which I took a dislike to for two reasons: First, the stacked FM just makes the thing ring with discord, and the rejiggering of the numbers and the type in the red stripe knocked the slanted end completely out of alignment with the leg of the R. The nifty in the logo had been killed and the body hidden somewhere, maybe on Mercer Island, who knows.

Well, our Seattle correspondent Ben alerted me to a new alignment of the parts – and here we have it:



They've applied some textual healing. And, like I said, it's better. Not great but better.

On The Upside:
  1. The stacked type is gone, gone, gone. The problem with the stacked type, even for something as minor as two letters FM, is that it brings your eyes up short. You're reading, left to right, and then ZANG you have to jink upward. It's unnatural. Eyeflow is, as far as I'm concerned, as important in a typographic logo as it is in any textual context.
  2. The black type – red stripe – black type makes for a stable, ordered logo. Business-like. Presents a sober, serious image for a news-talk station, which is appropriate.
  3. I've not said too much about it before, but I like the Space Needle drawing. Or maybe I did say something about it, I don't know, but I can see why they'd be reluctant to let that go.
  4. The way the Space Needle graphic breaks out of the boundaries keeps the logo serious without becoming too locked-down and boring.
Of course, a logo watcher and aspiring designer is never ever satisfied. We can find fault literally anywhere.

On The Downside:
  1. Is it just me, or does that 7 look a little too thick to be with the 9, 3, and decimal point on the top?
  2. I still miss the dead-cleverness of the original logo. I admit it. Maybe I love these things a little too much.
So, kudos to KIRO for recognizing the problem with the stacked type and going with this approach. It's a logo that does the job that it was meant to do and doesn't make the eye regret looking at it and, in logo design as I know it, two outta three ain't bad.

Sometime soon I might redesign this logo just as a something-to-do, hypothetical project. I have wondered if I could do it better, in case anyone wonders.

H/t to Ben for the headsup.
 
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17 February 2010

[logo] Iconic Logo = A Ton Of Money? Depends.

2324.In an article at Logo Design Love I saw today, the blogger asks the following question:
Can we create a truly iconic logo without the backing of a very fat wallet?
And I'd say it depends on what you mean by create.

One of the most well-known and iconic logos from out of Oregon is, of course, the fabled Nike swoosh. Its creation is the stuff of serendipitous legend. The designer who created it, Carolyn Davidson was, as the record shows, a design student at PSU at the time who was billing Nike as a design consultant at the rate of $2/hour (remember that this was in Nike's "Blue Ribbon Sports" era, and the year was 1971. Even $2 went rather a bit further then than now).

The famous logo itself cost the embyonic Nike all of $35 – once again, in 1971 dollars (Using the neato-mosquito calculator at http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/, this is, by the CPI measurement, about $182 – still a bargain). Later, when Nike finally strode the Earth like Colossus, they had Carolyn to a company lunch where she was given a nifty ring with the Swoosh and a bunch of stock (the amount and value of which remain a secret, but I don't think it's presumptuous to assume that the amount was $A Whole Lot).

So, one world-renowned logo was obtained, at the front end, for $35 and the mad skills of one young designer.

Or did Nike's relationship with Weiden+Kenney and Michael Jordan – where a metric ass-ton of money was spent, rather profitably – create the icon? Or, if the Swoosh wasn't simple genius from the start, would it have been iconic from that point on? Or did that deft move merely give the icon its power?

It's a little like lightning striking. But I think as long as you have a solid design, lightning's more likely to strike. I'm sure anyone reading this can think of a handful of icons that had money and talent helicoptered in just to debut to a "meh" from the zeitgeist.

No matter how much money you spend, if you got a solid design, you just might go far. You've certainly improved your chances.

My advice: If you get your design work at a bargain – make sure you go back and thank the designer appropriately if it turns out that you make it big.

(I need not point out that the Nike logo is copyright Nike, yes?)

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[cartoon art] Everywhere I Look, I See Your Face ...

2323.One thing I remember Scott McCloud hinting on in one of his amazing books on comics is demonstrated very well here, with this picture from a blog I stumbled on, Emilia's Illustrated Blog (used with permission):



There's a lot to like about the illustration. The ladies thereon are simply very very pretty. The outfits are stylish and executed well. The drawings are, dare one says, sexy. But there's one surprising thing that might not stick out, and I'll give you all a closeup so you can see (if this missive's title didn't give it away):



You've caught it now if you've noticed that, aside from a different set of eyebrows on one and a redder shade of lips on same that the four faces are, in fact the same face. The girls are quadruplets!

This can be a very effective shortcut for the illustrator wanting to 'people' an illustration. I don't know about anyone else viewing the complete illustration, there's enough going on in the illustration that the similarities in the faces aren't immediately apparent.

This of course doesn't take away from the fact that the illustrator is rather talented. If you look around on her blog, you will see that she has the mad skillz. If you think of it as a tool, then there's simply an appropriate use, and this is the epitome of an appropriate use. I wouldn't base a comic strip on it, for instance, but as an illustrator's tool, it's magnificent.

The whole point is that the prospect of drawing multiple people – and a person is about the hardest thing you can draw realistically – can be intimidating. McCloud pointed out in one of his books (Making Comics, I think it was), essentially, that the range of things a face can do can be represented with a limited set of things. An open mouth can mean talking, yelling, yawning, and it kind of depends on the context. The four ladies above seem entirely different people – but it all has to do with the context: the hairstyles, the dresses, even the attitudes one reads into them.

Moreover, Emilia's use of this tool shows an understanding of the fundamentals of illustration design that only a true pro would aspire to.

Understand your context, and the proper tool will usually present itself.

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14 February 2010

[comic art] Why I Admire Barry Deutsch

2322.This illustration of Mirka's family from Hereville is a good example of why I admire his work so much:



It's hard to argue that there's true talent when such simple lines can weave such an emotional story in one single panel.

It doesn't matter what kind of family you grew up in … if you grew up in a family, and that includes most of us, this will resonate with you. It's human.


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11 February 2010

[branding] Quietus: Why It's Not Selling Well Amongst Film Buffs and PD James Fans

2321.So many things could be settled with a simple web search really.

If you listen to talk radio as much as I do (too much, according to The Wife™), you've heard of an OTC homeopathic home remedy for tinnitus called "Quietus".

Now, if there's anyone in the audience who saw the Curarón fillum Children of Men or the PD James novel The Children of Men, could you tell me what Quietus was in the movie?

It's not just me that's saying that:

But savvy film buffs and avid readers may recall that Quietus was a key element of both P.D. James' dystopian novel Children of Men, and the 2006 film adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón. In the book, Quiteus refers to government-sanctioned mass drownings that are available as an option to elderly citizens who can't afford nursing homes. In Cuarón's film, Quietus is a suicide pill that's freely advertised to residents of an overpopulated, financially disadvantaged future world. The drug's cheery ad line is "You decide when."

Now, I'm not saying I'm some marketing genius, and, as far as I know, the Quietus tinnitus OTC product is selling just fine. But I can't hear one of their commercials without thinking of the drug in Children of Men. And it's not so embarrassing, I suppose; the market seems to be quite forgiving; I remember Quark's rebranding about four years back, and the great one back in 2004 where Google didn't check to see if the mark "Gmail" wasn't already being used by a British financial firm (scroll to end of this article: http://www.pcworld.com/article/115586/googles_gmail_already_under_fire.html)

It's the power of branding, and why you should be ever-so-careful. And do at least one web search – and see what else comes up.

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[type] Shavian, An Alternative English Alphabet

2320.I've been doing a great deal of reading about shorthand scripts, and have found out a great deal about them. The biggest revelation is that shorthand, to work, has to – to some degree – abandon the alphabetic sytem of writing in favor of phonetic symbols.

What that means, of course, is that each glyph, character, or symbol might represent a sound instead of a letter with which you construct them. Gregg shorthand is, in my opinion, a very good illustrative example of this. When you write via Gregg, you put what you hear through two filters; the first discriminates the sounds, the second maps them to squiggly glyphs representing phonetic atoms rather than decodes them into the letter combinations which create the sounds. Speed is gained by efficiency in writing; the sound-based glyphs and brief forms dash down an entire word in a squiggle, loop, and dot.

Phonetic sounds are not just the province of the shorthand writer, however. Something that seems to fit between the glyphic discreteness of Latinate script and the squiggles of pure shorthand is something called the Shavian alphabet. This system, developed in the late 1950s-early 1960s, depends on new glyph forms having little if anything to do with the 26-character Latin alphabet we all know intimately. Moreover, each letterform maps to an individual English sound.

The legend seems to have it that, in his will, the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw left a monetary prize to be granted to the person who developed a phonetic alphabetic system for the writing of English that, since it was to depend on sounds rather than letters, would be a more efficient and economic way to write English and, since it was based on sounds, easier for the English learner to pick up the language. Originally it was to be developed by Sir Isaac Pitman, developer of the Pitman Shorthand system, but due to disuptes the Trustee opened it up to a worldwide competition. This was won by a Ronald Kingsley Read, who developed the first Shavian alphabet and was appointed its sole designer.

The Shavian alphabet is characterized by an inherent sense of order and logic. This (source) is the system that Kingsley Read developed and is known as the original Shavian script:




The Shavian alphabet comes in three basic types and a fourth auxiliary type. The first two types cover the consonants, and are called Tall (for unvoiced consonants) and Deep (for voiced consonants). The third time are Short letters, and cover the vowel sounds. The Compound (called "ah", "awe", "are", "or", "air", "err", "array", "ear", "ian", and "yew") are blends of two short sounds (except that last one there), and provide for what they call "rhotic" speakers, that is, those dialects that voice the "r" in the word "hard", for a fast example.

The eye will probably pick up right away that the Deep letters are 180-degree rotation of the Tall letters, and the short letters have mostly graphically reflective pairs. These sounds (with a few exceptions) are the voice-unvoiced versions of the same sound. Note also the pairs of tick marks between the letter pairs: they are all the height of a Short letter, or, as a typographer might say, "x-height". The graphical definition of a Tall letter is one which starts on the baseline and goes to ascender height; the graphical definition of a Deep letter is one which goes to the descender.

The real fun of Shavian (anything having to do with the playwright Shaw was called Shavian) is that, even though it's sounding out English, it looks so delightfully extraterrastrial. From Omniglot, here's the text of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:



The translation of which is:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Another thing about Shavian which is a great deal of fun is the letter names. You might have noticed that, in the letter list, a word typifing the sound made by each letter is displayed. That is the actual name of the letter. Reciting Shavian would go Peep, bib, tot, dead, kick, gig, fee, vow … all the way through to ian, yew.
That makes me feel kind of antic inside, in the good way.

The apparent hope of Shaw was that a library of publications would obtain after his death but challenges to the will assured that only one mass-market Shaw script publication would ever happen: A Shavian-Latin edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. But there is some interest in Shavian and it's infected me a little; I'd like to learn this along with any other shorthand system I take up – which will most likely be an attempt at Gregg.


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10 February 2010

[design] With This Business Card, Your Brand Will Be Locked 'n' Loaded

2319.(via) Ready to make your business card something James Bond might enjoy?

There seemingly is about half-a-million ways to make your business card memorable. As a graphic designer, even a rather unsuccessful one, I try to keep abreast of as many as I can, but I've never seen anything like this … A business-card penny-gun, with a 10-round magazine …




The thing is actually a card sandwich, with the middle layer (the impeller) being the thickness of a penny, and the outer layers being thicker for structural strength. The magazine is formed by a designed set of cuts which, when pressed up, form a place to hold the stack.

View Demo: at YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KNZZ9qDJtQ
Visit the Designer's Website: http://cardnetics.com/randd/pennyshooter.html for more angles and downloadable plans.

Sometimes self-promotional collateral is a labor-intensive proposition, but sometimes its worth it. I'll bet anyone you give this bit to will remember you.

This is a business card that will leave an impression … if you are reckless about it.

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[comics] Phil Foglio: "Girl Genius" Free Via The Web?

2318.Well, it is something that many might do, and some might succeed at, but of all the comic artists I've liked over the years, only Phil Foglio can do it as though he always knew the way it was supposed to be done, as he highlights here, in conversation with Brigid Alverson at the Robot 6 division of the Comic Book Resources website:

Girl Genius was an established book. We put out 14 issues as a comic book periodical. It came out on a regular basis, and as an independent comic book goes, it was doing pretty darn well: We were selling, like 9,000 copies. About a third of them we were selling retail, off of our website or at conventions, the other two-thirds we were selling through distributors like Diamond. In 2005 we just stopped printing the comics, and we took this already established property that we had been selling for money and put it online for free and said no firewall, no subscriptions, no nothing—we are giving it away.



First of all, printing comic books is expensive. I figured that by not having to do the comic book we were saving close to $20,000 a year. When you lay out a comic book and then lay out a graphic novel, it’s two entirely different jobs. You have to do it all over again. All we do now is sell the collections. Also, printing the comic was really expensive, and we were in a cash crunch at a particular time and we were like, “Is this really worth it?”

And thirdly, for years people had been coming up to me and saying “I would like to get into comics” and I had been saying “Screw comics. Do a webcomic. It’s the wave of the future and your production costs are super low,” and eventually I realized that instead of just giving this advice I should take it.

A lot of the success of Girl Genius I think could only have been done by a person like myself who had a long career building up an established name and being in independent publishing, because that meant I was publishing my own books. So when Girl Genius went online, we were able to sell people Girl Genius books from day one, whereas almost everybody, who starts a webcomic has to collect material before they get a book. It takes them sometimes up to two years before they can begin to monetize our core product. We went in with a functioning store, and all we had to do was say “Like it? Buy it now.”

I've seen a lot of opinion (and mockery) of those who choose the web comic route. There is one thing, however; as divine as I think printed 'zines are, the economics of web comics are such that all you need is an online connection and they're up. There are some costs, but when you look at it as a value-based proposition rather than from a price POV (not that that isn't important but someties it's a flawed perspective) it can stand to be a huge winner.

Phil's got something on all of us aspiring web-comickers though, and it's not just an undoubted talent – it's the strength of a brand. Phil's famous for wry, clever humor, a delicious visual style, and an sense of adventure that's taken him credibly from role-playing gaming (What's New with Phil and Dixie, sometimes the only reason to pick up the late TSR's periodical Dragon Magazine), through fantasy (Asprin's Myth Adventures), satirical Pythonesque SF (Buck Godot) and to a comic that, for me, redefines steampunk (Girl Genius). When you get something with Phil Foglio on the cover, you simply know you're going to be entertained. When you combine that with the Studio Foglio's aggregate talent, Phil and Kaja's publishing knowledge and his history, you've got an unbeatable brand. It almost can't lose.

If you want to become famous and make a few bucks from your comics, then, start making your reputation now, if you haven't already, and if all you can do is put 'em on the web, put 'em on the web. We have to make some step.

Read: Girl Genius by surfing to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Visit: Studio Foglio by surfing to http://www.studiofoglio.com/

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03 February 2010

[design] Just What IS "Basic Photoshop"?

2317.In exploring and using Photoshop, I find that people I know who have little experience and have acquired a copy of their own, say, an older version – Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2 – and want to start using them right away.

I've never pretended to guru status, but I do have a bit of training and experience in Photoshop and have always said that Photoshop is the pixel editing king for some very good reasons – most of which are hard to say but which unfold under use, one by one, like the petals of a blooming flower.

A couple of readers have recently asked me where an online place could be found to get beginners skills – they'd found a copy of Photoshop 7 and installed it but their eyes glazed over when they saw all the goodies. So I wondered, what would be the best things to let a tyro Photoshopper in on, the basic skills that would enable them to bootstrap themselves into basic Photoshoppery and thus the ability to explore the interface and use what they will?

The way I see it, the tyro Photoshopper needs to go in with the following toolkit:

  1. The Basic Paradigm of Photoshop: "Select it, then affect it". 99 per cent of what you're going to do in Photoshop reduces to this (well, if it's not 99 per cent, then it's a pretty good deal of it). Photoshop includes an armful of ways to select out what you want to change, and a seemingly unlimited bag of things you can do to those selections. A lot of the time you'll find yourself deciding what to do with a graphic, and excluding out the areas you don't want to mess up.
  2. Layers … Layers is what separates the pros (or wannabe pros) from the amateurs. Layers allow you to save copies of things you don't want to destroy, blend things with other layers, and non-destructively alter other parts of the photo or graphic. At the very least, layers allow you to orgranize parts informatively, and with the sprawling nature of some projects, the value there can't be ignored.
  3. The Basic Tools. To me, these are any thing that selects, in this case, anything that creates a marquee, brushes, and the path tool. Coming out of the "select is and effect it" paradigm then it follows that, out of the toolbox, your best friend is anything that will create a marquee – the basic selection medium. Knowing about marquees equips you to understand what you're doing with quick-masking and the Magic Wand, to use two examples, and the brush, being the basic tool for making marks, transfers into other tools (quick-mask uses a brush-approach). The Path tool, illustrated like a pen, works just like the pen in Illustrator, and paths can be converted into selections, saved – I love paths.
  4. How To Select Colors. You came to Photoshop to work in color, or most of you did. Understanding how colors are selected and saved should be considered a basic skill
Those are my basics. I wonder what other Photoshoppers consider basic?

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02 February 2010

[pdx] Jabari Wants Matt Zaffino's Job

2316.
He's coming for you, Zaffino:



You might have years of forecasting experience and a college degree, but Jabari is adorable.

He's on your heels, Matt!

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[design] 20 Years Of Photoshop, In Pictures

2315.
We're, the most of us, so used to how Adobe Photoshop is, that we, the some of us, wonder how it was. While the interface has remained constant in the gestalt, it's changed in presentation details and, of course, looks. From then:



To now:



And each release inbetween. To take a trip down Photoshop Memory Lane, visit http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/20-years-of-adobe-photoshop/

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[liff] What Will You Find Under A Bridge, But Troll Avenue? (Seattle)

2314.Tipped off by an offhand comment Benjamin Lukoff left on the César E Chávez Blvd, I paid a virtual visit to That City Up North to see if I could see something.

Legend has it, trolls live under bridges. Seattle, like PDX, has many bridges; and like PDX, in more than a few cases, the approach to the bridge is as a viaduct built over the street it debouches onto, creating a sort of "under-street" over which the bridge forms a ceiling. There are five blocks of this under the east approaches to the Morrison and Hawthorne Bridges, for instance, and SE Morrison, SE Belmont, SE Hawthorne Blvd, and SE Madison St run beneath them as streets open to traffic.

The George Washington Memorial Bridge, or the Aurora Bridge in the local parlance because it unites the sections of Aurora Avenue north and south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, has several blocks of Aurora Avenue N under the bridge on the north side. It's said the Fremont Troll lived or lives there, and a great amazing statue of him (clutching a real VW Beetle) was constructed there in his honor.

So, too, was the street under the bridge so named, apparently in 2005, Troll Avenue N.

Google Maps Street View, looking west on N. 34th Street:



Right in the middle of the bridge, at the pier foot there, is the sign:



Once again, I do like the design of the Seattle street blades, though they aren't using Clearview. No time like the present, New York Alki!

Keep it weird, Seattle. That's why we love you.

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01 February 2010

[aaaa] Aaaa Aa Aaaaaa - A!

2313.A Aaaaa aaaa a aaaaa aaa aaa. Aaaaa aaaa a aaaaaa aa aaaa a aaa! Aaaa. Aaaaaa aaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaa aaa aa, aaaaa – aaaa AaaaAaa – aaaa, Aaaa. Aaaa? Aaaa. Aaa aaaa aaaaaa aaa aaa aaaa aaaa aaaaaaaaa aa aaaaa aaa. Aaaa aaaa aaa aaaaaaaa! Aaaaa (aaaa, aaaaaa, aaa) aaaa aaaaaa … aaaaa? AAAAAAA. Aaaa, aaaaa aaaaaa, aaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa. aaaa.

Aaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaa aaaa a aaaaaa. A.A.A.A. aaa aaaaaa aa aaa aaaaaaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaaaa aaaa. Aaaaaa aaa aaaaaa aa. Aaaaaa:

Aaaaa, aaaa. Aaaaaa – aaaaaa – Aaaaaaaa. Aaaaa, aaaa a aaaaaaa aaaa aaaaa. Aaaaaaa aaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaaa aaa aaaa aaaaa aaa a Aaaaa A Aaaaa, AA Aaaaaa, aaa Aaa Aa'Aaaa. AAA! Aaaaa aaa, aaaa … aaaa. AAAA, AAA, AAAAA. Aa aaaa aaaa aa aaa aaa aaa aaa aaaa AaaaAaaaa.

Aaaa, aaaa aaaa. Aaaa. Aaaaa aaaa aaaa aa:
  1. AAAAA. Aaaa aaa aaaaaa aaa – aaaa aaaa aaa Aaaaaa.
  2. AAAA AAA AAAA. Aaaaa aaa aaa, aaa aa aaaaaa – aaaaaa.
  3. AAAA AA A'AAAA. AAAA. Aaaaa, aaaa aaa aaaaaaa aaa aaaa.
A, aaaa aaaa aaaaa aaa aa a aaaaaaaaaaa aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaaaa a aaaaa aa aaaaaaaa aaa. A.A.A.A. aaaaaaaa, aaaa, aaa, aa aaaaa! Aaa, aaaaaa. Aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa. Aaaaa aaaa a aaaaaa aa aaaa a aaa! A aaaa aaaa aaaaa aaa. Aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaaaaaaa, aaaa aaaa aaaa.

… aaaaaa aa aaaa a aaa! Aaaaa:

Aaaaa (aaaa, aaaaaa, aaa) aaaa aaaaaa … aaaaa? AAAAAAA. Aaaa, aaaaa aaaaaa, aaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa. aaaa.

AAAAA! AAAAA!



Aaaaa aaaa a aaaaa aaa aaa. Aaaaa aaaa a aaaaaa aa aaaa a aaa! Aaaa. Aaaaaa aaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaa aaa aa, aaaaa. Aaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaa aaaa a aaaaaa. A.A.A.A. aaa aaaaaa aa aaa aaaaaaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaa aaaa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaaaa aaaa. Aaaa aaaa aaaa aaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaa aaa aaa.

Aaaaa: aaa, aaaa aaaa Aaaa? Aaaaa:


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30 January 2010

[pdx] Presenting The César E Chávez Blvd Blades (with Bonus Beech Street)

2312.As I mentioned yesterday, I was going to have César E Chávez Blvd blades for posting today. And I do try to live up to my promises. Here we go.

The unveiling and a ceremony happened in front of the Central Christian Church, 1844 SE César E Chávez Blvd, at the cross street of SE Stephens Street. Across the street is another church, the Temple of Praise, and nothing against the Central Christian Church, but it made a much more attractive backdrop (and it was easier to lens the pics from the former's parking lot, actually …)



The new Blades are the recently-evolved Type 3's, and the same sensitivity to leading, kerning, and tracking are evident. That's still a good looking Clearview sign, dang it!



The type is the right size, easy to read, aware of its baselines, and the generic and the block index align very nicely. This is a tightly-designed piece.



The signs will co-exist on SE 39th Avenue for the next five years, as per standard PDX practice. The buzz I heard (I thought it was via Mayor Sam's twitter stream, but I'm wrong, it seems) is that they'll come down and be sold or auctioned off for charity's sake. I'll look for confirmation of that.

Despite the ballyhoo of the signs being installed "from Hollywood to Hawthorne", they were only installed at one place each in Hollywood and Hawthorne. The above is Hawthorne's intstallation. The following two are from the so-far sole Hollywood installation, the overheads at the Broadway/Sandy/39th plenum, just north of the Banfield Freeway:



This is the overhead looking west on NE Broadway from CEC. Yet another evolution for Portland street blades: The overhead blade looks like the car-level blade – note the formatting of the generic and the block index, and the directional:



A very high-information sign, indeed. If you go south on NE 37th Avenue, just a couple blocks west, and approach the traffic distrbutor that encourages you to choose either Halsey Street eastbound or CEC soutbound, you'll now notice the directional sign points to César E Chávez Blvd South, and they're all in Clearview now.

Yes, I luves Clearview. Sosumi. I'm a type obsessive as well as a street blade obsessive.

Moreover, the inclusion of the accute accents impart a definited sense of sophistication. One of the things I regret about English is no diacritics, no umlauts, no accents. Well, just write about CEC Blvd, and you have them (Fellow sign obsessive Ben Lukoff also reacted positively, and he, too, has a good eye).

Oh, yes, the bonus: the Type 3s are up at the corner of NE 57th Ave and Beech Street, too:






Actually, this is along the side of 57th along the cemetery fence, but you can't miss it. An embarrassment of riches today, for sure – history no matter which way you look at it, and attractive, grown-up-city street blades slowly but surely populating the best city in the world … my home, Portland, in the state of my birth, Oregon.

O yea.

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29 January 2010

[liff] Gang Aft Agley - César E. Chávez Blvd Pix To Come Tomorrow

2311.As I tweeted and announced on @SJPKDX and facebook.com/samueljohnklein earlier today:

They're hanging the first Cesar E. Chavez Blvd sign today, at the corner of CEC/39th and SE Stephens Street in Portland. I'm planning on being there with a camera to get the first pictures on line - if possible.

As it turned out, not possible. Such is the gentle tyranny of having a third-shift job in 10-hour shifts. I did get straight home, straight to bed, and didn't wake up until after 1 pm. Sic transit gloria.

But I did get a report from KGW-TV to share with y'alls. Here it is:





It gives you a good idea of what the overhead signs look like, and they most likely look a great deal like the street-level blades.

Of particular and delightful interest is the accent marks over the vowels e in César and a in Chávez. In Spanish, these indicate which syllable is to be stressed and, I understand, only occurs over the vowel. Presumably, this is why we pronounce the name SAY-sar SHA-vez instead of say-SAR cha-VEZ. What's delightful about it is that, as Ben from Seattle tweeted at me, they don't have those on Seattle's street blades – and I've always felt Seattle's were a bit more sophisticated than Portland's.

Well, that's the genius of Clearview. FHWA sign fonts apparently don't have this standard.

I better stop writing or I'll have nothing to accompany the pix with. Tomorrow morning, when I'm on my way home from that third-shift job, I'll trip on down to 39th/CEC Blvd and get some pics for the files which I will perforce share here, and the taking of which will be unencumbered by having to rush through Friday traffic and not getting enough shut-eye.

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