Opinions. Now with Audio.

If you’ve ever wondered just exactly how nerdly I sound in person, now you can find out. Yesterday I was interviewed by a very cool young woman for a very cool radio show in Kansas City. And was just tremendously honored to share the airwaves with Mr. Sull, too. Check it out on the KCUR site here. And here’s the direct link to the audio mp3.

More Than Ugly

Stupid, Too

Watching the Series, I was struck by the resurgence of what I’d thought were Dookie ropes*, inexplicably now brightly colored and popular for some reason with baseball players.

But no. These aren’t just garish Dookies (and it’s pretty hard to garish up a Dookie**). They’re pseudoscientific claptrap, too.

From the product page:

This necklace features Phiten’s Phild processed Aqua-Titanium, which has the ability to regulate the body’s natural electric currents through cell ionization

Promotes muscle relaxation, pain and stress relief, fatigue reduction, blood circulation improvement thus helping prevent injury.

And we know this because they told us.

There’s otherwise zero scientific research to support it. Wired has a good article on it, but come on – Wired? The sports blogs I admittedly didn’t delve too deeply into seem to take it at face value, which is a bummer. Even worse is the Washington Post taking no stance whatsoever, doing no research, and generally skipping the whole journalism thing.***

It’s not just that they’re selling a nickel’s worth of whatever for 50 bucks. These things are flacked all over MLB.com, and after all the steroid outcry we immediately get this stupid shit. We’re practically begging kids to believe snake oil pitches, or at least accept them uncritically in the name of fashion. I know there’s a limit to what we can expect sports to do, especially when it comes to kids, but they do emulate the guys in the bigs, even if they don’t canonize them like they used to. But does MLB have to promote bad science? I wish they’d just have taken the claptrap off of the product descriptions. If kids want to wear ugly necklaces, fine. Ugly necklaces that actively promote stupidity is kind of enraging.

Uploaded by mr427at

* If I were a different person, in a different life, I would wear a Dookie rope, and wear it unironically.

** Why yes, I do love saying Dookie. Dookie dookie dookie!

*** If newspapers are dying it’s because they’ve stopped doing their jobs. Seriously, if this is the Washington Post, would it matter if it was gone?

Hooray for Football, Pt. 6

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, aka brain degeneration from repeated concussions. All that and it’s boring too!

From the LA Weekly:

“Most CTE sufferers die from either suicides or accidental overdoses,” he says. “CTE is responsible for most, if not all, of the absurd behavior these players show.”

Hooray for Football, pt. 5

I’ve always suspected as much, but research shows (and this time it’s actual journalistic research, although Cracked beat ‘em to the conclusions in a satirical way) that the average football game has just 11 minutes of action. The rest is people standing around.

The knock on baseball, from people who like to make pointless dualities like baseball vs. football, is that it’s a whole lot of guys just standing around. Which is true, apart from the pitcher-batter duel, which is what makes baseball interesting to many baseball fans. But it turns out the football is just as boring.

Judged by the metric of continuous battle and physical play, the best sport would have to be cycling. It’s best viewed on television (it’s tremendously exciting first hand, but you can’t really get the overall feel of the race), and it combines team and individual competition. Kind of surprising that it’s not more popular here. After all, cycling practically invented the steroid scandal, there are plenty of colorful logos on the uniforms (just like NASCAR!), and it can be quite dangerous. What’s not to like?

The New Art Directors Club Logo is Total Dogshit

The '90's called - they want Franklin Gothic Back

No, it isn’t. It’s not that bad, really. Smack dab in the middle of the road, sure. Boring, even? Yes. But this isn’t about the boring, middle-of-the-road choices that were made, or whether it’s better than Paula Scher’s previous logo. This is about how they screwed up the execution.

The r-t letterspacing is, however, total dogshit.

I don’t know why, but everyone seems afraid to properly letterspace the r-t connection. It’s as though there’s a force field keeping them from ever touching. It’s tricky, I’ll admit, but there are at least two strategies for letterspacing a word with a lower case r-t. This dogshit is now a teachable moment. And we’ll all pause to vomit at the term “teachable moment.”

Option 1:

One option is to keep the force field in place. It’s a bad option, but if you are the sort of a person who, like a chaperone at the junior prom, just is not gonna ever have no letters touching, then go with it. All it means is that the overall tracking will be a little wider.

No Touching Allowed

You should treat letterspacing as negative space, not linear spacing between the letterforms themselves. So, if we’re keeping the r-t space (the black line above), we realize how that affects the space between the outer edges of the r and t (the green rectangles above). It’s a difficult area to translate to the other negative spaces in your word, and there’s lots of room for individual interpretation. But it will help pull your mark together into a cohesive design. Unlike the original, which looks like a gap-toothed hillbilly.

A Comparison - Mine on top, original in pink, wider tracking in yellow.

Above, a comparison, with the r-t space used as a guide for the rest of the tracking in the mark. The yellow is mine, the pink, original.

Option 2 – a.k.a. the better option:

This one connects the r and t, and allows for a tighter tracking across the mark.

Tighter is better.

It requires a little drawing and a little finesse, but it works much better. Nontrivially better. Because I do think the tighter tracking in the original is the better way to go. So, don’t be afraid to have the r and the t touch. Even though, if you compared the r in Art with the one in Director, they’d look different, they are similar enough that the difference disappears. The thing about tricks like this is that, generally, people don’t notice the little cheats. They notice that everything works together better, perhaps in ways they can’t articulate, but better.

A Comparison - Mine on top, narrower tracking in yellow, original in pink.

But not to be a total curmudgeon, there is some nice craftsmanship. I’m not sure if they used a different digitization of Franklin than mine, or if it was custom made, but it’s a nice version. I especially like the rounded joins (rather than the angled join shown in the blue circle below) and overall character. Frequently, in a logotype, I’ll sand those edges off, too, because it’s just nicer and adds a little craft to what could otherwise look like just another typed-in word. So, they get some points for the subtleties.

Rounder is often nicer.

BTW, I redrew everything in like, nine seconds (because I’m not getting paid to do it), so, yes, it’s not perfect. (Man oh man, the trolls have made me preëmptively defensive. Thanks, trolls). Anyway.

Oba-meh, Update 2

Originally uploaded by prettyfnmess

Integrity is something I’ve been thinking about lately. Also dignity. And my thought is that these are things that have gone the way of the mimeograph.

Writing the words up there, they even sound quaint, if not stupid and ridiculous in the way that kvetching about the modern world makes you feel like a grumpy, out-of-touch old man (and old people are no good at everything).

There are several threads involved in this (which is how my brain works for better or worse) including:

• that the bar for celebrity has now been lowered to a point that we can be famous for… well I was going to say willingness to embarrass ourselves on camera, but I’m not even sure what this person has done;
• sub rosa shilling for companies via personal essays (now regulated by the FCC and who even remembers that once, product placement in a novel was grounds for much sturm und drang?);
• that we never apologize for anything (“sorry if someone was offended,” and “lapses in judgement” are not apologies);
• and, to get back on topic, Shepard Fairey. But I should keep this simpler and just go with the Fairey thing.

My point with the other things was that integrity seems to boil down to saying “no” to money; to there being some one thing at least that is, at bottom, not for sale. Or some one instance where you will forgo money that you could’ve taken, just because it’s the honorable (another dusty word) or at least fair thing to do. Which all seems like anachronism these days. It’s money and money is good!

Why would anyone ever say no to money? Which is why I’m wondering if dignity and integrity have any place at all in a country that has seemingly eliminated the last vestiges of “society” and now operates purely in an “economy.” But anyway.

So Fairey lied in his court documents and destroyed evidence and his lawyers have now abandoned the case. Which is something I did not expect to happen. He was (imo) hiding behind a mendacious concept of fair use to defend his image theft and the resulting badly-rendered (also popular) poster, although that was to’ve been a matter for the courts.

That he’s a cheesy copycat* is one thing. That he’d go so far to manipulate the case this badly is another thing entirely, and something I never saw coming.

The point about integrity might be something like this: if he had just paid the photographer – forgoing, really, a miniscule percentage of whatever money he’s gotten from the poster (he says none, but he’s said a lot of things that aren’t accurate) none of this would’ve happened and he could continue blithely LiveTracing photos for Nike** and whatnot (why is he called a “street artist” again?). So that’s your economic argument for doing the right thing. Hooray! We still live in an economy.

Here’s a link to the AP’s story (and bear in mind that it’s the AP reporting on a lawsuit against the AP, so, you know).

* Do click that link. Glaser rocks.

** Ugh, that’s so horrible. And it’s in my neighborhood.

Hooray for Football, pt.4

Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head.

Looks like Gladwell‘s getting his ideas* from this blog now. Or maybe I’m just part of the tipping point.

Idle Speculations:

Originally Uploaded by Creativemonkey

• Gladwell views head injury as implicit in the game of football, and I’m tempted to agree, but I also wonder how much helmets have to do with it. There is research showing that cyclists take more risks when they’re wearing helmets, feeling somewhat more immortal with the protection (anecdotally, I know I sure as shit do – at least until I frighten myself enough to take it easy). Which is not to say that cyclists shouldn’t wear helmets, just that it’s complicated.

  Watching Gladwell’s slide show, I wonder how much the head-on attack style comes from having such a convenient battering ram in the form of that hard plastic globe on top. Would there be as much injury if they were wearing the old leather helmets (okay, I just wanted to button up that cool image of the football player – I don’t really think they should go back to leather)?

• That said, do rugby players (unhelmeted) suffer as many head injuries? I do not know. But helmets don’t help them, according to this study.

*Except with, you know, reporting and analysis and other stuff beyond my trademark lazy, blank ranting. By which I mean of course he isn’t getting his ideas here. But still. Hooray for football!

Hooray for Football, pt.3

I’d thought this was going to be a one-off rant, but the awesomeness of football is unstoppable.

It’s, of course, “everything that is wrong with America,” as one blogger put it. It kills children. And now it gives you Alzheimer’s.

You might think that’d be enough to doom an activity to the fringe subcultures lurking in the darker corners of craigslist, but add to that the actual experience of watching it (as reported by the fine journalists at Cracked) and it’s kind of amazing that we’d all watch (and love!) something so boring. Yes, it’s violent. We love violence. But other than that, what’s the appeal? That I do not know the answer makes me feel like an alien.

From cracked.com

Zombie Mall

I’m jammed with deadlines this week, so I probably won’t get to more Fortune until next week. In the meantime, here’s a zombie mall I found, outside Sacramento. Click the photo to go to a slideshow.

The Dude is Us

I know they’re gone, but with Cheney’s torture tour it seems less and less like it. And seriously, Cheney has to know that he’s admitted committing war crimes, doesn’t he? He has to. Why else would he be pushing so hard to make his torture decisions seem vital to the continued existence of the United States? Protesting too much would be the phrase, I think.

But anyway, walking around the produce aisle, it struck me that we’re all living in the Coen’s world now –  (this is part glib blog post bullshit, but also part of a different rant that movie critics don’t know how to approach their movies – more on that, probably, later, maybe) specifically the Big Lebowski. 

Cheney is Walter

• The war fetish, minus actual service; a love of the dark side; ability to obtain human toes on demand).

 

Donny is Bush

• Out of his element.

And the Dude? We’re all the Dude.

• Exasperated. Reduced to parroting the patriotic sayings (this aggression will not stand).  Trying to get on with our lives, but constantly frustrated.

I suppose you could make the argument that Larry (the kid with the homework) is Iraq? Maybe? The big Lebowski, maybe the oil producing nations? I don’t know – it’s not perfect. How about Lebowski’s assistant as the Republican party? Any thoughts? Who are the nihilists? And the Jesus?