Falling back in love

Something interesting happened this week. I feel like I fell back in love with graphic design.

Somewhere along the way got disenchanted, I got interested in other things, I got burnt-out. Looking at typefaces didn’t excite me the way it used to. Suddenly conversations about design styles and possibilities—conversations I used to live for—didn’t interest me anymore. I’d find myself thinking, “Is it even worth anymore?”

But this week, my passion seemed to return. I think there are a few things I can attribute this to:

  • Jason Santa Maria’s great interview on the Happy Monday Podcast energized me in a way I hadn’t felt in a while. Pair that with his other interview on The Gently Mad where he waxes poetic on typefaces for a while and I realized what I had been missing.

  • I’d been reading Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job this week and though the book isn’t really about designing it is about caring for your craft. I wanted to care again.

  • Experimental Jetset released their new identity for the Whitney Museum. I’ve done very little work in identity design so it always seems to impress me the most, especially when it’s so thoughtfully executed. This is one of those projects that makes me sit back and go, “Man, I want to design something like that.”

  • The Newsweek.com redesign completely knocked me on the floor. In school, I thought I’d head towards a career in editorial design. Somewhere I got turned around and have made a career on the web. Seeing a site that blends these two paths so wonderfully gets me excited about the possibilities.

I firmly believe that what you look for, you will find. Maybe I was looking for something to help me fall back in love with design. I’m not really sure, but I know I found it. It was a good week for design. It was the kind of week I needed, one full of reminders why I’ve always loved this gig, sometimes I just get distracted. Thanks for helping me find my way back.

“That’s all anyone wants from anything else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I think you need to be a little in love—not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps—but to be in love with the reality of your own life in order to produce beautiful and meaningful and intelligent things creatively.”
Maria Popova, from this fantastic interview on The Great Discontent

You Learn

A poem by Jorge Luis-Borges, whose birthday would have been today:

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,

And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,

And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,

And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure…

That you really are strong

And you really do have worth…

And you learn and learn…

With every good-bye you learn.

Love, Love Love - Of Monsters and Men

“I think most people find it difficult to hear criticisms of things they love. We often translate “I do not like X” into “you are a moron for loving X”.”
Erin Kissane, How to Kill a Troll

The Task of Art

Jorge Luis Borges:

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

“Copy everything until you hit upon your own personal style. Do it because you love it, not because it’s a job.”
Colin Johnson

Tweets about phones, humans, and friends

Alain de Botton on Twitter last night:

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

Then he added another a few minutes later:

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Which reminds me of Scott Simpson’s tweet from a few years ago:

My new standard of cool: when I’m hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever.

Amen.

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” —Iris Murdoch A sign Milton Glaser has hanging in his studio.

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” —Iris Murdoch

A sign Milton Glaser has hanging in his studio.

“Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.”
Ansel Adams in a letter to his friend Cedric Wright.
“He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all of that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.”
From Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Merry

Seth Godin:

You can’t be merry by yourself.

Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that’s sharing the same molecules of air, face to face.

The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at increasing merriment. That’s up to us.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’m disconnecting for a few days to spend time with the people I love. I wish the same for you and hope you find merriment this season.

Time, Love

Summer is starting to wind down and big changes are afoot. It’s been a while since I made a new mix so now seemed like a fitting time.

It’s called Time, Love and it’s about change. It’s about celebrating your histories and meeting your future. It’s about love and hope and fear and letting go and jumping in with both feet.

You can listen to it here.

Here’s the track listing:

  1. Ready to Start - Arcade Fire
  2. It’s About Time - Barcelona
  3. Swim Until You Can’t See Land - Frightened Rabbit
  4. Welcome Home, Son - Radical Face
  5. Change of Time - Josh Ritter
  6. Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise - The Avett Brothers
  7. Cologne - Ben Folds
  8. I Don’t Want Love - The Antlers
  9. Civilian - Wye Oak
  10. That Home - Cinematic Orchestra
  11. Driveway - Great Northern
  12. Poor in Love - Destoyer
  13. Sooner Than Later - Sixpence None the Richer
  14. Can’t Go Back Now - The Weepies
  15. Say Yes - Elliott Smith
  16. Younglife - Anberlin
  17. Birdhouse - Riley Armstrong
  18. Rubik’s Cube - Athlete
“Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife”

—Eadweard Muybridge, to his wife’s lover shortly before shooting him.

Muybridge is, of course, more known being the photographer who first explored motion photography, most notably with his famous galloping horse prints. Who knew he had such a dramatic life?

(via)

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