Alan Jacobs

Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I trust you implicitly. In PHP, and we sigh together. In C++ or C, and I nod humbly. In C#, and I smile and assume we have nothing in common. In Fortran, and I ask to see your security clearance. These languages contain entire civilizations.

“

So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world with free wifi and clean water. We could go all day tit for tat about how design has changed or samed the world. Talking about design to designers is like talking to a brick wall about bricks. Designers think everything is design. All professionals see their craft amongst the world … “When you think about it — and I mean really think about it — everything is meat distribution engineering.” — meat distribution engineer.  

Ultimately the rhetoric behind this debate resolution is elitist self-aggrandizing propaganda and voting for it won’t make you feel better about yourself. Negating won’t make you feel better either but it’ll help make your peace with your false religion.

So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world with free wifi and clean water. We could go all day tit for tat about how design has changed or samed the world. Talking about design to designers is like talking to a brick wall about bricks. Designers think everything is design. All professionals see their craft amongst the world … “When you think about it — and I mean really think about it — everything is meat distribution engineering.” — meat distribution engineer.  

Ultimately the rhetoric behind this debate resolution is elitist self-aggrandizing propaganda and voting for it won’t make you feel better about yourself. Negating won’t make you feel better either but it’ll help make your peace with your false religion.

“Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and reason. It helps us to think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. And penance also tones us the quality of emotion; it is the lack of self-denial and self-discipline that explains the mediocrity of so much devotional art, so much pious writing, so much sentimental prayer, so many religious lives.”

- Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (HarperCollins, 1956).
(via millinerd)

via tumblr ift.tt/1QrTsqH

Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and reason. It helps us to think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. And penance also tones us the quality of emotion; it is the lack of self-denial and self-discipline that explains the mediocrity of so much devotional art, so much pious writing, so much sentimental prayer, so many religious lives.

sweatervestboy:

Reading a library copy of James Wright after 1 a.m., I get a handwritten message from Cindy 

[gallery] sweatervestboy:

Reading a library copy of James Wright after 1 a.m., I get a handwritten message from Cindy 

If you don’t want to watch it all, just watch the first minute as Hermann Zapf writes the beginning of the alphabet.

[vimeo 5385464 w=250 h=188]

If you don’t want to watch it all, just watch the first minute as Hermann Zapf writes the beginning of the alphabet.

austinkleon:

Paul Bacon, 91, Whose Book Jackets Drew Readers and Admirers, Is Dead

“He didn’t see himself as a sensitive artist; he was there to serve,” said Mr. Gottlieb, who worked with Mr. Bacon for many years. “If you rejected the first one, he was happy to do a 10th one. We worked and worked until it was right.” […]

When describing his approach to design, Mr. Bacon said he had learned to subordinate his own aesthetic impulses to convey the main concept of a book. “I always tell myself: ‘You’re not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off,’ “ he said in an interview with Print magazine in 2002.

Here’s a nice appreciation from Steven Heller: 

[W]hen you look at Bacon’s jackets en masse, you realize you’re looking at a history of late-20th century commercial book cover design, a virtual legacy of eclectic lettering, illustration and typography prior to the digital revolution. Bacon was, after all, a product of an era of hand-drawn lettering, and type that was cut and pasted in order to achieve precise spacing. While this sounds archaic in a time when layered Photoshop imagery is the order of the day, Bacon’s work was appealing precisely for its handcrafted precision (as well as minor imperfections) and spot-on conceptual acuity that evoked the story rather than isolated passage.

That’s one helluva portfolio. RIP.