I made this poster for an event next week which brings people together to discuss transportation issues in Louisville. They don’t know it, but I was inspired by Paul Rand, putting the cruciform to use in the overarching shape of the text. In his book A Designer’s Art he discusses the power of symbolism in design, and shows examples from his own work having used the cruciform. I don’t think the poster would’ve worked well at all without this, even as subtle as it is. It was screenprinted by Monkey Drive.

Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being aesthetic. No matter how useful it is for special and limited ends, it will not be useful in the ultimate degree — that of contributing directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life.

As people increasingly rely on Internet dictionaries and other online reference works, it seems that passing down an ancestral book will become more and more of a rarity and that keeping older versions of these books will become exclusively the province of the professional and the persnickety. Although who knows? Perhaps one day a child shown a dictionary will be told, “This is the very same HTML that your grandfather read when he was your age.”

Setting expectations low leaves little room for disappointment, and therefore could be said the best way to go; setting high expectations might ruin the whole occasion. And so this is our dilemma. My only conclusions are humility and patience. There are other times when expectations are set ambiguously, thus misunderstood, and I have the same conclusions about that, too.

For the first time in two years my job feels like a real job. I leave the house in the morning, and at the end of the day I come home. My day hours are focused on being at work, and doing work. And when I come home, home is a haven, a place for housework and family and rest. Anyone who has made this transition before will tell you that working at home is not as dreamy as once thought. I can attest to this. Working at home is hard. The line between work and home is always blurry. Coffee shops never helped me.

For two weeks now I’ve been working in an office on Frankfort Avenue with good friend Paul Disney. The simple difference of having a place to go to to do work is enormous, the benefits incalculable. I’m very thankful for this and I highly recommend it.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do to a printed block of justified type is found in section 9.4.1 of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. (The good graphic designer will tote this as his bible if he does not have it memorized.) It’s a simple rule:

Good justification is calculated paragraph by paragraph instead of line by line. And the best computer justification now relies on microscopic adjustments to the space between and within the letters as well as the space between the words. In this book, for example, the justification engine has been permitted to vary the intercharacter spacing by ±3% and to adjust the width of individual glyphs by ±2%. The bulk of the work is still done by adjusting the spaces between words, but there are more letters than spaces in these lines. Tiny adjustments to spaces within and between the letters therefore go a long way toward creating a page of even color and texture.

“A page of even color and texture” is what we’re after here, which makes a much more pleasant reading experience. In Adobe InDesign CS3, these adjustments look like this (click to see it bigger):

Below are before and after examples using the same adjustment allowances Bringhurt used in his book (±3% intercharacter spacing, ±2% glyph scaling).

Before

After

I use this simple rule in all my printed work where justified type is used. Whether or not people know what it is, they see the difference. In our day of digital Word Processing, precision details like this are what bestow us the honor of charging money to set type.

You can’t defy the laws of physics or building codes, but beyond that, the possibilities are endless.”

He’s quoted about his work in a NYT article, One Man’s Trash. He builds homes for low-income folks using “mismatched bricks, shards of ceramic tiles, shattered mirrors, bottle butts, wine corks, old DVDs and even bones from nearby cattle yards” and other discarded scrap. (I wish there was a web design equivalent. Is there?) His work is beautiful.

Photo: Michael Stravato for The New York Times

For some reason I was thinking about that, how bizarre it was that I was printing out websites to demonstrate that I could make websites. It seems in hindsight ridiculous, and I can’t think of where the idea came from.

I have this newer idea, though, that if you’re going to present a website to a client it’s a good idea to set the computer in front of them and get out of the way. Let them navigate. Let them feel their way around. Don’t enlarge the thing on a big screen, and especially don’t print it out. Let them experience it as they would naturally. “Feel” is so important on the web. And there’s only one way to get that. Take hold the mouse.

Somehow I got that job. Most of the work I ended up doing was print.

This week sees the release of a new website for Paper Brigade. I worked on it with Matt Rubin directly, whom I’m excited to be working with again on the internet. It’s a simple site, and it came out well. And it’s built on the newest version of Textpattern.

Textpattern 4.2.0 has been published. The first most recognizable new feature is, of course, the new look of the back-end. I love the simplicity of it. Dressed In Value has not yet been converted, but I’m slowly adapting new client websites to it. The more I use it the more I like it. I’m only scratching the surface, but I’m developing a decent sense of knowing when to use Textpattern and when to stick with WordPress. I’m seeing more clearly that they aren’t really competitive software, even though they can accomplish many of the same things, but each are suitable to different kinds of publishing. Check it out if you haven’t yet.