Ballardian Plastics

Creepy - but don't have nightmares. This is from a fascinating article about JG Ballard's typographical experiments, which can be found here.

The Joy of Low-Tech

Call it a minor investment. This is my recently-acquired Salter portable postal weighing scale. Why anyone would want a portable postal weighing scale, I don't know - maybe there are places where accurately weighing your items to within 10g in order to select the correct postage is illegal (probably in a country where MC Escher is prime minister). But it was relatively cheap - I think about £6 - and it looks dinkily functional, like a distant relative of something Dieter Rams might have created on his lunch break.

New Greetings Cards

I've also, after much deliberation, begun selling sets of cards taken directly from my portrait prints series. In each set you'll get five cards & envelopes, the cards featuring either Jacques Tati (pictured), George Orwell, Dylan Thomas or Oscar Wilde, depending on which one you buy. I may do others, we'll see how these ones go first.

Have a look at them in the shop.

Recession Books

Inspired by my love of the great Penguin Books cover designs of the 1940s, I've created a series of prints showing how classic literature might look if it were subject to the same cutbacks that everything else seems to be undergoing in the present financial calamity. Finding a way to laugh at problems is a good starting point for dealing with them, I find. That's my approach here.

Anyway, check them out in the shop.

Three Portraits

Time to round up the new portrait prints I've recently finished (and which are now available here).

First up is James Joyce. Yes, I remember well the outsized Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses that used to sit awkwardly among the other paperbacks on my bookshelves. Carrying it in a bag felt like I was carrying not a book but an object, some kind of talisman... something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in fact - a massive encyclopaedic encapsulation of life and customs written from a very partial (and very funny) point of view. Though it's set in (and all about) Dublin, Joyce wrote the bulk of it (all of it?) in exile in various cities in continental Europe (Trieste being one such city). Putting your subject matter at arm's length can certainly help the creative process (especially the story-making, exaggerating process), but it's interesting to note that Joyce frequently wrote to friends 'back home' to ask them for details about this place or that place to ensure his very particular form of accuracy. Crowdsourcing, as it were. There's nothing new in rock 'n' roll, as they say.

Next is Harold Pinter. Here's my claim to fame, if you can call it that: I once stood on Harold Pinter's big toe. Waiting in a theatre foyer Somewhere In Europe before a performance of the fantastic No Man's Land ("I'll drink to that", etc.) I went up to the tea table (yes, I know, nice isn't it?) to buy some tea. Transaction over, I took a step back and away only to find my heel had found someone else's foot to perch on. Turning round ready with fulsome apologies I saw that my unwitting victim was in fact the great man himself.

'Sorry!', I said. He glowered at me. There was... an awkward silence.

I trotted off sharpish down the stairs only to be followed by Pinter and his companion (the theatre manager?). After a good 10 seconds Pinter's anger had subsided enough that he was able to speak again and I heard his unmistakable baritone ask the man, "So... how's tricks?"

You see - it's one thing to meet your heroes, it's quite another to injure them. Reminds me of that quote from Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End: "I never met a man I didn't maim."

Finally (it has been a productive week-and-a-half) it's Dylan Thomas, stories about whom are legion. I like the one where he met one of his idols, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin found his drunken four-letter-littered behaviour appalling, and told him so. Thomas walked out into Chaplin's conservatory and simply pissed up a pot plant. Now that's poetic compression!

Words Into Images

How about this for a chunk of text? If you get enough words together, they become a picture (or even a sculpture).

Depending on how my experiments go, the relevance of this image may become apparent later...

Kafka

The thing that struck me most about Kafka's writing the first time I encountered it was the physicality of it. We're used to valuing brevity and succinctness over wordiness and bulk, but here was a form of writing where a paragraph could run over two, three, four pages. A single paragraph! Great blocks of writing, dense as a meteor, and containing an equivalent amount of universal wisdom. The vast rockface of protocol he was writing about solidified in the vast rockface of words he created. It's that great modernist thing of form following function, and like a lot of modernist work it's great on the large scale but also in miniature - if you've not read them, treat yourself to his collected short stories. Anyway, my Kafka print is available in the shop here.

Young Intellectuals

Here's my new print for this week - some Young Intellectuals.

It's the first print I've done in my looser, note-taking style (although the Vintage Radio Calendar is close). I've always enjoyed drawing like this because, even though it looks simple, it forces you to make every line count. So you have to bring everything you know about how faces fit together - all the 'rules' - and gently bend them.

This is also the first print I've put up in the shop that isn't hand-lettered. I wanted to make something that was kind of promotional material for young intellectuals (can I still count myself among them, I wonder?), so the layout's very faintly suggestive of a poster. Ranged left type - can't beat it. And Helvetica Bold - as you know from my Gill Sans post earlier, I love a nice sans serif. I was out of love with Helvetica for a long time. But visiting New York and seeing it employed so beautifully - white on black - as signage on the subway system (among many other places) made me realise that it can be a force for good rather than for blandness.

And while we're on the subject, here's the trailer for Gary Hustwit's film about the font, appropriately entitled Helvetica. It's well worth checking out.

Important Information for Buyers in the USA

Here's some info for those of you in the States who have bought from my Etsy shop recently:

In November the Department of Homeland Security instituted extra security measures on mail inbound to the US. This has meant that shipping times have been extended way beyond what we'd normally expect - up to 7 or 8 weeks instead of the normal 2 for Airmail. This is due to the DHS's need to restrict postal transit methods and to screen each item individually. More information can be found here:

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1289237893803.shtm

...and here:

http://www.etsy.com/storque/seller-handbook/an-important-note-on-international-postal-delays-11571/

Lots of sellers in the US - and thus lots of buyers in the US - are having to deal with this:

www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6739394

The key thing to remember is that the mail is getting through, eventually. It's unfortunate and annoying that this is happening but there's nothing we can do about it - plus it's meant to be for our security, after all - so I'd ask for your patience and understanding if you're still waiting on one of my pieces to arrive. Thanks.

The Remains of Hastings Pier