LAB

Matt Soar discusses the invaluable aspects of failure over on Design Observer:

For example, Jonathan Hoefler says, “Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly ‘experimental’ has to run the risk of failure.” Hoefler describes these moments as “happy accidents:” “Several times a day, some misstep on the computer produces an unexpected result, and sometimes these results are fetching, intriguing, even provocative.”

Where does blue end and red begin? The folks at Dolores Blog asked people to name random color swatches, then processsed that into a color-label space.

How color is perceived may be objective to a point, but there’s obviously some kind of shared common perception / color space.

(via Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream)

The NYT has a nice write-up on Linzie Hunter, who turns spam into fantastic hand-lettered prints :

She found a way to convert commercial entreaty and flimflammery into something pleasing. That is, she made spam into art.

Alphabet: An Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering and Experimental Typography, an exhibition at The Cooper Union, features what you might call a plethora of interpretations of Ye Olde Alphabet.

All these variations on 26 letters, yet we haven’t see many proposals for new letters in some time. Not that there hasn’t been attempts in the last few centuries: Benjamin Franklin, Jan Tschichold, and George Bernard Shaw are among those who proposed expanding the alphabet, according to…

What do you collect? Why do you do it? What have you collected in the past, and what did you do with it? Share your collections and obessions with LAB for Project 7. For more details, check out the Projects section.

We’ll be showcasing a collection of collections in the next two issues of LAB. Submit by Nov 1st, 2007.

The Processed Word is a set of photos of vernacular signage and typography in various states of decay. It’s part of a larger, ongoing series called Someplace Else. From Craig Hickman, author of Mars Observations and maker of D-, the interactive spelling wrecker, among other things (Craig is also the creator of the original KidPix program).

We’re pleased to say LAB is now at the library. And not just any library— a traveling library, run by the The Itinerant Poetry Librarian (founder of the Poetry Cubicle). As she passed through Portland, The Librarian (AKA Sara Wingate Gray) installed a temporary library at Reading Frenzy, the IPRC, In Other Words, and several other locations. In its last year of travel, the library has signed up nearly 500 members from 10 countries and 14 cities. Find out more about the project here.

LAB joins a collection of eclectic and obscure small press books, pamphlets, magazines, and ephemera as the library hits the road and heads to its next destination: Seattle, WA. And if you’re the type who enjoys getting any kind of excuse to zoom around in Google Earth, then voila! : track the nomadic library’s sojourns via this nifty link.

Ray Fenwick and Julie Jackson, kingpins of the shady industries of illustration and cross-stitch, have combined their crafty perspicacity into a beefy new cross-stitch kit: Meat for the Beast. Can it get much better than this? It can and it will: the gory-yet-playful design glows-in-the-freaking-dark. Bone-chomping awesomeness! The kind that inspires fits of typing phrases-connected-by-dashes.

More meat for the insatiable browser monster: check out this redonkulous Craft Query interview with Mister Fenwick on Subversive Cross Stitch. A tiny sample of the meaty innards of the interview:

CQ: Will you start carrying a man purse when blue Q comes out with those excellent Fenwick coin purses?

RF: Are coin purses not masculine? I am so clueless. I guess the word purse implies feminine, but whatever, I would totally carry a coin purse. I would carry my brass knuckles and PCP in it. Open the purse, take the PCP, put on the brass knuckles, and then just go for it! I know PCP is not something to joke about. I’m sorry. But do you really want to make fun of the coin purse of a dude who is amped on Angel Dust and swinging his brassed knuckles around?

David Byrne, in the introduction to Sensacional: Mexican Street Graphics:

As true perfection appears on the horizon, as the fruits of the enlightenment and of centuries of scientific progress appear within grasp, we take a bite of the perfected tomato or a huge flawless strawberry and realize that something has been lost. Flava. Soul. Humor. Funk.

He adds:

Perfection, one must conclude, is not acutally perfect at all. In fact, it is almost the complete opposite. Perfection is bad. But bad is good. But bad perfection is not good, only good bad is good. It’s all very simple.

You can find the whole essay here: When Bad Art Is Good
(republished in Utne)

The seventh issue of the ANP Quarterly is out, sporting an ecstatic Phyllis Diller on the cover. (Scroll down below the first fold of the ANP site for the intro to the current issue) The ANP is a free, sans-advertising quarterly (published by RVCA) that promises to “bring forward people and phenomena that deserve acknowledgement and coverage regardless of their place in time.” Yarly! In Portland, you’ll find it at Reading Frenzy, Jackpot Records, Motel Gallery, and Ozone Records.

An excerpt from the interview, with Miss Diller talking about what she paints:

Whatever comes out of my head. It all comes out of my head. Now my natural thing is a face. I see faces, faces, faces. Millions of faces. And faces are the part of the body that’s the most expressive. We have body language but faces are the most powerful beams you give out.

And Phyllis sure knows how to beam some powerful stuff. I’ve had to keep the magazine upside-down on my desk so it doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies everytime I walk into the room. Yowza!

After interviewing Deb ‘Boss Lady’ Dormody (of If’n Books) and Ray ‘jazzy funk’ Fenwick (of Drama Club infamy) in issue 0.5, we introduced the two, dropping numerous clumsy hints about the unstoppability of a potential collaboration. And the result? Deb and Ray have teamed up to create this hot jammin’ smacker journal: DANCE IN2 THE POSITIVITY. Fresh! It’s a hand-numbered edition of 100 available through Etsy— better get your electric boogaloo on crazy-fast, girl.

In Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, Daniel Tammet writes about an experiment which investigated a possible link between visual patterns and the sound structures of words:

The researcher, Wolfgang Kohler, a German-American psychologist, used two arbitrary visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and the other sharp and angular, and invented two words for them: takete and maluma. Subjects were asked to say which of the shapes was the takete and which the maluma. The overwhelming majority assigned maluma to the rounded shape and takete to the angular one. Recently, Professor Ramachandran’s team has replicated the results using the invented words bouba and kiki. Nintey-five percent of those asked thought the round shape was a bouba and the pointed shape a kiki. Ramachandran suggests the reason is that the sharp changes in the visual direction of the lines in the kiki figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the word’s sound, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.

Maybe that’s how Ikea comes up with the names for their furniture designs. Then again, maybe not.

In Hand Job (Princeton architectural Press), Michael Perry selects some delicious hand-lettering from an array of designers & typographers. From the Amazon review:

In this digital age of computer-generated graphics and typography, it’s refreshing to find typographers who still believe in working by hand. No longer relegated to designer’s sketchbooks, hand-drawn type has emerged from the underground as a dynamic vehicle for visual communication—from magazine, book, and album covers to movie credits and football advertisements. As the practice and appreciation of hand-drawn type grows, it’s time to celebrate the work of those typographers whose every letterform is a work of art.

[ tip of the hat to Scrappers for the book recommend ]

The experiment that is LAB continues posthaste.

Well, more like sans haste, to be honest. This issue, although roughly half the size of its predecessor (issue 0.5), took roughly twice as long. Which means, of course, that this issue is four times better. That is to say, we had four times as much fun making it. If we keep this up, the sixth issue will take 8 years to make and be approximately 3 pages long… but the fun we’ll have! Indescribable. Beyond imagination. Words could not even begin to describe the fun to be had.

If you asked us to rationalize a bit (and it wouldn’t be unreasonable of you to do so), we’d probably say: well, we took a page from the book of Slow Food, and decided to practise some Slow Making. Or Slow Design. Which involved doing things like using a Kamp-King utility knife to scratch letters into a soggy board found in the backyard; scavenging neighborhood free boxes for curious ephemera; doodling on paper bags while volunteering at local micropress mecca Reading Frenzy; sitting on the porch with fruit salad talking about Neue Haas Grotesk (AKA as Helvetica); doing things like printing up pages, then dropping them in puddles and walking on ‘em with muddy boots; buying old stencil kits from retired clergymen at garage sales; running around the park and jumping out of trees and climbing on public statues and evading security guards (well, that was mostly Scrappers… see Keeping It Wild). And then there was the laborious process of setting all the type by hand on a KroyType™ 80 lettering machine¹ (basically a giant 40-lb Dymo labeling machine on steroids, except you can swap out “typedisks” and kern words individually— oh the fun to be had!).

On the back cover, you’ll find a detail of a blanket handmade by one Verna Sigurdson of Portland, Oregon. It was one of five or six she was selling at a garage sale, priced very reasonably at $10.00 each. When asked how long it takes her, on average, to make one blanket, Verna replied, “I don’t know. It takes as long as it takes to make it. It’s done when it’s done.”

Which pretty much sums up the attitude here at LAB. However, there’s at least one main difference between Verna’s blanket and this booklet / quasi-zine (or PDF) you’re holding in your hands (or reading on your screen): this issue probably won’t keep your feet warm on a chilly winter night. But we hope that it at least piques your curiosity and maybe keeps you company on a sunny afternoon.

Cheers+

/Joseph Robertson

¹ Okay, so we didn’t actually set all the type in this issue with the KroyType™
behemoth… just a few title fragments. But that counts for something, right?

Ed Fella discusses using vernacular signage as inspiration in Letters on America :

‘I use low design to make high design, non-condescendingly. It’s a kind of bio-feedback; it’s visual reference material at its simplest.’

Fella’s collection of polaroids in Letters on America is a wunderkammer of folk typography, vernacular signage, and indigenous hand-lettering. The best part? It’s completely non-ironic— no kitsch, no camp, no wink-wink nudge-nudge. This is a sincere fascination with how letters and type mutate and evolve out in the vast territory otherwise known as everyday America.