Mature Themes




I definitely don't consider myself an illustrator but this is an image I created to represent Ariel Pink's album Mature Things for UO's best albums of 2012 list. The image of the minstrel is an etching of a painting called The Jester by Frans Hals. Minstrels and Jesters are a common theme in paintings from that era and I could have easily chosen Carravagio's lute player but something about Hals' smirking Jester made more sense for Ariel if not the entire album. And had I been designing the actual record cover, I might have narrowed the composition down to just that image or a recreation of that image.




input
















import



direct democracy
chocolates
typography's spiritual home

OP001:


Hello hello. Is this thing on? Is this thing on me? Yes, it is. Honest, reader, it is. On me like the fear of high places. Writing about Design. Design about writing. The stench! I said to my friend the other day, "you know, I really can't stand the designers that ONLY write." That's rough though. It's a pretty awful observation on my part. I knew it had to be coming from somewhere. Yes, a fear. A fear of writing something wrongheaded, uncritical, uneducated, of not finding an audience, being above all a bad communicator. My problem with writing is a design problem.

I had to think of a way that I could write about design without feeling the pressure of graduate students looming over my shoulder with MLA books and every essay ever published by a small press just a memory away. I'm not oriented like that. My memory is horrible. Ask anyone that knows me how many times during a conversation I can't recall the name of the band that did that one song…yeah. That's why this is an OP. Not an opinion. An OPeration. Things could go right or left. Up or down. The space is incomplete and all mine to define. You might find a footnote. You might read the wrong date or an absolutely absurd or even possibly trivial argument. Exciting, right?

That being said, I want to discuss the nature of being a designer that is intimidated by those who do a lot of writing. Some of it is envy I must admit. You people are not just taking part in a very important conversation, you are leading it. Histories are being written. Progress is being made through debate. That's everything I truly believe in my bones to be the way to move design forward. So why am I so intimidated?

Without getting into too much psychoanalysis, it's got something to do with how I was raised. Risk taking is not something the hard-working, disciplined midwesterners do well. Hence why so many of them never stray far from where they grow up. To face a room of designers and speak can only be done by ignoring this sense of extreme guilt amongst other personal social phobias.  And to seal my thoughts in ink, in volumes, to publish something to be read by designers and non-designers alike, is the same way. Now it would be simple to say this is totally curable with a writing class or maybe a few therapy sessions.

Except it isn't. This is the other part that makes it hard to jump in. There actually are a lot of people that do use their knowledge to keep others an arm length away, often against the same community that is trying to support endeavors such as criticality and deconstruction. There are also people that write to publish rather than write to be read. If designing books is a passion, a true deep obsession, then one should care quite a lot about the content going into those objects just as much as one would care for the selection of materials and organization of such content. Both form obstacles of the personal in addition to other obstacles like the economic. Coolness is sometimes on the line and all the surface, self-commodifying, attention-grabbing bullshit we are taught to care about just gets in the way. Of course with the currency of likes and reblogs, what do we expect?

Which is precisely why the posturing and pretension that comes with it are happening. Those who cherish authenticity are having to hide deeper and deeper in order to hold onto it like secret societies meeting in the middle of the night, under the stairs and in other private, closed off spaces. The recent mining of the 'net art'  aesthetic by Rihanna on SNL is an example of a small community worrying about surface over content, style over substance. The publishing of signs and signifiers, of a conversation without context, is always going to be easy prey for the whims of fashion and style. The result is a tension produced between people that would otherwise not be opposing forces. I want to address this problem and find ways of communicating that allow for a more honest discussion. I want to help designers (especially young designers) elevate the substantial, curate the content even if it entails a little self-editing. I want to explore the meaning of tradition, of rebelling against that tradition, and of ultimately forming a unique practice. Those are just a few goals for these operations but they are pertinent to just about everything I do.

We are failing each other if we don't talk about this. The attention machine that social media is desperately trying to wall us into online is turning what we do, what we think, (and it follows) everything we make into a quest for attention. This, as I said, is a false surface value ruling over content. Even if the powers that be in the United States of Advertising want to make us believe it and buy it, attention is not a metric of any real value. Attention is a distracting barrier to real, open dialogue.

There's another reason for writing (whether good or bad). Writing is a way to re-align oneself with the structure, rhythm ,and sound of text and therefore typography. Tomato calls it typoetics. HeiQuiti Harata calls it Eternergy for Communication. Even what Emil Ruder accomplished with Univers in 1961 brought a certain "weightlessness" to the then prevailing Zurich and Ulm schools of Swiss design. I've noticed this relationship seems to be missing in a lot of contemporary work that surrenders typographic expression to a template and a kind of universality that feels very cold and inhuman like the machinery of academia without the students. Or like very formulaic writing, without a voice, only in monotone.

In the following weeks I'm going to get mixed up in a variety of topics. It's very much an experiment. If it goes well, I'll keep going with (hopefully) an increasing amount of courage, discipline, knowledge, and passion.

Next up: What is honestypography and how can it be done? I'll revisit an essay published in Octavo (87.4) by Wolfgang Weingart and try to apply some of those principles to typography today.

An exercise in identifying key components of the studio's design process. It becomes a matrix where the combination of words form new meanings.

post-title

—ever hired someone because they sent you a cool PDF?

Reformatting


There is no mistake in the language. Reformatting. Cleansing. Gaza. Bosnia. The Congo. Poland. The meme stretches back but now the cloud can be formatted into whatever form is suitable for the Admins of war culture.

L.A.

I now live in Los Angeles.
Get in touch if you're local.

Love,

Travis

Y4RD S4LE



I have too much shit.

What Kind Of Dub Is This?


What Kind Of Dub Is This Mixtape - 1:08:20

1 - Big Hard Excellent Fish - Imperfect List 1 (Weatherall mix)
2 - Cola Boy - He Is Cola 
3 - Skinned Teen - Ex-Boyfriend Beat
4 - Ruby - Paraffin (Richard Fearless Mix)
5 - Funki Porcini - The Softest Thing In The World (Motorway Accident)
6 - Dubstar - Stars (Mother dub mix)
7 - Yoshinori Sunahara - Elegant World
8 - Golden - Don't Destroy Me 
9 - Garbage - Queer (The Very Queer Dub-Bin Version)
10 - Slab - Cosmo
11 - Interlude 
12 - AMorphous Androgynous - Swab
13 - One Dove - Friend
14 - El Perro Del Mar - What Do You Expect
15 - Golden - Anglo-American (Mickey Finn Family Dub)
16 - Fudge - Nothing Dub x A Soldier in Thailand Audio Letters Home

Download

Elevator conversations

I made several versions of these scripts to place in the elevators at a former employer. They were intended to force people to talk about something out of the norm of sports radio chatter and the weather (which is almost always a complaint, even when it's nice).




Process: HTDW part 1

Some of the process that went into designing How To Dress Well's Total Loss album. As you'll see in this part and the next one I put together, there was quite an extensive amount of exploration for just about every aspect of the packaging.


This came out of putting everything on separate layers and turning them on and off to create compositions. It can be helpful if you encounter a creative block.


Asked of the whereabouts of the Golden girls, Bob Stanley stated in an 2002 interview "I guess one member lives in Glasgow where she works as an environmental scientist."

Now Playing

gettin weird

notes on moronic cynicism

Moronic cynicism is a form of naïveté. It's naïveté turned inside out, naïveté with a sneer.

For the moronic cynic misanthropy is just realism hard-boiled.

The moronic cynic uses cynicism as a way to prepare for the worst. The worst consequently arrives. 

The moronic cynic dumps on man because man is an animal who dumps on his fellow man. 

-momus



I quit



I quit my advertising job. The immeasurable hell of that falsehood is over.
The process of moving and building something new can begin.

xo,

Travis

Get Rid of Yourself


Wandering relieved the condition of feeling foreign everywhere

'the new normal'


THE NEW NORMAL IS A NEW SITCOM
THE NEW NORMAL IS PEACEKEEPING
THE NEW NORMAL IS FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
THE NEW NORMAL IS A FAMILY VACATION ON A BUDGET
THE NEW NORMAL IS THE SAME GREAT TASTE WITH HALF THE CALORIES
THE NEW NORMAL IS A RE-BRANDING CAMPAIGN FOR THE STATUS QUO
THE NEW NORMAL IS DIFFERENT IN A SIMILAR WAY 
THE NEW NORMAL IS PRETTY UGLY
THE NEW NORMAL IS PLASTIC SURGERY FOR THE WEIRD
THE NEW NORMAL IS NOT A MOVEMENT

NightMare Yoshitaka Amano


analysis from the web

Where a right-wing republican puppet-president will always require emphasizing the foreign threat and the need for military spending and foreign intervention (republican rule means outward, expanding, dilapidating energy), a left-wing democratic president-puppet that is in special need of consensus (comes november) will always emphasize the internal, domestic threat (democratic rule means inward, soothing, defensive energy). Clinton had his Oklahoma, his Waco, his Columbine; Obama is having all these mad fascists who hate the world and make the necessary contrast with the all-loving, fatherly figure of the democratic president willing to include everyone rather than to fight anyone.
(Yes the global world requires now these "domestic threats" to be staged also abroad, such as in Oslo, Brindisi etc; this still works psychologically as a "domestic threat" because it describes a danger that comes from within the society and not from a mysterious alien enemy hidden in deep caves abroad, like the Spectre Agency. it is simply implied that this can happen everywhere now, because the whole world is "sick", like the 2012 Olympics ceremony explained to us.)

Simon is right to call these events stupid: they are not only stupid in the details of the fakery, they are also stupid on a higher, strategic level because they keep repeating this primitive scheme over and over:
the well-meaning, loving president who encounters an obstacle in the madcaps who, without any profound vision or deep thinking of any sort, but only animated by hate, wrong doses of antidepressants and the lack of a facebook account, simply do not want to be included within this loving, open society: which is supposed to motivate the rest of society to provide even more consensus and support, not just out of fear, but also to compensate for the supposed, artificial, unreal unbalancing of a community precipitating towards madness.

(When in reality few societies in human history have been so potentially healthy and sane like ours, was it not for the scumbags propagandists maniacs that keep them in check.)
by nonhocapito on August 7th, 2012, 12:10 pm

Cut the world


TOTAL EMANCIPATION
AT LONG LAST

relation of self to value in the undesirable economy


Notes: 
1. BBC News: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users, published