Archives for the month of: April, 2005

Alice in WonderlandEver notice when you have a head cold, like I do now, that every­thing seems out of bal­ance? This sense of insta­bil­ity is attrib­uted to equi­lib­rium, defined as a “con­di­tion in which all act­ing influ­ences are can­celed by oth­ers, result­ing in a sta­ble, bal­anced, or unchang­ing sys­tem.” It also makes every­thing seem as if you’re an inhab­i­tant of Won­der­land. I’m expect­ing that any moment now a white rab­bit will clum­sily hop in front of me, wav­ing his pocket watch exclaim­ing, “I’m late! I’m late!”.

When I was younger and to this day I’ll usu­ally lie on the couch, when I can find a peace­ful moment, and just stare at the ceil­ing. If I con­cen­trate on the ceil­ing long enough, it will sud­denly warp and roll as if it were made of taffy, expand­ing and snap­ping back to its pre­vi­ous form. If I lis­ten to music, the tune will per­me­ate into my thoughts and some­times I’m left with an end­less rep­e­ti­tion of that tune in my mind. Believe me, I love music but not when it takes over and becomes a fix­ture in my mind. I’d only allow that to hap­pen if it were a theme song, my own per­sonal theme song, as I strolled the streets wav­ing to passer­by­ers, offer­ing high fives and thumbs up gestures.

Tak­ing all of this into account, I rather like the def­i­n­i­tion of sick­ness which describes it as a mal­ady, which fur­ther defines itself as “the mal­ady of dis­con­tent”. It has a cer­tain ring to it and cer­tainly describes my con­di­tion at the moment. I feel as if I’m falling down the rab­bit hole; past reversed mir­rors, cack­ling chia pets and giant goo­gly eyes.

How about you? What hap­pens when you’re inflicted with the “com­mon head cold”? 

First of all, thanks goes out to every­one who par­tic­i­pated! I wasn’t expect­ing so many heart­felt com­ments, but mem­o­ries have a way of tug­ging at our emo­tional strings.

Sur­prise, Surprise

Due to the gen­eros­ity of Adam Michela, Adam Smith and Alberto Gon­za­lez I’m now giv­ing away not just one Flickr Pro account, but four five! This is fan­tas­tic con­sid­er­ing I was fret­ting over the fact that I only had one prize to give out.

The Win­ners

Now for what you’ve been wait­ing for; our judges have decided (based on a com­bi­na­tion of brain­power and caf­feine) and the win­ners are: Robert Pol­lack, Rob Cot­ting­ham, Henna, Ken­neth and Bryan Peters.

Con­grat­u­la­tions! I hope you enjoy your new Flickr Pro account and look for­ward to see­ing your pho­tographs. To those indi­vid­u­als who won, please con­tact me so we can square away the details.

To those who didn’t win, I’ll be offer­ing a few more con­tests spread out over the course of this year and because you par­tic­i­pated this time you’ll be auto­mat­i­cally included in the next con­test (scouts honor). 

Flickr ChihuahuaSince I’ve never held a con­test of sorts I fig­ured now is the time, and not only that, I feel some­one will ben­e­fit from the prize. Who­ever wins this con­test will be rewarded with a 1-year Flickr Pro account cour­tesy of Ludi­corp Research & Devel­op­ment.

Con­test Rules

It’s pretty easy, all you have to do is leave a com­ment with your favorite mem­ory from child­hood. That’s it! I’m a nos­tal­gic kind of per­son and so are you, so this should be rel­a­tively easy.

On Fri­day, April 22nd at 5pm (EST) I will choose and announce a win­ner and that per­son will receive an email for a free 1-year Flickr Pro account. All sub­mis­sions (or com­ments in this case) will be accepted until 12am Thurs­day, at which point the con­test will be closed to remain fair to everyone.

Eli­gi­bil­ity

Only those with­out Flickr Pro accounts are eli­gi­ble. If you’re han­ker­ing to upgrade your free account to Pro now is your chance.

Good luck to everyone!

If you don’t win this time around I will be hold­ing a few con­tests through­out the year for more oppor­tu­ni­ties to win prizes, so keep your eyes peeled. 

The fol­low­ing comes from an email inter­view I had with John Martz of Robotjohnny.com for my Typog­ra­phy course.

Around 1997, Cana­dian graphic and font designer John Martz decided to design a type­face which would be inspired, in part, by his child­hood and his bewil­der­ment with the oppo­site sex. Accord­ing to Martz;

It shares its inspi­ra­tion with a lot of my work, which is the stuff I grew up on as a kid — Hanna Bar­bera car­toons, lit­tle Golden books [and] Looney Tunes. A fun, almost retro style.

The font would be called Girls are Weird and lit­tle did Martz know that for the next 78 years it would become one of the more pop­u­lar free fonts dis­trib­uted on the Inter­net due to an unusual and refresh­ing usage agree­ment; that is, if the font is used for com­mer­cial pur­poses all that Martz asks for in return is a pur­chase from his Amazon.com wishlist.

Girls are WeirdGirls are Weird is a curly-q font made purely for dec­o­ra­tive or dis­play pur­poses with a rel­a­tively large x-height. When Martz was design­ing Girls are Weird he men­tioned that he never thought about its intended use, instead focus­ing on the fact that he was just moved by the fun of cre­at­ing it. On that note he also acknowl­edges the fact that the font itself wasn’t dif­fi­cult to create;

I cre­ated it almost 10 years ago before hav­ing any for­mal design edu­ca­tion or real grasp of the soft­ware, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m both pleased and sur­prised that it’s still kick­ing about.

In the cre­ative process, Martz explained that he first starts with sketches. From there, once he’s pleased with a sketch, he’ll then scan the draw­ings into the com­puter and work in Illus­tra­tor to con­struct the font visu­ally. Like any­thing, his ini­tial attempts at font cre­ation used more arbi­trary methods;

My first exper­i­ments in cre­at­ing fonts [were] done in stone-age ver­sions of Corel­Draw, which had an option to export draw­ings into .ttf files with very lit­tle con­trol over any­thing. I soon grad­u­ated to a com­bi­na­tion of Illus­tra­tor for draw­ing and Fontog­ra­pher for the con­struc­tion and out­put of the font. I now use font­lab because of its com­pat­i­bil­ity with OS X.

Since Girls are Weird is fea­tured on a mul­ti­tude of free font sites it’s not sur­pris­ing that the font itself has been seen in the wild. Martz has seen it used on toys, games, books, comic books, CDs, store­fronts, sig­nage and even on Television.

In regards to offer­ing his fonts for free online and his Amazon.com share­ware model, Martz explains that the only real issue he’s run into is when peo­ple don’t abide by the rules;

… part of the prob­lem that the Inter­net presents is that peo­ple love free stuff, so my fonts get passed around and they show up on free font web­sites and CD-ROMs often with­out the orig­i­nal copy­right infor­ma­tion, so it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to police. I know that every time I see one of my fonts out in the wild that often­times it’s by some­one who didn’t pay for the font, but I ulti­mately can’t com­plain because it’s still excit­ing to see my work in the wild and I can’t guar­an­tee that it was my own site that the font came from.

Despite this issue, Martz has been impressed by those who do abide by the share­ware model; “the hon­est and good nature of peo­ple con­tin­ues to impress me, and I get sev­eral things pur­chased from my wish list every month, so even if I feel I’m get­ting ripped off by the peo­ple who don’t read my copy­right info, there are still a good bunch of peo­ple out there who do and they keep my book­shelf stocked!”.

Finally, Martz offers a piece of advice for cur­rent and bud­ding graphic and font designers;

Detail. Don’t skimp on the details. Good design is made by peo­ple who pay atten­tion to the lit­tle things, whether it be kern­ing, mea­sure­ments, colour, etc. Iron­i­cally, its advice I wish I was given when I cre­ated these fonts, some of them in high school, because I feel they’d have a longer shelf life, but I’m still happy Girls are Weird is still popular.

 

BackyardigansBecom­ing a father incurs a lot of respon­si­b­lity and chal­lenges, but the most reward­ing aspects of father­hood out­weigh any­thing else. You notice that through your own chil­dren you’re able to become a child again and that’s an amaz­ing turn­around since becom­ing an adult means hav­ing to tone down or leave behind cer­tain aspects of your childhood.

Lately my daugh­ter Zoe and I have been spend­ing time watch­ing car­toons, mostly because at 15 months she’s start­ing to enjoy them moreso than when she was younger. Her favorite prime-time car­toon is The Simp­sons and when­ever that famil­iar Danny Elf­man tune car­ries itself through our apart­ment she’s imme­di­ately atten­tive. She dances to the theme song and then for the next half-hour (or 15 min­utes, thank you Tivo!) she just sits there qui­etly and smiles, occas­sion­ally point­ing to the tele­vi­sion and bob­bing her head up and down like a baboon.

A co-worker of mine shared with me that he enjoyed watch­ing a show called The Back­yardi­gans with his daugh­ter, Mad­die. He men­tioned that the show, which stars a bunch of computer-animated ani­mals (and one alien named Uni­qua) depicted var­i­ous pre­tend sit­u­a­tions like pirate adven­tures. At that point I pro­grammed Tivo to pick up on a season’s worth of episodes hop­ing it was as cool as my co-worker had described. The fact that it pro­moted imag­i­na­tion was an imme­di­ate atten­tion grab­ber for me since to this day I still tend to sway towards my cre­ativ­ity to carry me along, espe­cially when life throws it’s curve­balls.

To me, it’s a won­der­ful thing to be spend­ing time with my daugh­ter watch­ing these shows. It makes me happy to see her danc­ing along with the music and casu­ally glanc­ing back to me wait­ing for my reac­tion. Through her I am able to revisit cer­tain parts of my child­hood and that in turn makes me nos­tal­gic for the past but appre­ci­ate the future.  

Creative SuiteI recently pur­chased the entire Adobe Cre­ative Suite about two months ago, pat­ting myself on the back for invest­ing in soft­ware which helps aide in my cre­ativ­ity. A few weeks later, as prob­a­bly every­one is aware, Adobe announced a new update — avail­able in May — to the Cre­ative Suite, dub­bing it CS2 (or appro­pri­ately Cre­ative Suite 2).

One of the coolest fea­tures included in the update is the Van­ish­ing Point, a tool which allows you to dig­i­tally “clone, brush, and paste ele­ments that auto­mat­i­cally match the per­spec­tive of any image area.” Since I had pur­chased it in Feb­ru­ary I fig­ured I’d qual­ify for the free upgrade which Adobe calls the “Post Announce­ment Upgrade”.

Appar­ently the only peo­ple who qual­ify for the upgrade are those who’ve pur­chased CS 1.3 between April 1st and July 31st, 2005. What con­fuses me is the fact that noone would pur­chase the orig­i­nal CS when they could have the Cre­ative Suite 2 for the same price, so I pro­pose that Adobe revise their free upgrade pol­icy, allow­ing those who’ve pur­chased pre­vi­ous ver­sions of their soft­ware within 90 days before the announce­ment to qual­ify, not the other way around. Accord­ing to one of the sales­peo­ple I spoke with at Adobe their pol­icy can account for a cer­tain amount of time before the announce­ment date, but they aren’t allowed to dis­close that information.

Adobe, I love your soft­ware but your upgrade pol­icy needs some tweaking. 

Billy DoveFor the big name celebri­ties in Hol­ly­wood who will even­tu­ally retire some­day there will be a man­sion or pri­vate get­away wait­ing for them. How­ever, what hap­pens to the lesser known celebri­ties, musi­cians and writ­ers when they retire?

The answer is the Motion Pic­ture and Tele­vi­sion Fund Coun­try House, a retire­ment com­mu­nity that houses char­ac­ter actors, reoc­cur­ring extras and other celebri­ties. Every res­i­dent has more than a hand­ful of sto­ries to tell, tales that describe min­gling with celebri­ties like Elvis Pres­ley, Grace Kelly and Jack Lem­mon and mem­o­ries full of love, laugh­ter and most impor­tantly years of effort.

83-year-old char­ac­ter actor William “Hal” Rid­dle is a res­i­dent of the com­mu­nity and his story reads like a child­hood dream.

Grow­ing up in Ken­tucky, Rid­dle had dreams of mak­ing it big in Hol­ly­wood. More often than not he would skip school to attend show­ings at the local the­atre, bask­ing in the glow of Hollywood’s magic. At 11 years old, Hal fell in love with a young silent film star by the name of Bil­lie Dove, a crush that would last for the next 60 years. Mus­ter­ing up enough courage Hal wrote a let­ter to Dove and received an auto­graphed photo with the mes­sage “Greet­ings! Bil­lie Dove”.

Through­out the years Hal has col­lected sev­eral celebrity (and Hol­ly­wood) para­pher­na­lia. When he retired in 1995, and moved into the Motion Pic­ture and Tele­vi­sion retire­ment com­mu­nity, he dusted off his pic­tures and hung them on the wall, admir­ing most of all the auto­graphed pic­ture from Bil­lie Dove.

Over the next sev­eral months Hal rem­i­nisced of his past expe­ri­ences, includ­ing; a vari­ety of bit parts in movies, doing three pic­tures with Elvis, test­ing the pilot Beat the Clock with James Dean and of his room­mate Jack Lem­mon. All of these expe­ri­ences never quite lev­eled with that of his admi­ra­tion and love for Bil­lie Dove, some­thing that he endured for the greater part of his life.

One day he received a call from an employee at the Motion Pic­ture Retire­ment home. She told Rid­dle that she had heard from var­i­ous mem­bers of the com­mu­nity of his infat­u­a­tion with Bil­lie Dove, and much to his sur­prise she men­tioned that Bil­lie Dove was a res­i­dent of the Motion Pic­ture & Tele­vi­sion Fund hos­pi­tal, less than a 5-mile walk from Riddle’s cottage.

The very next day Rid­dle walked to the hos­pi­tal to visit his child­hood crush and despite her ill-health and con­sid­er­able aging (she was 96 years old) through his eyes he saw the same woman in the pic­ture, youth­ful and extremely beau­ti­ful. As Hal described, “..I could see the essence of her beauty still. I was shak­ing like a leaf.”

Rid­dle con­fessed every­thing to her, includ­ing his boy­hood crush, his fre­quent days play­ing hooky and watch­ing Dove in Ado­ra­tion and how much the pic­ture still meant to him after so many years. Towards the end of the visit Dove requested to see Rid­dle ask­ing him if he would like to visit her again.

Over the next few days Hal Rid­dle and Bil­lie Dove formed a friend­ship and much more than that in fact. Accord­ing to the hos­pi­tal staff, Dove would ask for her hair and lip­stick to be done by the nurses prior to Hal’s visit. Bil­lie Dove would sit silently in her wheel­chair as Hal would wheel her around the the home care­fully lis­ten­ing to her many sto­ries of Hol­ly­wood life.

Over time, Hal could tell her health was get­ting worse and shortly before he was to leave for Alaska she made him promise that he would return to her, afraid that he was going to leave her. When Hal returned it was on New Years Day (a year since they had met) and when he went to visit her the nurse informed him that she had passed away.

How­ever, despite the sad­ness, Hal real­izes that he was blessed with the com­fort of his res­o­lu­tion; to finally meet his child­hood crush. In Hal’s words;

When you stop and think about it, it seems ironic. I guess the world has a long tail. You never know when an 11-year-old boy in Ken­tucky is going to write a fan let­ter to a star and years and years later get to be her friend. It’s a mag­i­cal wonder.

 

Hot SoupWhen I was kid, when­ever my fam­ily and I would go on vaca­tion I’d always order the same thing at restau­rants we’d eat at. I had my Roast Beef Sand­wich phase where I’d order noth­ing but Roast Beef Sand­wiches with a side order of fries, some­times sea­soned and some­times not. Before that there was the Grilled Cheese phase, golden brown on both sides with a huge dol­lop of ketchup on one cor­ner for dipping.

It became some­thing of an inside joke; “What will Erik have this trip? Will he suc­cumb to the same kinds of food or will he try some­thing dif­fer­ent to mix things up a lit­tle?”. Never one to dis­ap­point I’d rarely break the pat­tern of not order­ing the same thing at meal time but on occas­sion I’d try some­thing dif­fer­ent. That was then, this is now, but I’ve found that child­hood quirks stay with you, no mat­ter how much time passes.

Even to this day I’ve noticed pat­terns in what I’ll order at restau­rants and most of the time it’s just food I’ve become com­fort­able eat­ing, like Clam Chow­der for instance. Noth­ing adds to a meal — at least in my opin­ion — like the sooth­ing warmth and taste of thick chow­der topped with soup crack­ers and a dash of salt and pep­per. Even­tu­ally I might grow tired of order­ing clam chow­der with every meal but most likely it’ll be replaced with a dif­fer­ent phase.

Do you have any food phases?