Through Lines 273

I suspect I Like Me will break my a heart a little. I grew up with John Candy and it’s still hard to comprehend he’s been gone for more than 30 years at this point. David Fear’s profile of the film in Rolling Stone is worth the time.

Art & Design

  • The Letterform Archive just acquired a trove of incredible local history from the Wonderlight Neon Products Co. I cannot wait to see some of this in person soon.
  • Drop a giant balloon in a public place and, like magic, it’s transformed. Steve Messam's giant bulbous and spiky inflatable sculptures throughout London are no exception.
  • I wasn’t familiar with the work of Sue Coe, but thanks to Steven Heller, now I am. Her timely, on point linocut illustrations are packed with depth, complexity, and deep concern for where things are heading. Her latest collection, American Fascism, Still! hits hard.
  • I really believe that a piece of design should reward the second look, the slow encounter. Hugh Miller's approach is spot on. I hope he’s able to maintain this approach in his work as a newly minted partner at Pentagram.
  • Rob Weychert pushed the launch button on his new website after many years in development (I know the feeling). There’s so much to dig through I hardly know where to even begin.
  • I could use one of these Sketch Toolboxes.

Type of Note

  • Proximity from Blaze Type is no ordinary pixel font. Free of the rigidity of traditional 8-bit aesthetics, it stretches beyond those hard limits to offer a more nuanced, integrated, and highly crafted family of script faces.
  • And if Proximity wasn’t enough for you, Teeline Fonts offers a carefully polished take on LED type in Ticker which includes high- and low-res varieties and designs built on a rectilinear grid.
  • Mark Caneso’s at it again with his latest, Please. The Poster styles whose tight counters and bubbly forms are busting with (ahem) character, stand out the most. The proverbial cherry on top of a solid sans super family.
  • Inspired by 1800s French Nouveau, Fillmore, also from Teeline Fonts brings a surrealist, near psychedelic quality to this family of blobby, lava-lamp like letterforms.
  • Of note also, is the launch of Petra Dočekalová’s independent foundry for her beautiful fonts and lettering work.

Technology

Humanities

  • Boredom is quite literally good for you. We need it. We’ve probably survived as long as we have in part because of it. Don’t listen to me, listen to Arthur Books, and then go uncomfortably stare off into the clouds for 15 minutes without your f*!king phone.
  • After many years of studying the behavior of black holes, Stephen Hawking is proven right in that the surface area, of black holes can never decrease which gets wilder when black holes merge.
  • As much as I appreciate clean, modern design, there’s something about the stark, un-lived-in cleanliness that is so pervasive that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s unsettling, maybe because it’s so unnatural. I prefer a little manageable clutter in my life.
  • I’m intrigued by this Finnish sand battery as an alternative energy source. This is the kind of important (and cool) technology we’d be better spending time and effort on than f$*king AI.

Music & Film

One More Thing

I took a beat last week because I was deep in a book project that’s been simmering for more than a year and where the pieces had finally started to fall into place. It’s been a focus throughout this week also and maybe a week or so out from completion, at least structurally, if I maintain a similar pace. It’s been good to be back in that world. I’ve been missing the particular energy that comes from visual collage storytelling and it’s sparking ideas for how to wrap up another book that’s been left unfinished for a similar length of time.