Max Kohler – Visual Communication
Dimitri Hon, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons (my edit) I was quoted this week in a story in the Guardian about the Tate Modern accidentally posting mine and 110 other people’s applications for a software developer job on a public website. Your guess is as good as mine as to how such a “rigorous organisation” (as I wrote in my cover letter) could do something so incredibly stupid and illegal.…
The strongest portion of On the Edge 1 is its opening section where Silver, an expert gambler, explains the mechanics of the Las Vegas casino business. 2 In particular, he makes two interesting observations about slot machines. One: they're not games of chance. The outcome of each spin is determined by a random number generator inside the machine the moment you press the button. The spinning reels…
For a while, I've been looking for an automated method to load up a list of websites, take a screenshot of each one and save it somewhere convenient. There are many ways of doing this, but doing it on a NAS is nice because 1) I have one already, so I'm not incurring any extra costs 2) it'll run arbitrary code with few restrictions and 3) it's where I would want to store the screenshots anyway.…
Show a tooltip with column values in descending order Assuming your data columns are column_a , column_b and column_c , you can display all three values in descending order in a HTML table using the following tooltip template code: < table > {{ JOIN ( MAP ( f ( el ) = CONCAT ( "<tr><th>" , SLICE ( [ "Column A" , "Column B" , "Column C" ] , NUMBER ( SLICE ( SPLIT ( el , "_" ) , 0 , 1 ) ) , NUMBER (…
Earlier this month , I lost out on my one-hundredth job application. When you look for work for any prolonged period, you start to notice different shades of no: The most common (incurred by 52 of my applications) is no response at all. I received 38 automated rejection emails; eight applications were declined after one or more interviews — two via phone call, one (to a public institution in…
The other day I was building a Wordpress website that needed footnotes on posts. Wordpress doesn't support that natively (there's an issue about it that's been open since 2017). My first thought was to use a plugin, but I couldn't find one that was maintained and had the right the feature set. I want a footnote solution to do the the following: In the post editor, let me write something like: This…
We're going to use simple-git to read the commit history and make it available to templates using eleventy's computed data feature . To generate changelogs for markdown files in the posts collection, we start by creating a data file at /posts/posts.11tydata.js (the filename must match the name of the collection) package.json .eleventy.js _includes/ posts/ one.md two.md three.md + posts.11tydata.js…
A figure pulled from Minecraft , Minions , Fortnite , Looney Tunes , DeviantArt portraiture , the Are ya winning son meme, corporate illustration , or some other slice of the American vernacular is shown in three-quarter portrait on a field of bright colour, looking indifferent. The figure is decorated with references to popular entertainment ( Harley Quinn ’s baseball bat, the three-eyed fish…
TLDR Add-to calendar links are a HTML-only way to let people add your event to their own calendar. Support varies between calendar apps: Google calendar Google took down the documentation for ATC links, but they do work. The base URL is calendar.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE followed by one or more query parameters for your event data: text (required) – Event title dates (required) –…
What is alt text? "Alt text" is short for "alternative text". It's a short piece of text that's used in place of an image when it is unavailable. This happends when someone uses a text-only or audio version of your website, they turned off images to save bandwidth, or the network request failed. Alt text also makes your images more readable for machines, both your own and those built by others .…
Here's a really specific problem I've run into a handful of times building websites with custom fonts: I set some type on my Windows machine, and everything works as expected. But when I pull up the same page on a Mac (regardless of the browser) the line height is totally different. My first thought was that something was wrong with my CSS – maybe there's a rogue line-height declaration that gets…
Who this article is for This was originally written as a seminar for undergraduate design students, but it'll work for anyone who is comfortable with HTML. If you've built a few websites in HTML and CSS and are ready to take on bigger projects, read on. The Problem Your first few websites are probably built in plain HTML (and CSS and Javascript, but we're not really talking about those here).…
I just published a little technique for pushing what you can do with CSS inline styles over on CSS Tricks. Here's how I pitched it: Say you have a blog, and you want each post to have a different background colour when you hover over it - for art direction, say. You can't do that with inline styles! But I learned a trick: You write the colour value into a CSS variable (scoped to the post element),…
TLDR Eleventy has built-in support for custom data formats . To read data from a CSV file: Add it to the _data folder Install csv-parse using npm install --save-dev csv-parse Add the following to your Eleventy config : .eleventy.js import { parse } from 'csv-parse/sync' export default function (eleventyConfig) { + eleventyConfig . addDataExtension ( 'csv' , ( contents ) => { + return parse (…
The Utah Monolith stood at 38°20'35.18" North, 109°39'58.32" West in Red Rock Country, Utah, on a piece of flat ground between two diverging rock faces. It was installed there by an unknown artist sometime in 2016 (that's when it appears in satellite images), discovered by wildlife officials on November 23, 2020, and removed ten days later by four unknown men. 1 It was ten to twelve feet tall, and…
Here are some notes about an idea I've been calling "Continuous Typography". It's a way of thinking about typography in terms of continuous functions, rather than absolute values. Functions produce different results based on one or more input parameters. For example, the function $f(x) = 3x + 2$ will return different results depending on the value of its input parameter $x$. If we apply this idea…
The degree show is a staple of art school life in Britain and the United States. Held at the end of the summer term, they’re a an opportunity for graduates to develop their work in a high-stakes exhibition environment, celebrate the time spent together, and speak to a wider public. Since indoor events are still off-limits in most places, this year’s degree shows have largely moved online. Looking…
I've been doing some Wordpress theme development recently, and I couldn't find a decent reference for the blocks that come with the default Wordpress editor . So I'll keep one here. Wordpress Core I'm pulling these out of the Wordpress Source Content core/audio core/calendar core/buttons core/button – Only used inside core/buttons/ core/code core/classic core/cover core/separator core/embed…
Cropped version of an image originally published in The Mail Online with the caption: Thousands of Britons ignored repeated warnings to stay home as part of ongoing efforts to clamp down on coronavirus by heading to DIY stores, parks and beaches on Sunday. Source In late March, some weeks into the pandemic, a new genre of local news story emerged: Local park Crowded with People Despite Social…
FontTools is a family of libraries and utilities for manipulating fonts in Python . From what I can tell, it's the industry-standard way to automate things in font production. I don't really know enough about type design to understand what it is people automate this way, but I gather that it ranges from outputting trial fonts , wrangling metadata, to fully auto-generating italics (wild). What I…
If the answer is yes, I'm creating a lot of work for myself now : I'll have to spin up some local development environment, think up a data structure, and write a bunch of templates. But later the CMS will make it really easy to update the site, so hopefully I'll make up the time I spent setting it up. If the answer is no, I'm making the opposite bargain. I'm making my life easy now by writing…
I just wrote about that question over on CSS-Tricks . I go into some detail there, but the argument boils down to this: Even though a basic idea of the Jamstack is that you do as much of your logic as you can during your build process (earlier in the programme lifecycle, if you will), you still have options. Namely: Do the logic in your head and write down the results Move it into the build…
I started using Netlify a few weeks ago, and I've already gotten very used to the workflow it enables you to have: You work on a local copy of your website You push changes to Github Netlify notices you made a change It makes a fresh clone of the repository It runs whatever build process you set up It takes the result of that build process and deploys to the web This workflow feels so good to me…
Wrote down some notes on Jony Ive's Zoom-Seminar at the RCA with Roland Ross. The short version is that it was pretty bizarre. Read the long version on Content Free .
Notes from Jaguar-Landrover's design director Gerry McGovern's lecture on the RCA Zoom. This was basically an hour-long fanfic about a world in which climate change doesn't exist and thousands of people don't get killed by SUVs every year. Roland Ross in black, me in green. Read on Content Free .
I recently wrote about the privatisation of university buildings 1 and how that’s a Bad Thing™. Between the time I enrolled and graduated at Camberwell College of Arts, the building went from being largely open to the public to a situation where access to the building, and movement inside it is tightly controlled by access cards, remote-controlled gates, cameras, visitors lists, fencing, and…
“Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century” , writes Rem Koolhaas in the opening paragraph of Junkspace (2001) 1 . It was replaced, he continues, by Junkspace — a kind of built environment that isn’t really designed but kind of just happens when you throw together a load of drywall, prefab concrete slabs, venture capital, air-conditioning, elevators, and vinyl stickers and hot-glue…
7 November Hoping to develop a typeface out of this lettering I did: Maybe also take some stuff from Node Paint (extended pen nib). 14 November Above might be useful for bold weights down the line. 15 November Like the contrast in the H and A . Horizontal stress 17 November V1 of the uppercase nearly finished. I'm trying to keep the wiggles in the same position vertically, so I can eventually kern…
30 September, 2019 Sekula: The central Artefact of [Bertillion's] archive is the filing cabinet, not the photograph. Archive as a body of literature independent of the objects inside it. All the descriptions, titles (written by archivists, not artists), but also categories, access status, reference numbers and so on. Tate Archive contains different collections : TG - Tate Public Records TGA - Tate…
Chermayeff & Geismar (1971): Poster from “PanAm’s World” Campaign. Eye Magazine When I was an undergraduate student, a relative gave me this big coffee table book about airline visual identities. 1 It documents the visual output of the 20th century aviation industry in all its glory: Full-bleed Kodachrome photography overlaid with tightly-set Helvetica at PanAm . Colourful, bold illustrations and…
Day 1 Non-Human Publishing Wikipedia has bot users to update categories and things. MediaWiki has no special interface to indiciate that a user is non-human. Cydebot is the most prolific editor on Wikipedia at 5.1m edits. We tend to think of Wikipedia as this big human endeavour, but there's actually lots of automated labour going on. Even good bots fight: The case of WIkipedia says that Wikipedia…
I wrote about unpaid design projects (especially in art schools) on Content Free , the online publication of the visual communication programme at the RCA. This is also the first time I've done editorial illustration (I think) — fun stuff. Read the article here .
Reading Towards a Newer Laocoon , Greenberg Towards a Philosophy of Photography , Flusser Indexicality and the concept of medium specificity , Doane Video the Aesthetic of Narcissism, Kraus Remediation, Bolter and Grusin Friday, Febuary 1st 2019 Empire by Andy Warhol basically started structuralist film P. Adams Sitney coins the term, see also Structural Film Antology by Peter Gidal A lot of…
Course outline Reading Theory of Type Design , Gerard Unger Type & Typography , Phil Baines & Andrew Haslam Dimensional Typography , J. Abbott Miller Fuse 1–20 , Neville Brody & Jon Wozencroft Does Writing Have a Future? , Vilém Fusser Drowning the Crystal Goblet , Matthew Butterick Dimensional Typography , Leslie Atzmon Is Best Really Better? , Erik van Blokland, Just van Rossum References Doc…
Proposal (December 2018) Provisional Title: The photographic image in the age of the neural network Topic (approx. 100 words) How does our understanding of the photographic image change when most photographs are taken by machines for machines? What happens to the photograph when it becomes an instance (of millions) in a machine-learning dataset, and are these datasets a modern extension of the…
I started making machine drawings during my undergrad. Many of my early drawings where born from the excitement fo getting the machine to work at all. Suddenly, I could draw perfectly straight lines, repeat gestures hundreds of times and keep drawing for hours at a time. There's something oddly mezmerising about seeing a familiar drawing instrument (like a ballpoint pen) move in an unfamilliar…
On the eve of Brexit, some thoughts on passports: They let you cross invisible lines on the ground. Everyone only gets one (the rare person with two is envied, three or more make you a character from a spy novel). Every few years you go through a ritual in which the old one is destroyed following a certain protocol, and you're handed a new one. They have invisible information embdedded in them We…
Reading David Batchelor: Chromophobia William Gass: On Being Blue Tim Ingold: Lines: A Brief History Petra Lange-Berndt: Materiality Catherine Malabou: Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity Maria Fusco: Master Rock Charles and Ray Eames (1977): Powers of Ten The Art of Japanese Life: Nature William Kentridge: Six Drawing Lessons Hito Steyerl: In Defense of the Poor Image…
I did experiment with some pre-built networks, such as DCGAN by and char-rnn , but I didn't really undestand what was happening under the surface. More importantly, I couldn't modify these networks to change their outputs (apart from tweaking some hyperparameters). The focus of the next few months is going to be to change that. As with earlier projects , I will be taking notes here as I go along.…
I wrote about CSS Scroll Snapping on CSS-Tricks . This is the first time I've written for a professional publication, which is exciting. It's also the first article of mine that went through a proper editorial process, and it's much better because of it. Processes are the best. Read the article here .
Let's look at some options I'll list them roughly in order of elaborate-ness. Linking to the live site This requires the least amount of effort on your side, and arguably it gives people the most accurate impression of your work. They can click around the site, look at animations, and see your design work at different screen sizes by resizing their browser. They can even look at things like…
January 2, 2018 I managed to work my way through Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & Tensorflow by Aurélien Géron. Some of the more advanced math is still beyond me (remembering how vectors work was hard enough), but I feel like I've now got an actual understanding of some of the acronymns that get thrown around a lot: Deep Learing, Neural Networks, MLP, TensorFlow and so on. An…
This setup is all command line based, but once you get used to it's much nicer than the XAMPP -based workflow I had before. VVV All my projects run on VVV , which (as far as I understand) is a wrapper around Vagrant and Virtualbox . You install those two first, then pull down the VVV repo following these instructions . Once that's done, you can run vagrant up which spins up a virtual machine with…
I spent at least a day and a half getting all my figures numbered correctly, making sure my bibliography was formatted correctly, all my citations were in the right format. Numbering things, making sure data is in the right format - sounds like something a computer would be good at. Turns out there is software to do precisely this, and it's been around for 20 years: it's called LaTex. Bold, Italic…
What they were working towards was vision for society in which citizens, architecture, product design, agriculture, entertainment, science and art would exist together in one unified, rational programme: Modernism. To the young people at the Bauhaus, overlooking the rising industrial town of Dessau from their glass-wrapped studios this idea must have felt utterly within reach: In a country still…
November 28, 2017 Turns out my steppers and drivers worked just fine, I just didn't have enough voltage. 9V battery does the trick. I also found out my first EasyDriver is in fact perfectly fine, which is good news. October 3, 2017 Managed to solder pins on my EasyDrivers, they fit nicely into the breadboards now. Hopefully I didn't cook any of the components. BA Graphic Design level soldering…
April 18 Bridging Talk Content on the sheet are relevant but dates are for Illustration only. Will be looking at Unit 7 and 8 Work, no target of people to get on ba Get a merit on average (c-), get on the bridging unit prepare a project to do through 3rd year, also dissertation bridging unit outcomes: evaluation, proposal for 3rd year sheena calvert running unit 9 s.calvert@csm.arts.ac.uk look at…
Let’s look at some of the briefs that are part of my assignment. Here’s one from this year’s D&AD Young Blood awards : “Whatever you do, drive sign up online” — Huh. Here’s two from this year’s YCN-Awards : Notice anything about these? It sounds like they’re each asking for a very specific piece of design work that will directly benefit their business. A campaign to “drive signups online” for a…
Having to scale a bunch of images to three different sizes while also changing the file type is something that's been coming up in my work lately. This is easy enough to do in Lightroom, but it feels icky to fire up a massive piece of software just for one simple task. GraphicsMagick does things like rotate, scale and convert images just as well, but with a much smaller footprint. I'll keep using…
Week One Established some general type history, terminology and classification. Turns out everyone was pretty much up to speed already coming but certainly doesn't hurt to be reminded. Talked about type coming from handwriting Did some drawings to see how different typefaces are very much defined by their underlying skeletons and how negative space is used in various letterforms. Set up a shared…