The Discrimination of NPR

I’m curious to know if anyone else out there has come to this same realization:

I like classical music and I spend a fair amount of time listening to NPR throughout the work week. I even scan their playlist online regularly just to see what’s coming up – whether it be something already familiar and prized or something unfamiliar that might be worth discovering. Or often I just listen rather casually and something nice that I hadn’t heard before gets played. And so I look it up, making a note of the composer and the composition’s name for further exploration later.

But after several months of this sort of routine it has begun to dawn on me that, with relatively few exceptions, whatever rules are out there governing what gets played on NPR are apparently not all that different from the rules which govern pop-oriented FM radio. Their playlist really does become quite predictable and tired after a while. The heritage which is “classical” music is so rich and so deep and so glorious – but you won’t really gain a healthy appreciation of this fact if all you’re ever exposed to is the rather stingy menu that NPR serves up during their regular air time. I mean, Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise is a beautiful piece of music, but didn’t we just hear it sometime during the afternoon last week – and the week before that too? Didn’t ‘ole Sergei write some other stuff that might be worth playing?! Sheesh!

Love Those Ligatures!

I love to linger over a nice set of ligatures – almost as much as I love to alliterate.

What’s a ligature? Don’t feel bad if you have to ask. I was initiated into such typographical mysteries later than I care to admit. Be forewarned, however: once you discover them you will find it hard – painful, even – to live without them.

The sad fact is that certain lowercase letter forms don’t get along very well together. They can’t seem to keep their arms and ascenders to themselves and are constantly invading the space of their neighbors. The most notorious problem child of them all is f, who behaves particularly badly when placed beside l, i, j, k, b, h or another f. He is even known to cause problems with certain, ordinarily well-behaved punctuation marks when left unsupervised in their vicinity.

In the days when texts were written by hand, scribes often got creative in their handling of some of these letter combinations by binding problematic pairs (or even trios) of letterforms into a single, seamless unit when the situation called for it. (The word ligature comes from the Latin verb ligare, meaning to tie up or to bind together.) With the advent of moveable type, this practice was continued by the creation of separate metal casts for the desired combinations. In the era of digital type, the desired results are (in principal) produced most easily – if the producers of a typeface include the necessary ligatures as part of the font set, if the publishing software makers allow for them to be readily appropriated, and if the end-user knows or cares enough to bother about them at all – a chain of requirements which is tragically broken more often than not in practice.

Notice the variations in the following examples. (The text is set in Adobe Garamond Pro using Adobe InDesign.) In the first example, ligatures are turned off. (In InDesign, the ligature feature can be toggled on or off via the pull down menu on the Character palette.) Notice how the ffi combination in Officina creates some ungainly crowding and uncomfortable tangents, particularly between the terminal on the f and the dot on the i. (Adobe Garamond Pro is actually more generous than some typefaces, where you would find these letters actually colliding and overlapping most abhorrently.)

Now ligatures are turned on.

Ahhhhh, that looks and feels so much better!

Open Type fonts such as Adobe Garamond Pro (for you professional users out there) also often contain extra “discretionary” ligatures which can be appropriated if so desired. (In InDesign, again go to the Character palette, access the pull-down menu and go to Open Type > Discretionary Ligatures. Also, going up to the Type menu and selecting Glyphs will open up a separate palette displaying the complete character set for that font – ligatures, punctuation marks, diacritics and other special characters – which you can explore to your heart’s content. Just place the cursor at the appropriate point in your text box and double-click on the desired glyph to manually insert.) Notice the ct in the example below.

While standard ligatures ought to be just that – standard use for anyone with even a modicum of typographic sensibilities – discretionary ligatures are a bit pretentious and distracting for normal body copy, though they can create some nice results when setting display text, if the added touch of sophistication is desirable. So, be sure to use them as the appellation suggests – with discretion.

Happy ligaturing!

Excerpt from James Jordan

Here’s a little secret I should let you in on: I have relatively few original insights when it comes to most of the stuff I'm posting. In the interest of giving credit where credit is due and in directing others who may be interested to the same wells which I have been refreshed from, I’ll be sharing some of those sources of inspiration as I go along. James Jordan has been a significant one. I’m currently reading The Sociology of the Church and I just came across (quite unexpectedly, in the midst of some seemingly very unrelated matter, I might add) this very nice encapsulation of some of the themes that I have been and will be touching upon in these posts. I thought it well worth sharing:

“The central ritual of the church is the action of Holy Communion. Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, distributed it, and they all tasted (evaluated) it, and ate it. This six-fold action (taking, thanking, restructuring, sharing, evaluating, enjoying) is the key to the Christian life in every area. An artist takes raw material, thanks God for it, creates his art and distributes it (playing a concert, exhibiting a painting), and evaluates and enjoys it in fellowship with others. A businessman takes raw material, thanks God for it, works with it and shares it by means of the free market (exchanges it for a share of someone else’s goods), and then evaluates and enjoys it in fellowship with others. This is the Christian life, and it finds it [sic] most concentrated expression in the liturgy of the sacrament.”

—James Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p189

Keeping

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden…and the Lord God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress and keep it.
Genesis 2: 8a-15 (AV)

In the previous post on this topic we explored Adam’s duty of dressing the Garden. Now let’s turn our attention to God’s charge to keep the Garden.

As quoted above, the AV renders this Hebrew verb as (to) keep. Most English translations stick with this rendering. The two notable variations would be (to) take care of it (NIV), which I think is rather weak, and (to) watch over it (HCSB), which I really like. According to Strong’s Concordance, the Hebrew verb can take the following meanings: to hedge about (as with thorns), to guard, to protect, to beware, to be circumspect, to take heed, to mark, to look narrowly, to observe, to lie in wait.

This conjures up a good many interesting things to consider. The most obvious meaning here is that God appointed Adam as a guardian of the Garden. There are some fascinating and rather ominous undertones here. Even in an unfallen world, Adam was supposed to be on his toes, to mark what what went on around him in the Garden – what was present there, what was done there, what was said there – to sift it all carefully and to be ready to act if some sign of trouble or danger manifested itself. Though one wonders what trouble or danger Adam could possibly have conceived of in his state of innocence, God of course knew what he did not: the serpent was lurking and would be looking for an opportunity to work mischief.

Adam was to be an observant creature – a watchful and thoughtful guardian. He was to examine each thing around him, assessing its latent potentialities – for good, but possibly also for evil (even though he as yet had no knowledge of evil, save perhaps by name only). A sense of foreboding certainly overshadows all of this because we know the rest of the story as recorded in Chapter Three. However, I would submit that Adam’s charge to keep has richer, more glorious and more constructive implications woven into it than these darker associations alone will reveal. Recall everything which was mentioned earlier with regard to dressing and let it sit closely beside the watchful observation which is enjoined here.

Taken together, the entire task would require a good deal of imagination and creativity on Adam’s part. Adam was not created to simply take things – save God’s own words – at face value. He was not created to necessarily accept things as they initially presented themselves to him. He was supposed to examine things up close, and then he was supposed to take a step back from things – to squint at them, to turn his head sideways and look at them cock-eyed. He was supposed to question. He was meant to dig. He was intended to investigate. He was created to explore.

Super Bowl XLIII ads

The planets of sports and advertising had their annual conjunction last night. I checked in somewhere in the second quarter and was in and out, so I did miss a few. There is a good re-cap along with some funny commentary here.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1874549,00.html

My personal favorites:

Monster.com’s “Moose Head” ad
I laughed out loud.

Cash4Gold’s ad featuring Ed McMahon and M.C. Hammer
Again, laugh-out-loud funny – and timely.

Coca Cola’s “Insect Heist” ad
Cleverly creative and impeccably animated.

NFL’s Usama Young ad
A nice combination of humor and father-son sentimentality.


Stinkers:

Pepsi’s “MacGruber” ad
I’m sure most MacGyver fans ate this one up, but it didn’t really do anything for me.

GoDaddy.com’s ads featuring Danica Patrick
These were both tasteless and not really all that clever or all that funny.

The Elements of Typograhic Style

Within a short time after completing my formal education and entering my profession, I became rather painfully aware that my training in the art and craft of typography had been sorely lacking in many respects. There is an incredibly rich history and a fascinating set of accepted principles and rules which govern typography, the skillful use of letterforms and typeset matter which is a very important sub-discipline of graphic design. These were practically occult to me early in my career. I had some vague sense that they were floating around out there and that others were aware of them and made good use of them, but they were as yet undiscovered by me. After I languished for a couple of years or so in this state, a helpful co-worker (eternal thanks, Jade!) recommended this book. My well-worn paperback first edition copy of Bringhurst’s respected manual still sits within easy reach on my shelf and I refer to it – sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of sheer delight – on probably a weekly basis, at least. I would say that its contribution to my career has been inestimable, though I have by no means begun to exhaust the vast store of knowledge on the subject and am always captivated to learn more.

There are those who will assert that rules have nothing whatever to do with aesthetic enterprises, to which I say Hogwash! Of course I will grant that the rules have to be employed with a rather loose grip and a free hand, especially when it comes to aesthetics. But even one intent upon bending or breaking the rules (which is appropriate and even obligatory from time to time) must understand them thoroughly if it is to be done with thoughtfulness and effectiveness. (This is true, incidentally, with respect to literature, poetry, music and any other art form as much as it is within the visual arts.)

For all its value, Bringhurst’s book is not without its flaws. In my opinion, these have more to do with what is left unsaid than what is said. (Some of the reviews on amazon.com, while overwhelmingly positive, do highlight this fact. I would particularly Amen! virtually every critique offered by Erik Fleischer.) Hopefully the author can address these in a future edition. That said, I would consider this a must-have book for every graphic designer and a handsome edition to the library of anyone who has even a casual interest in typography.

Dressing

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden…and the Lord God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress and keep it.
Genesis 2: 8a-15 (AV)

As we continue to explore man’s lordly role as established by God at the creation, we need to consider three very important aspects of that role which are highlighted in the Genesis narrative: dressing, keeping and (as we shall see later) naming.

First let us turn our attention to the concept of dressing, as the Authorized Version renders the first of man’s two assigned duties. Renderings of other translations include tend (NKJV), work (NIV, ESV, HCSB), and cultivate (NASB). The original Hebrew word indicates labor, husbandry (a somewhat archaic English term for cultivation), service and most interestingly, the idea of compulsion, as in to compel someone or something else to work. Taking all of this together, we get the general picture: Adam (Man, which is the literal meaning of the Hebrew name) is given the task of maintaining the garden. One would presume this to include the garden and everything in it: plants, rocks, soil, streams, beasts and, of course, himself and (later) his wife. And we have to almost pinch ourselves into remembering once again (I will be calling attention to this frequently when dealing with the first two chapters of Genesis) that all of this is in the context of an unspoiled, pre-Fall creation. This leads to some fascinating ruminations.

First we have the very concept of work. Work in and of itself is not a product of or a penalty imposed on account of the Fall. The Fall would drastically alter the nature of man’s work, primarily by ratcheting up its intensity while subjecting it to constant frustration rather than continual blessing, but the pattern of six days of labor and one of rest is established right from the beginning.

Secondly, consider this: God didn’t cause a wild and untamed jungle (or a rainforest, even) to grow up in Eden; he planted a garden in Eden. A garden is something which must be maintained, pruned and cultivated. The soil needs to be worked to maintain ideal growing conditions. The hedges needed trimming from time to time. A tree’s natural and God-given glory might be further enhanced by observing the tree as it continues to grow, perhaps selectively lopping off a few limbs here and there, and perhaps re-training some that remained. The fruit needed gathering.

It is virtually tantamount to gospel truth in the modern world that concepts such as pure, pristine and unspoiled are necessarily equated with untamed, unrefined and untouched by the hand of man, but in the Bible it is not so. When man interacts with nature, exercises his influence upon it, and works thoughtful change upon it and throughout it, he is not thereby necessarily or merely by definition meddling or interfering; he is doing so at the express appointment of God. Note that I said the change wrought should be thoughtful (and even that is not to say that even any duly considered change is necessarily for the best, at least not in a Fallen world), and as noted in the previous post, it should be performed with an ultimate end in mind which is replenishing and nurturing for the earth. Those important qualifications duly noted however, it must be reiterated that man alters his environment with the blessing of Almighty God.

God in the beginning created everything good, and yet, the world still had much which God intended to be made even better through the careful stewardship of man. The original creation was indeed glorious, and yet, God intended it to ascend, through man’s agency, from glory to even greater glory. I believe that, had the Fall never happened, we would still have much that we treasure even in our now corrupted universe. Landscaped vistas. Sculpted shrubbery. Terraced embankments. Wisteria laden arbors. Flagstone walkways and courtyards. Rose-entwined trellises (sans thorns, of course). Ivy-clad brick walls. Bonsai trees.

Or at least things very much like them.

More to come as we have a look at keeping.

Abba Java logos

Here’s a look at a fun little logo project recently completed for a friend. This is branding for some specialty-roasted coffee which will be sold to benefit orphans. The emphasis at this stage is on coffee grown in Africa and benefiting African orphans specifically, hence some of the early Afro-centric designs. However, the client ultimately decided to go with something a bit more versatile, to keep his options open as the business develops.

And the winner is...

Farewell Andrew Wyeth

It was announced just yesterday that celebrated American painter Andrew Wyeth has passed at the age of 91. Wyeth was indeed a fine painter, though I confess to being more an admirer of his father, N. C. Wyeth. I would love to take a trip to Delaware sometime to visit the Brandywine Museum, home to many works by the Wyeths and a good many other fine artists and illustrators.

Dominion

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, over every creeping that that creepeth upon the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1:26-28 (AV)

My goal in posts under this topical heading will be to muse upon and to explore the relationship between the arts and mankind's original calling by God to exercise dominion over the earth. In order to get to the place where we can discover various ways in which this applies to the arts specifically, it will be helpful to establish some key points and principles regarding this calling to have dominion as it exists generally.

Notice first of all that man – that is mankind, encompassing both male and female – is charged with exercising dominion upon the earth. This position of dominion or lordship is apparently the essential component of what it in fact means to be made in God’s image. When man exercises dominion over creation as God intended him to do then he is in that very capacity most accurately and fully representing God Himself to the rest of the created order.

Secondly, notice that this authority given to man includes both the earth itself and the other, lesser creatures which dwell upon it.

Notice thirdly that what is involved here has two closely related though slightly differentiated aspects which should not be confused, separated or set against one another: Man’s position as established here by God involves authority over it, which would include the implicit sanction to order it, make use of it and dispose of it as he deems most fitting (according to certain fundamental principles and within certain important parameters). At the same time, this exercise of authority is always to have the net effect of replenishing or nurturing the creation. (Many translations render the phrase in v.28 as “fill the earth”, but I like the AV's choice of “replenish” here. The Hebrew word here does literally mean “to fill”, but I think the context of Genesis indicates a filling which is qualitative as opposed to simply quantitative. In other words, man is certainly supposed to “fill up the earth” by populating it, but as he does so, he must take care to go about it in a away that enhances rather than detracts from the glory and the richness of the creation, lest his filling of the earth actually amount to an emptying of it and its resources.)

And lastly it must be remembered that all of this is established in a pre-Fall context, which provides much to ruminate upon. The Fall of course greatly marred and deteriorated this established order, particulaly man's ability to faithfully fulfill his role in it. But the trajectory of redemptive history as presented in the Bible involves a return to the Garden, a return which is made possible by the work of Christ. Since in Christ we are re-established in our role as His agents upon the earth, it is therefore imperative that we seek to more fully apprehend what that role entails – for redeemed mankind generally as well as for each of us in our individual callings – based upon a careful examination of its original authorization.

Bezalel

Since mankind is created in the image of God, the calling to imitate Him applies to all of us as we live our daily lives and pursue our respective vocations. We are all called to be, as it were, “God’s shadow” simply on the basis of our creation in His image.

If it is true, however, that man as man is called to imitate God, the text of Exodus 31 would seem to indicate that the artist fulfills this calling in some unique respects. The Hebrew name Bezalel literally means “in the shadow of God”. As hinted above, the name itself has certain reverberations with respect to mankind’s original calling as established in the early chapters of Genesis. Moreover, it is interesting to note that this is the first instance we find in Scripture (following Genesis chapter 2) of a man being filled with God’s Spirit. And, as is most often the case, particularly in the Old Testament, we find that this unique gift of the Spirit is given with respect to a particular calling or duty to which that individual is appointed.

Bezalel was the man assigned by God to oversee the design and construction of the tabernacle (the tent in which God's presence accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness during the period of the Exodus) and all of its furnishings and associate articles. This task encompassed a number of different crafts and artistic disciplines - virtually all of them in fact: sculpture, carpentry, wood carving, metalworking, weaving, embroidery, gem cutting, jewelry design, engraving, calligraphy, and (broadly considered) graphic design. The overall plan called for the implementation of both representational and non-representational (abstract) art. Without doubt Bezalel would have relied upon skills and canons of visual representation which had been acquired in Egypt, and yet he was also to follow a detailed pattern which had been divinely revealed through Moses. (Exodus 25:40; 26:30; 27:8) The principles of form and function are in constant interplay and (Modernist assertions to the contrary aside) it is often difficult to ascertain which is in the driver’s seat.

There are many rich truths here and in related passages which I hope to explore further in some future posts.