Welcome Home, Mr. Wilson.

It appears that noted skeptic A. N. Wilson has returned to the Christian fold. You can read about it here – and be sure not to miss the short little Q&A at the end. I love his references to things that God used to harass his consciousness throughout his decades of avowed atheism: language, literature, love – and the music of Bach.

What the hand dare seize the fire?

I must say this image is pretty striking.



CNN: NASA photos show giant cosmic hand

Saint Dwayne

I was reading an article in a recent issue of Communication Arts the other day which contained some comments from another reader that piqued my interest. A quick investigation confirmed my suspicion that the sentiments were indeed coming from a kindred spirit. Saint Dwayne’s blog has some really great stuff and I commend it to your own reading. (I’ve also included it under my list of links to the left.) His full essay on designers and the books they read, which was excerpted in the aforementioned article, can be found here.

A.S.I.C.S.

Bought a new pair of tennis-shoes recently. (Those would be what non-Middle Tenneesseans refer to simply as sneakers or athletic shoes.) Anyway, my previous pair of ASICS had served me quite well (over-served me by probably almost a decade or so, actually) and a local store was having a good sale, so I bought another new pair of the same brand. I wasn’t aware of this before, but the little tag I had to clip off informed me that the name is actually an acronym standing for anima sana in corpore sano. This in turn is based on Juvenal’s mens sana in corpore sano. Either way, the meaning is essentially a sound mind in a sound body. Mens is properly translated mind and anima more properly soul or spirit, but it works – especially given that you’d otherwise be left with MSICS for a brand name!

That Hideous Strength

This is a very relevant book for our times. It’s also C.S. Lewis. Those two factors alone make it a more-or-less mandatory read – and one that is virtually guaranteed to be above average, at least. I do have to say, however, that I did not find it nearly so enjoyable to read as Lewis’ very best fiction (which would be Perelandra and Till We Have Faces, in my opinion).

While I embrace with satisfaction the overall trajectory of the narrative – cold, calculating rationalistic-materialism on the one hand effectively contrasted with enthralling, incarnate (and erotically charged) spirituality on the other – I do have to admit that I somehow found the ending rather anti-climactic. In addition, there are a number of elements here and there which I found quite puzzling and disjointed. (For just one example, what’s up with that one little segment of first person narrative in Chapter One which is never again taken up?) Perhaps some of this apparent lack of cohesion is by design, I don’t know. Lewis was a very clever one.

On the plus side, the book is chock-full of very interesting characters, some great individual scenes and is deliciously rich in irony. At times the satire (it took a while, but I eventually began to see why many reviewers describe the work as “satirical”) approaches laugh-out-loud intensity. So it really is a very good book. Probably the biggest thing working against it is that it follows right on the heels of Perelandra, which is positively sublime.

Please Kern Responsibly

Found this at Type for you.

I suppose no additional explanation is really needed. It looks like the clever folks who came up with this have applied it to t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., to the delight of graphic design nerds everywhere.

Bad Type Sighting, 090316

In virtually any discipline, the via negationis, the negative example, can be an effective teacher. This is at least as true with graphic design and typography as it is with anything else, and in our era of aesthetic devaluation good examples (which is to say, bad examples) are to be found in abundance.

Case in point, this little photocopied beauty that struck me like a Three Stooges jab to the eyeballs when I opened a well-meaning card from a local bookkeeping business. (Pertinent information is blacked out to protect the guilty.) Y’know, I freely admit that my accounting skills are laughable. That’s why I hire a pro to do my taxes and provide consultation. But since these folks didn’t feel the need to hire a professional graphic designer to handle their promotion that got sent to this one (I know…times are tough), I feel all the more justified in rubbing it in a little!

If you insist, in the face of all protestations to the contrary, on doing it yourself, here’s a little typographical tip for you, free of charge: don’t use script fonts when any all caps work is required! (Or, vice versa, just refuse to use any all caps if you’re dead-set on using a script font. Or explore some other option like substituting a roman font for obligatory acronyms, etc.) That “Congratulations” is just painful. And the only thing scarier than the IRS itself is seeing the acronym spelled out in gaudy, flourishing, jostling, self-contradicting script capital letters. Kinda like those pantyhose commercials that Joe Namath did back in the 70’s. Ick! No thanks.

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.