We’re on the other side of the vernal equinox and graduation is getting closer. Chris and I started to take big steps toward finishing the magazine, the illustrated typography project was due in illustration class and I learned the story of the bork. This week was brought to you by a big effort to get eight hours of sleep every night.
Progress on the magazine
Chris and myself are well underway developing the features of our magazine project. One of the features involves your data and what happens to it once you die. It’s in the spirit of this article. We’ve been taking JPGs, opening them up in text editors and then messing around with the code inside; cutting a few things here and pasting extra characters over there. The whole process is unpredictable and it makes for some nice surprises. For another one of our features we needed some scratchy letters for headlines and subheads. We found some black acrylic and scratched an alphabet into it. All this experimentation has kindled some excitement for the project in us.
Chris and I took both days over the weekend and went into school to work on the magazine. We called the event the Editorial extrava-bonanza-thon and we know there will be at least one sequel. Both of us brought snacks (yogurt covered raisins and Miss Vickie's chips mostly) and pop and went out for lunch to keep spirits high. The most important part was that we set timers and had to complete one spread per hour. They turned out scrappy and pretty rough but it’s an early version and there’s still lots of time left to refine what we’ve done. It’s clear to us now that up until the extrava-bonanza-thon we were spending too much time at once on each spread.
A glitched imaged
The alphabet for the scratch font we made
Illustration critique
The illustrated type project finished up this week and I tried my hardest to step outside my comfort zone. After the critique was over I could tell I treaded too far into unfamiliar territory and should’ve taken some steps back. It’s a bit funny that despite illustrating the phrase “Done is better than perfect” I spent a little too much time pushing and pulling things in an effort to get it just right. Thankfully I was able to pull the project back just by getting rid of the colour. Few other mistakes are fixed that easily but it was a lesson learned regardless.
The mistake and the fix
Purchases
Pitch Regular and Pitch Regular Italic are now in my collection of fonts. It also marks the first font I’ve bought (of hopefully many) from Kilm Type Foundry. My friend Laura Sand also picked it up for her branding project.
Type specimen for Pitch
The story of the bork
I subscribe to the Listserve and I pulled this story out of one of the emails I received from a guy named Chris Morrison.
When I was a kid, my dad used to pick up rocks when I wasn’t looking and hurl them into the forest, where they would crash-crash-crash through dry leaves down a hill. “Do you hear that? It’s the bork!” What a bork was, he left to my imagination. Even at that tender age, I didn’t quite believe in the bork, but I never fully came to disbelieve it either. Today, when I look out into a peaceful forest, I imagine the lumpy form of the bork there: the world’s most mysteriously awkward monster.”
I’ll be thinking of that Bork every time I take walks in the forest now. Here’s another takeaway from his email:
“Human imagination works that way: leave a blank space, and given a starter seed, imagination grows and incorporates fresh details.”
I like that.