To say that I’m still a design novice is something of an understatement – for all the manifest benefits of being self-taught (the main one being that you’re forced to trust your own eye), I do sometimes yearn to go to design college to learn about history, theory and technique in a systematic fashion.
As it is, I read books on photoshop and others, I experiment at home, I devour works on design, usability, and art, and I skim about 160 RSS feeds per day. Such are the course requirements for BA (Hons) Design at the University of Neil Scott.
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What or whom inspired you to become a graphic designer?
In one word: play. I used to really enjoy playing around with Geocities site builder in 1999, creating arrangements of text and image. Design was never something that I consciously wanted to do (I wanted to be a writer), so I didn’t feel any weight of expectation. Inexplicably I found that I had some talent and that some people actually wanted to pay me to design things. So I carried on accumulating experience, learning where I could, until I finally found that I could legitimately call myself a designer.
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For all of “Dr” Gillian McKeith’s many faults, the initial impact of the You Are What You Eat cannot be denied. Though we are now inured to the sight of pale, viscous shit and flabby bellies, the first time you see it is a revelation. My own favourite bit is when they present the lardarse with a table containing everything they consume in an average week. Fatty usually breaks down in tears at this point. It is easy to convince yourself that one cream cake is excusable, but when you eat thirty it is difficult to deny that you have a problem.
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To the qustion ‘why blog?’ must come the eternally blank reply. Blogging is writing without reason, pure expression, intellectual lumber. Blog posts can be well-crafted and clever, but they needn’t be definitive. They should be opinionated and grab the attention, but each has to make its way amongst an immensity of ephemera, as such it cannot hope to really lodge in the consciousness of its readers for long.
Unlike the newspapers and journals, it doesn’t decay physically and can be retrieved instantaneously in the same condition. Through hyperlinks it lives on in the blogs of others, creating an intellectual discussion that reminds me of my description of blogging as the modern equivalent of the 18th century coffee house. All human life is here, talking about everything from politics to pokemon. Indeed, if there’s anything that the blogger should take a couple of seconds to ponder it is this: what are they going to focus on?
My friend Will keeps a journal that has the sole purpose of documenting his travels when he leaves Greater London. At first glance it seems unnaturally restrictive, but over time it has built up into something that captivates. It is imposing this kind of arbitrary limitation that interests me in blogging and that is why I have come up with 4 blogging obstructions, a title that comes from Lars Von Trier’s remarkable film The Five Obstructions, which is about a sadist (Von Trier) who attempts to shake a hedonist (Jorgen Leth) out of his complacency by forcing him to remake a film with different impositions. Here are my obstructions:
1. To write at least one entry every day, even if it is just something on the linklog.
2. To write in a way that engages with the world, not just other bloggers.
3. To not post anything until I have an opinion about the subject (blogging should encourage thought).
4. To displays my actual reality rather than affecting an online persona.
These may sound vague to the point of excluding nothing, but it is helpful to have them as reminders and encouragement. In terms of subject matter, I want to limit myself to design and entropy, but I suspect that I’ll cross over into other territories almost immediately. Indeed, this whole subject made me think about what it is that I look for in a blog. Particularly in those blogs I read straight away, no matter how busy – what it is about them that excites me.
I managed to sift the list down to three qualities identifiable in three bloggers:
1. Dickon Edwards – Blogging is pure display and no one displays themself quite like Dickon.
2. Rhodri Marsden – Blogging is inevitably anecdotal and Rhodri never tells the same story in the same way. The man is practically allergic to unconscious use of cliche.
3. Nick Currie – His Click Opera is always opinionated, always engaged and always surprising. What more could you ask for.
Display, well-told anecdotes and opinion – this is blogging as it should be done and as I hope to do in the coming months.
In the same way that Christians ask themselves What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), I sometimes watch films and think What Would K-Punk Say (WWKPS): his essays on A History of Violence and Batman Begins were so illuminating that some films can feel incomplete without his exegesis.
Children of Men was one of those films. It cried out for his commentary (alas, they could only get Zizek) and I emailed to telling him so, but due to him moving house he only recently got to see it on DVD with his eventual post linking it in with some atrabilious musings on the exhaustion of culture/capitalism and referring to a TV drama called Threads, which was apparently about the after effects of nuclear apocalypse. Needless to say, I ordered Threads immediately.
For I love apocalyptic dramas. As a ten year old I devoured Z is for Zachariah and Day of the Triffids. For years I helped myself to get to sleep by becoming absorbed in a fantasy wherein I was a survivor (protected by clambering inside my duvet cover) of a nuclear bomb attack. Walking into Wigston alone, I found myself struck by the silent, empty streets and wondered whether the populace had been wiped out. So let’s say I had high expectations for Threads.
Threads begins (spoilers follow) with a realistic depiction of ordinary Sheffield life, full of annoying families, back-street aviaries and fumbled fucks in Ford Cortinas. It feels less like a drama and more like a documentary replete with RP narrator explaining the increasingly tense geopolitical situation. The news – overheard in pubs, on the wireless, glanced at in newspapers – builds with devastating inevitability so that when the bombs fall it comes as something of a relief.
As Martin Amis said in Einstein’s Monsters, nuclear weapons are unthinkable. The reality of the consequences are beyond our ken. Civilization crumbles, hope dissipates, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. Selling sex for rats to eat – that is the reality of post-nuclear Sheffield. I mean, bleakness is so much part of Sheffield civilization that to see that civilization torn to shreds is to experience a bleakness beyond compare.
And yet, some people survive, more or less in starker and starker contrast to the RP announcer, who calmly explains what would happen to the crops, to the radiated children, and to the piles of rotting corpses. The viewer is left demoralised, barely able to face a future full of nuclear bombs in the Middle East, bird flu, global warming, and bioterrorism. I loved it.
When I started at my current job I was daunted by two things: switching from mac to PC and having to work in Photoshop.
I tend to work quickest and most effectively in Fireworks, with Textmate, Transmit, Voodoopad, Linotype Font Explorer and other li’l mac apps making life so much easier. Shockingly, PCs aren’t as horrific as a mac user would imagine: the annoying paper clip thing (”Clippit”) seems to have disappeared and you can get adequate replacements for most essential apps (Ultraedit, Filezilla, Keynote). I also managed to get myself a copy of Fireworks.
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Ever since John Stuart Mill posed the question ‘what would you rather be a dissatisfied Socrates or a satisfied pig?’, intellectuals have been looking on swinish pleasures with a fustian disdain. Comparing Beethoven’s Ninth with Crazy Frog may show conclusively that pleasure can be ordered hierarchically, but never objectively. For what is pleasure but that which engages us? And that which is engaging must hold some kind of challenge within it, otherwise it would be boring. Nevertheless, being challenging doesn’t necessarily mean it has to have long words.
When my friend Tim came up to visit us a couple of weeks I was pleasantly invigorated by his uncanny ability to channel the zeitgeist into all conversations. As features editor on Channel 4’s Slash Music website, he spends all day talking to and thinking about the latest bands with their funny haircuts. He loves George Pringle, Girls Aloud and Coco Rosie, but he is also a Dylanologist who has studied acting theory. The idea that some of these pleasures are more or less worthy is abhorrent to him, guilt just doesn’t come into it.
Perhaps its a remnant of the days when people believed that culture moved forwards. Indeed, the clubbing phenomena is based largely around “cheesy” disco records, the kind of “naff” music that the year zeroism of punk attempted to obliterate. It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths people will go to in order to legitimize their tastes.
In last Saturday’s Guardian, the dubious concept of the guilty pleasure is used as a means to understand modern intellectuals. All the usual suspects are there – AC Grayling (Boxing), Richard Dawkins (Computer Programming), Steven Pinker (Rock Lyrics), Elaine Showalter (Trinny and Susannah) – justifying their lumpen pleasures. It’s as though the Modern Review never existed! Not that any of them are particularly guilt-inducing. Only Slavoj Zizek’s choice of Military PC games has even the slightest possibility of being offensive or sinful. Imagine if Roger Scruton had revealed a passion for necrophilia or John Carey for bestiality – that might be interesting – but no, it’s dull dull dull.
And me? Well, accounting for all my “guilty”, low brow pleasures would take all day but these are the ones that spring to mind. I love playing darts, watching buddy comedies, and reading science fiction.
What are your guilty pleasures?
Link: Guardian Weekend: Doh!