Archive for the ‘soapbox’ Category

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Do YOU know where your fonts came from?

January 5th, 2010, posted in general thoughts, soapbox

[Are you ready for this hyperlink-tastic rant I wrote during a five-hour layover in Cincinnati?  Here goes:] I love free things just as much as the rest of you.  I’m an advocate for free culture, open source software, and fighting overly restrictive copyright laws.  However, when it comes to free fonts, there are some important distinctions to be made.  This is certainly not a new debate in the typography world, just adding my thoughts to share with my community and network.

Professional fonts can cost hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands.  That may sound like a lot for just a font, but high end magazines, newspapers, and graphic design firms can afford it.  Designing a font is quite a fine art and science, and fonts take months, sometimes years to design; typographers should be compensated for their work.  Did you know it’s possible to make a living designing fonts?  I know a recent Hampshire alum who does just that – what a cool job!

However, we students, amateurs, and hobbyists can’t afford such things, so what do we do if we feel dubious about where our fonts are coming from?

You’ll notice on sites like Dafont (my favorite free font database), many fonts say “free for personal use.”  This generally means any non-commercial project, but the lines are fuzzy.  It’s worth mentioning that some “free” fonts are likely ripoffs, since the software is more accessible these days and it’s easy to change a few strokes on a font and then call it your own.  It is unlikely font foundries are going to hunt you down if you pirate or ripoff their fonts – unless you are a large corporation like NBC, or your project is seen in a wider public sphere.  Font lawsuits have happened a number of times, and the font foundries always win.

Recently I have come across more and more public domain and open source fonts, which is where things get exciting.  One particular group that appears to be at the forefront of this is the League of Movable Type.  An excerpt from their manifesto:

This revolution is not a movement against type foundries and type designers; it’s quite the opposite. The kind of revolution we want is a change in the way people think about doing business. We want type foundries and typographers to start thinking, “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with giving things away sometimes.”  It’s not always about the money, sometimes it’s also about making a contribution to the society, in this case, the design community. Giving one typeface away for free will most likely only boost sales, and it’s a good deed. We want more people to look at it like that: like they have a responsibility to do something good for their peers. We’re not asking type designers and type foundries to sacrifice profit, we’re asking them to contribute to a greater cause, to create a community where we not only have a high design standard for print and web alike, but also a community where we’re able to share our creations, knowledge, and expertise with our peers and the world.

There are many collections now, thanks to Smashing Magazine and others, of high quality professional fonts that have been released under a Creative Commons or some other kind of open source license.  You can even search on Dafont for just fonts that are public domain.  HOWEVER, even these seemingly well-intentioned open source folks are HOTLY DEBATED! in the typography world.

Now that there are so many fonts available (of all license varieties), maybe the real question should be, Do we need more fonts? – This final linked article is very geeky (and of course the conclusion is that we DO need more fonts), but a worthwhile read, I promise! An excerpt:

The most common question I get about being a type designer is this: “Aren’t there enough typefaces already?” The best response I have ever heard to this question is, “You know, I heard the same thing about people!” It is quite funny but probably comes across a bit rude, especially to people you have just met. For a long time, the best response I could come up with was a more diplomatic, although less articulate, “Oh, well you know, ha ha.” And then I would try to change the subject. “Aren’t there enough typefaces already?” isn’t a bad question though. There are a lot of typefaces. Even to a type designer, it can seem like everything has already been done…

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Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 1

February 3rd, 2009, posted in general thoughts, media, soapbox

As I’ve become more familiar with the graphic design and typography “world,” and begun to identify more of my favorite artists  and type designers (Robert Slimbach, Matthew Carter, David Carson…) I’ve started to wonder why I don’t have more female role models.

The other day I happened upon this fantastic video (I highly recommend it) of a panel discussion on the art of the book, with Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd, and Dave Eggers, moderated by Michael Beirut. I’m very familiar with all of their work, and all four of them are some of my top heroes – my idols! The coolest, savviest, most interesting designers I know! And seeing all of them together in the same room talking about book design, it was a real treat. Until the very end during a Q & A, when there was a question about why there were so few female “superstar” graphic designers – “is there a glass ceiling in graphic design?” Milton Glaser’s response:

He said that the reason there are so few female rock star graphic designers is that “women get pregnant, have children, go home and take care of their children. And those essential years that men are building their careers and becoming visible are basically denied to women who choose to be at home.” He continued: “Unless something very dramatic happens to the nature of the human experience then it’s never going to change.” About day care and nannies, he said, “None of them are good solutions.”

The crowd was silent except for a hiss or two and then Eggers piped up that he and his wife both work from home and share child care responsibilities — but added that maybe New York was different (although we don’t think Eggers really believes this). Then it was clear to everyone in the room that it was time to move on.

In Helvetica (the greatest movie ever) why are only two of the two dozen interviews with women?

Shira asked me once when the first time I was really conscious of my gender was. There are probably some times in my youth that I can’t clearly recall (other kids questioning whether I could play Huck Finn because I was a girl), I think the first time was in a class my freshman year of high school. After completing a month’s worth of assignments for an Intro to Technology class in one day, my parents and teachers realized something should be done. So I was transferred into Visual Communication, where I was the only freshman and the only girl.  I thrived on the material, but I felt really uncomfortable and out of place in that environment.

I’ve take a number of computer and technology oriented classes in both high school and college, and I’ve always been in the minority.  I think it always made me subconsciously want to work harder, to prove that I could be as good or better than the boys.

Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 2: what I’ve learned from doing design and animation on the documentary film Heretics: Stories from a Feminist Art Collective for the past two years… coming soon.

-Molly

(p.s.  if you read this, you should comment!  the more you comment on our blog, the happier we will be, and the more often we will update.  it’s nice to know when your writing is read.)

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Palin Pains

September 30th, 2008, posted in soapbox

The other day I watched the SNL parody of the Couric/Palin interview, and I thought it was pretty funny. Tina Fey is brilliant as Palin. But I found out after watching the actual Couric/Palin interview that SNL took a lot of material pretty much VERBATIM. It was already so ridiculous that they hardly had to make anything up to exaggerate it. The thought of Sarah Palin being vice president (or, in all likelihood, president) basically terrifies me. I think I might start actively campaigning for Obama less so to promote him, but rather to urgently campaign AGAINST McCain and Palin.

Here is the SNL version…

And clips from the actual interview: foreign policy, McCain and regulations, and the bailout proposal.

I think this article sums it up pretty well:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters.

!!!

-Molly

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The internet needs to know: What are you doing RIGHT now?

September 18th, 2008, posted in media, soapbox

Okay, SO Tara and I have been horrible at blogging the last few weeks, but we’ve both been rather busy moving. To be fair, I moved only from North Amherst to Hadley, about five miles away, and Tara moved from New York to London… Here is a picture of us hugging goodbye a few weeks ago. And, here are some random scattered thoughts and article excerpts about social interaction the internet and such things.

I read an interesting article a few days ago about digital intimacy, and it had a few new media terms I liked: microblogging (posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing, like Twitter) and ambient awareness.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”

But: “If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.” It’s a long article, but I recommend reading all of it, very fascinating stuff.

I also just read an article in Hampshire’s student newspaper, the Climax, about so-called “Facebook celebrities” in the incoming class – those kids who, before school even starts, go and and friend every single person they can find. So when you meet someone you’ve friended on Facebook in person for the first time, do you pretend you don’t already know where they’re from, their favorite music, relationship status, and employment history? Is it taboo to ask about an interesting picture you saw of them on a vacation?

Facebook was the new thing when I first started college, and our generation is still navigating the social do’s and don’ts of how online information is used in real life interaction. But do you suppose, in a few years, there will be a more universal, unwritten social code about how we interface with such things? OR, maybe at some point ALL of our socializing will just be digital? This virtual reality cocoon is amazing technology, but it kind of freaks me out.

We joke casually nowadays about googling or stalking someone online, but in the age of social networking, digital intimacy, ambient information, and blogging, where is the line drawn between curiosity, obsession, and straightforward stalking?

-Molly

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