Vintage hand-painted sign seen in Evansville, Wisconsin on August 7, 2004. This building was in the process of being restored. It had been covered in imitation brick tar paper. Amazingly, the surface beneath is barely weathered. The building was painted silver with these large coal-black letters about two feet tall on both sides of the building. The style appears to be late nineteenth century, but it could have been later than that, especially considering the condition.
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A presumably unintentional contradictory message seen on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, August 5, 2004.
I spent last evening enjoying a talk by Scott McCloud at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He did a similar talk there two years ago which I also attended.
McCloud is a comic book artist and writer best known for his book Understanding Comics. He talked mainly about online comics, a phenomenon he has been involved in since the beginning.
The audience was mainly hard-core comics people, so it felt a little weird for me to be there. When I was young, I read Mad magazine and wanted to be a cartoonist for a while. But I’ve only been into comic books sporadically.
McCloud’s book caught my attention a few years ago and I would put it on my short list of most inspiring and thought-provoking books. The reason is that I just like the way McCloud thinks.
He has a knack for getting beyond conventional thinking, drawing out fundamental principles and presenting them lucidly. It’s an old cliché to say someone “thinks outside the box.” In McCloud’s case, I wonder if he even remembers what the inside of the box looks like.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun. As with the last time I saw him talk, he had his family with him. And, once again, he did a dramatic reading of Monkey Town at the urging of his two young daughters (only this time he didn’t blow out any of the speakers in the auditorium). And I got him to sign my copy of Understanding Comics. Pretty cool.
Cheshire Dave’s Mastication Is Normal is home of the famous Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black, a clever spoof of VH1’s Behind the Music series. Cheshire’s latest production, Etched In Stone, is a murder mystery revolving around the typeface Trajan. It was premiered at TypeCon 2004 in San Francisco and, hopefully, will be viewable online soon. **Update:**Chesh called it quits on his site, but Etched In Stone can be seen on Vimeo.
Jon Coltz is a statistics guy who discovered type at some point and has been writing about it on daidala. [Update: The site no longer exists.] Jon has absorbed a massive amount of knowledge about the subject for someone who is not in the design profession (he won the type trivia contest at TypeCon this year). He is also a very entertaining and engaging writer. Be sure to check out the interviews.
David Earl’s UK-based Typographer.org has gone through several incarnations over the years. When I first discovered it, it was an online magazine with articles about type and featured several writers. Then it changed into a type news blog for a while. A couple of years ago, it changed again and David has scaled back to posting an in-depth article every now and then.
Packaging label seen in an antique store in Hixton, Wisconsin on July 29, 2004.