Meanwhile #031
Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.
This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completion.
In praise of boredom – "When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor."
Jakku chic – Interview with Star Wars costume designer Michael Kaplan at Clothes on Film, full of interesting trivia. Did you know they Rey's headscarf is actually a jumper? Or that her goggles are salvaged from a Stormtrooper helmet? I love all of these little incidental details.
Flat is in the new headless – AIGA on the unstoppable rise of the flat woman, the world's most popular book cover girl.
Where twitter happens – In Geolocation, Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman use publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. The book is a means for situating this virtual communication in the physical realm, exploring cities 140 characters at a time through the lives of others.
The cover design process: an author's perspective – Great post by Francesca Haig on the anxiety and joy of the design process for her new book The Fire Sermon (also read designer Alexandra Allden's side of things). Note to self: find excuse to commission blacksmith for a cover at some point.
Read Reed – Mike Reed chats to the thoroughly excellent and specific blog Dads and Design about juggling copywriting, self-employment and parenting. In summary: splendid chaos.
Alan Rickman, designer – Alan Rickman studied graphic design at the RCA between 1968 and 1969. Design Observer interviewed him about this period in 2014.
Self-healing cities and permanent infrastructural robotics – "… these self-guided machines would be the white blood cells of the urban environment: a city-scale immune system made entirely from remote-controlled or fully autonomous robotic repair teams. There would be different types of robot with specific roles. Some would perch like birds on structures such as street lights, waiting to swoop down and patch them up. Others would be released and forgotten about, disappearing into our urban infrastructure like insects or worms, operating indefinitely."
Ask Me Anything – The best of Reddit's AMAs have been compiled into one lovely 400-page book. Includes the likes Barack Obama, Jeff Bridges, David Attenborough, Louis CK, Elon Musk, Madonna and Buzz Aldrin giving silly answers to silly questions.
Reading, none to five – Dolly Parton is supporting a scheme by Southwark Council to provide free books for children born in the area this year – the scheme will give a free book every month from birth until their fifth birthday to every child born in the borough from December 2015 to December 2016.
Cover, me –I've been adding a variety of my used, unused and experimental covers to instagram, which it turns out is a very useful receptacle for this sort of thing. Check out the next issue of Creative Review for further musings on this subject.
That is all.