Meanwhile #010
This week: growing elaborate and careless with the passage of time.
Charlie Brooker has been reading the Mr Men.
“Revisiting the books, I was surprised to discover that despite forgetting most of the storylines, the visuals felt so familiar, they can't have ever left my mind. When I was young, I wanted to be a cartoonist. As a teenager, I even managed to make a career of it for a few years. Back then I figured I'd formed this ambition thanks to the comics I'd read when I was about twelve. No, looking back at some of my ham-fisted drawings of the time, I realise the Mr Men must have kicked the yearning off years before that. I was unconsciously sampling and regurgitating whole sections of Roger Hargreaves' visual repertoire. The way Roger Hargreaves drew a shoe is still the way a shoe looks when I picture it. Same with a house. Or a hat. Or a butcher. Or a wizard. Or a cloud.”
“Contemporary curating has become an absurdity. Outfits are curated. Salads are curated. Twitter feeds are curated. Bennington College in Vermont invites prospective students to curate their applications. Lorde was appointed ‘sole curator’ of the most recent Hunger Games film’s soundtrack. Everyone is a curator these days. … Yet to examine the etymology and history of the word ‘curate’ is to find a direct, fascinating link between the professional curator and her pop culture counterpart, engaged in the activity of selecting and displaying. It is also to discover important, perhaps unsettling things about how we currently understand value, and ourselves.”
Ex-Nasa man to plant one billion trees a year using drones.
“First, drones flies above an area and report on its potential for restoration, then they descend to two or three metres above ground and fire out pods containing seeds that are pre-germinated and covered in a nutritious hydrogel. … With two operators manning multiple drones, it should be possible to plant up to 36,000 trees a day, and at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods.”
A brief history of the @ and the #.
“How the ‘@’ came about is still the subject of some dispute – it may have been an accented French à, grown elaborate and careless with the passage of time, or an abbreviation for the word amphora, an ancient unit of measure – but whatever the truth of the matter, the symbol itself came to represent the word ‘at’ as in the statement ‘five apples at fifty pence each’. It was a well-used symbol among the mercantile classes, if one that received little other attention, and as such it was a shoo-in for inclusion on typewriters and later computer keyboards.”
Sol Sender, designer of Obama's 08 logo, on Hillary Clinton's big pointy H.
“If you boil it down it's really a symbol of forward motion. On the Obama work we were really conscious from the start about where he was vulnerable — we knew Obama critics said things like, ‘He's not American.’ So we thought going strong with a patriotic theme was quite important. Hence the red, white and blue colors in the Obama logo. In terms of vulnerabilities, Hillary always seems to get dragged into the past by her critics. Therefore, you might argue that a symbol like this, which is so aggressively pushing forward, could help counterbalance any negative energy that is directed at her past.”
I'm in the new issue of Creative Review, reminiscing about what I did before all of this design stuff took over my brain. My blog has had a bit of a rejig, and it finally has a facebook page for you to like or poke or something. Plus I've been throwing some of my covers at instagram. Tweets continue to be twut.
That is all.