If you want to click a button and have a fully printed map shipped to your front door, there’s still the Society6 option. However! If you want to do a little legwork and go down to your favorite print shop to have one made for you, you could save some money.
Introducing my new sale:
Simply go here and exchange Bitcoins for the ability to download the file. The coins go to me (0.14 BTC), the high resolution lossless .jpg (2′ x 3′ @ 300 DPI) goes to you. Throw that on a flashdrive and have it printed however you want. Easy!
Now, I’m trusting you with this one. I’m giving you the printing resolution file itself and technically you have the ability to pirate it to the rest of the world, it’s true. I’m assuming you aren’t going to spit in the face of some kid who spent a lot of time making a map because, let’s face it, those are the sorts of kids who don’t have many friends. So. Don’t be a dick, and I’ll give you the ability to make derivative works for your personal printing (maybe you want it in a different colour or something? Go for it!) but tell you that it’s not cool to further sell or share it. Cool? Cool. Thank you.
Super busy over here, and I’ve taken to writing things that aren’t posted immediately, namely: both a three act comic and an entirely unrelated novel. But, of course, LTKMN gets short fiction posts every so often.
But, if you’d like to buy the above poster from our good friends at Society6, you should do so here. The usual formats are there (posters, art prints, stretched canvases, etc) but it’s also available – and I think quite fashionably – as an iPhone back. Take this simple philosophy wherever you go!
Note, the printed poster version doesn’t have the Acrylo logo in the corner. Other than the obviously branded stuff, I try to keep things clean for you.
The above is the first time I’ve ever tried to do that hard surface style. I think it came out well. Then I was busy with car stuff for a while and bought this:
She’s an ’06 Mini Cooper S with basically everything and front rally lights (which I then discovered weren’t legal to turn on in town…)
It coincides with my birthday, so although I wasn’t planning on it for that reason it worked out to be a self-birthday present. It’s been a week and a day since I drove her off the lot and Calgary’s endured basically the entire gamut of weather in that time so I’m excited for spring and dry roads.
Meanwhile, my evenings were spent between a few freelance gigs, so I was MIA on the blogging front.
Then I drew this:
Which would be my… fourth? try at that style. There’s a few in between and after but they aren’t nearly as coherent and one is ridiculous (by request: Ke$ha riding a robot-ized Nyan Cat with a lightsaber).
This weekend will be bloated with posts because I have lots of ideas and for once, the time to get them out.
I’ve been receiving lots of love for the first one, which is always cool to see. Here’s another! It seems the ratio of hardcore minimalists (without the text) to the wimps (that’s me!) is overwhelmingly on the text side, so this is released in just one style.
Two versions, depending on how hardcore you are on the de-clutter thing. Both 1920×1080 because ultimately I made them for my own use. As it turns out, there isn’t much else out there for minimalist, geometric Christmas / holiday / wintery themed background wallpapers.
People usually roll their eyes upon hearing that a person is into typography. They don’t call it that, of course, they call it “fonts” which doesn’t make any actual sense but is the thing they know and might have even used themselves. It’s akin to saying someone is into MP3s instead of music; fonts are a format container, a bucket for glyphs – sounds – which together make a song. A typeface then, is perhaps one such song in a suite – a family – of compositions. Similar structures or notable features, but with different uses. Maybe bold is one song in a different key or in major rather than minor, changing the mood.
And glyphs themselves are funny to think about individually, as are notes. There are many instruments that can play the same note but it would be inappropriate to use the same instrument for every kind of song, just as it would be inappropriate to use the same type treatment for every kind of word or brand. There are trends in each – an era of intense popularity – and perhaps we could call Helvetica like the Beatles: really popular for a decade or so and then drifting off into recognized but backseat brilliance as other, newer things come up. They are undeniable classics and heralds to new ages, but we can’t keep using them for everything. We still play them sometimes and are still caught up in the melody or the way the square period looks, but people would give us weird, annoyed looks if we interrupted a rave with them. It would be contextually inappropriate.
The shapes themselves are made up and meaningless but have been repeated so many times they form their own standard. Microtonal music sounds off or wrong somehow, just as a Japanese hiragana symbol might to an English writer. Our minds fall into patterns of language, be them visual or audio and we gloss over the individual parts in favor of the overarching melodies. Typographers, then, are like very obsessive luthiers, trying to make that perfect note ring on every fret and then making them all match each other and dance when strummed in chord.
There are words that look good in some font families, just as there are chords that sound good in some keys. To design type, then, is to design a scale structure to accommodate certain types of chords; words. The notes are picked and played individually but the scale is the coherent thread woven through them, where you could play any note in that scale and it would match any other.
What I’m trying to say, really, is that beauty as I see it is the organization of the arbitrary into systems where there are rules for individual interactions to create the whole.
It showed up on Canadian Netflix a little while back which means, I can only assume, it’s available everywhere. Definitely this post put much more eloquently than I ever could have. It’s a topic that’s coming up more and more lately in not only my interactions with cars but also my observations of people’s interactions with their objects and even the introspective reasoning of who I am and why I design.
One of my favorite bits:
Just briefly:
It’s interesting to me, now that I’m writing for LTKMN and working in fiction more, how much of my writing tends towards objects and spacial relationships. Coinciding with my love for architecture, even when given unlimited range to create things I create spaces, not people. I’d never really thought about it in such a direct way before, but I truly am bored with mere people. It’s a terrible thing to admit aloud but it’s true – I simply don’t find any interest in the people themselves outside of their relationships both with other humans and with other things. I look back to all of my favorite movies and books and stories and music and they’re all about a shift in paradigm that breaks and reforms those relationships. Those are interesting, those are the ones worth watching for me. Because the characters themselves are just tropes, just patterns based on the equally boring and predictable humans in real life. It’s how they collide and spin that’s fascinating.
And so, I write about spaces. I write about alternate histories and futures yet to come. It occurs to me that the few storylines I’ve written about people (or anthropomorphic robots) are all about the splitting and rebinding of relationships towards external things. Internal events, sure, that some might call character change, but that are inherently externally forced.
There’s that Debussy quote “Music is in the space between the notes” and it’s apparent: humans, like notes, simply smushed together is just a cacophony. Architecture, and that of a car’s space, is the physical separation required to generate story. My writing, then, is more a reflection on silence than anything, following the metaphor. Obsessed in the other direction.
