You are not from around here, right?

You mean from this town?

No, Earth.

I love this exchange. Half remembered, expletives omitted.

As I write this using a German keyboard layout on a tablet device I do not use half as often as I would like, summer is going out of season.

Here, where I am, that means when it rains, it pours.

I want to reconnect with where we last heard from each other, tell you what I am up to right now, and these last few weeks.

I used a lot of ChatGPT to complete projects which I had on my mind for years, but knew that I would never finish them.

And I am currently working through the gaps in my graphic design education, because Plain Text 1 by Plain Form talked a lot about type design, experimental type design even, and I saw that what I knew, what I was taught, did not cover that at all.*

Shot from Plain Text 1, Type as Labyrinth, by Benjamin Dumond.

Type design? I learned which type to choose to make things look a certain way, read a certain way.

Experiments? There was the one during our first semester where we made our own grids and used that grid to make some letters. Not a whole alphabet, much less than what a typeface covers. And after that?

So reading this zine I understood my need to become a graphic design generalist as much as I can: why should I stop at what I know when there is so much to learn, do, make?

So that is where I am right now: reading pages of that magazine, made by typographic outlaws from France, who talk about asemic writing, about FontLab and Glyphs, about computational type design, and if knowledge is a country, these are the cities I want to visit. I do not want to be a user of software, like an interface worker who pushes assets around a canvas. My apologies if that sounds rough, but I need the distance from my core studies. I need a little punk here.

And what I need is to get that next level of control, so I can reach the next screen, again.

*I had to order the out of print volume 1 from a different store, cahier central, but you are a smart kid, you will find your own source for it

Quelle: Code & Canvas