Bobulate

Today, Core 77 launched their annual Hack 2 Work series, essential tips and articles for the design professional. You should consider stopping what you’re doing right now, and going to check out posts from Michael Bierut on How to Make Your Client’s Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger, Alissa Walker on How to Shower People With Gifts, Andy Polaine on 19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own, Steve Portigal on 5 Keys to Successful Design Research, Steve Heller on Beat the Clock, and many others—those are just a few. More…

Backpacks, notebooks, and leather shoes in need of a firm breaking-in; even if years are significant since the days when there was a purchase protocol for attending school, the metaphors for tradition are no less vivid.

More than 60 years ago, Silas Rhodes and Burne Hogarth founded the Cartoonists and Illustrators School with three faculty members and 35 students, creating a model whereby faculty were working professionals and courses were held at night. This model allowed students to work during the days, brushing up on professional skills if desired. By blurring boundaries between the profession and academia, the founders set pace for art education going forward. They, simply, started a tradition. More…

Yesterday was a landmark day for type (and type enthusiasts everywhere), as Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces, was unveiled. Typedia has been in development since 2006 when Jason Santa Maria first had the idea, and I’ve been watching him masterfully pull together the project since.

It’s really an honor to have been part of this kind of team, having the privilege to watch structure and design unfold as ideas and form take shape. Weighing in on features like the Forum (how much do people want to participate?), the Add section (how many fields are too many?), and Good Deeds (how can we engage people to add more?) were enormously interesting to be a part of early on. More…

When yesterday I got an email signed “rgds,” a trite valediction closing an email to a group of professionals, I stopped. Rgds? Really? Was the email author intending to communicate a familiarity with his audience by dropping the vowels, or simply just a level of tired sophistication with the keyboard—too familiar with typing that vowels were an interference and, therefore, a waste of time between us. Or was it simply that everything is now bound by constraints even when we are constraintless?

No matter the reason, vowels are the victims, and it seemed fitting to compose a quick ode in response. More…

When it’s clear summer has officially dethroned spring to become the sole proprietor of the season, my thoughts immediately turn to tradition. Tradition, as a condition of summer integrity, is crucial as it begets the connections between idleness and frenzy, between new and old, and between intellectual stimulation and lazy creativity. But no matter what the parameters, one thing is consistent from summer to summer — the critical nature of the prefix “re.”

You see, the prefix “re,” borrowed from Latin meaning “again” or even “again and again,” signals the critical cadence of summer, as summer is perhaps the underdog season of tradition itself. As footloose as we imagine ourselves in summer — barefoot and lightly clothed (apologies, San Francisco) — it’s actually replete with rituals as rigorous as the December shopping season. “Re” is affixed to just about every activity, signaling a return to familiarity, a reset, and our revelry in it. More…

Inbox Zero. To get to the unimaginable, unattainable place only reserved for the likes of those disciplined enough or courageous enough to manage it, one has to be comfortable with “delete.” Delete as a colloquial term is fairly recent, but as part of our language and social structure, the concept of deleting is clearly not. We’ve been promptly disposing of items that others have prepared for us for centuries.

Why then, does one feel like an utter failure when one must delete an email without having taken action on it? Are there precedents for these defeatist feelings in other aspects of our lives that we can draw upon? More…