The Curative Power of Storytelling

A wonderful story about books brought to us by author, illustrator and animator William Joyce and the team at Moonbot. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is full of detail and theater with many book-related themes going on in some of the backgrounds of the story. Check out a previous short about the iPad version of this story I posted here earlier.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore available in the iTunes App Store for $4.99. You can even get a Moonbot case for your iPad that looks like the cover of the book.

Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Childrens' Stories

Less is more is the best way to describe the inspired poster work of Christian Jackson. These could just have easily been produced as a series of book cover designs. Simply beautiful!

An Animated Sentence

Another stunning illustrated short from local Seattle artist, Drew Christie for electric literature, promoters of writers and the short story. Inspired by one selected sentence, Drew animated a short for Nathan Englander's story, The Reader, about a discouraged author haunted by his one remaining reader. Combined with the moody music of Michael Guggino, his short animation sets the tone of a haunting landscape and I wonder if Englander's story can measure up to this dreamy sneak preview. Drew is an amazing talent of many skills and comes by his first name quite honestly. He is a prolific artist and would often turn out drawings on every page of old discarded books for his animated shorts. He tells stories by drawing on historical events such as the assassination of Lincoln which took 12 entire paperback books to complete. His lovely music video for the Moondoggies song, Empress of the North, is a must see. I posted it here a little over a year ago. So is History is Us, his short animation for the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle. To see far more of Drew's drawings, check out Democracy for the Cartoons. Some mighty fine work there!

Thank you Steve Jobs

Thank you for your contributions, your determination and your inspiration. You have enriched our lives greatly!
      If you are unable to view the video of Steve Jobs 2005 speech at Stanford you can listen to the audio on the internet archive.

Accordion in Typewriter Tin

Using an old typewriter tin for the container, Patricia Sahertian created an accordion structure tale of a proficient office typist who could type with lightning speed. The story was adapted from a 1952 educational film from Encyclopedia Britannica Films posted at the Internet Archive titled Office Courtesy: Meeting the Public. You can see more stills from Sahertian's book, Mayor No Match for Girl Typist here. She also has several other typewriter tin books here.

Emotional Characters

Andrea D'Aquino has an uncanny ability to make her stories come to life with her playful and expressive artworks as evidenced by The Secret Life of Books I and II above. 

From Andrea D'Aquino's self-promotions series, A Modern Guide to Punctuation, exploring the imagined personalities and neurosis of various punctuation marks. This series and other cool prints of D'Aquinos' are available for purchase at Big Cartel.

iThank You Steve Jobs

Adapted from the interactive visual of Shan Carter at the New York Times.

No one has been more influential to the design and technology industry than Steve Jobs. A remarkable 313 patents are listed with his name as principle inventor, designer, or collaborator. His patent list includes everything from iPod lanyards, monitors, mice, laptops, keyboards and packaging, to the beautiful glass staircase that graces some of the Apple stores. Miguel Helft reports on these achievements in a New York Times article today and on Job's influence and leadership of Apple since its inception in 1976. Worth viewing, is Shan Carter's interactive feature for the article, which displays many of Jobs' impressive patent holdings. Another great link takes you to an interactive timeline by Danielle Belopotosky and Sam Gorbart featuring Apples' benchmark achievements during Job's tenure.
      Under Steve Job's leadership, Apple has had a profound influence on the design and publishing industry. Perhaps one of his most important contributions has been the elevation of typography into our daily language. Since the inception of the first Mac, everyone has learned the difference between a serif and sans serif, and they all have opinions about their likes and dislikes of fonts. This has not necessarily improved overall typography standards, but it certainly has invited more people into the typebar for conversation.
       Thinking differently has been Job's approach to everything. Foremost, it was about the user's experience—about how we work and play. (This was evident with the introduction of the first Mac in 1984, when it greeted you with a cheerful Hello). He has been one of the most legendary successful chief executives in corporate history (just 2 weeks ago, Apple surpassed Exxon as the stock market's largest company), and his visionary contributions have changed the way we listen to music and communicate with words and images. He has given us the tools to become a nation of storytellers, but his personal story remains one of the most inspiring. Though he is officially stepping down from his role as CEO, this is not his fade-out departure into the sunset. He intends to remain involved as chairman of Apple's board, which leaves him more time to concentrate on his personal health challenges. I wish him the greatest success in the next chapter to his remarkably different story.  

Cinderellas and the FBI

A couple of months ago I attended a local paper show and met a new dealer there with a lot of cinderella stamps. The stamps above are a couple of the cinderellas I found that day. Although he was a very knowledgeable dealer, he couldn't recall their origin. They appear to be selvedge, or a border strip at the edge of a printed sheet. In this case they are engraved with a pattern of nicely script Es, Ds, Gs and what appears to be either a cap I or a T. I am puzzled over these little stamps, but do enjoy them.
      Side story...after a lengthy conversation, I learned this paper dealer was a former undercover FBI plant during the 60s and hung out with members of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in order to gather information. He had some amazzzing and very convincing stories to tell about drug running and the life of an undercover agent. He could recall every detail of conversations, parties and events he attended with these nefarious perps. Coincidently he also happened to know my father who was another FBI guy dealing with interstate bank robbers and crimestopping in that era. Our conversation made for a very entertaining afternoon of ephemera and espionage. He is now retired from the FBI and collects cars and blimp ephemera. Go figure. Below are a few more cinderellas, cancelled stamps and poster stamps I picked up from my new dealer friend that same day.

A Book Proposal

My student Diana Plasencia came to me last week to ask if I would take a look at a book she made over the Spring break. Naturally, I was delighted to do so, and was bowled over by her results. After producing her first book with sewn signatures and a cased-in binding for my formal book design course last Fall, Diana engineered another kind of book structure to accommodate a different sort of book proposal. Weeks earlier, her good friend Jordan asked her assistance to illustrate a short story he had written. He wanted to present his story to his girlfriend as a marriage proposal. Diana seized the opportunity and suggested a book might be the perfect formula. She created about a dozen charming watercolor illustrations to accompany his short story and developed a book structure to accommodate a small hole inside the back board where he could place an engagement ring. Jordan recently presented this finished book to his girlfriend and asked her to marry him, and according to Diana, his girlfriend was thrilled to say yes.