MARLOWE: “I don’t mind your ritzing me, or drinking your lunch.”
BUTTERFLY: “Uh, dude, I’m a butterfly. We have to drink all of our meals.”
Monthly Archives: August 2013
I just need to say this real quick: You friggin’ hippies are ruining everything. Literally.
Of course, I’m referring to the recent internet explosion of debate about the incorrect usage of “literally” to mean the precise opposite of what the word really means being accepted as an alternative meaning.
Folks, this isn’t like accepting “nookyal’r” as a fair-and-balanced pronunciation for a particularly dangerous variety of WMD. This is like making “up” an accepted meaning for the word “down.” It’s like the various semantically absurd political slogans in Orwell’s 1984.
It isn’t adding to meaning of the word, it’s negating it and endangering the meaning of literally everything we do as civilized human beings.
_
During the final season (ongoing!) of the Showtime series Dexter, former police lieutenant Deb Morgan goes to work for a private eye and former cop named Jacob Elway. Elway’s dad, a rich oilman, did not support his choice to become a police detective; he waited until his dad died and invested the inheritance to start a private investigations firm.
Now, right off the bat you might assume I sympathize with this character because he’s a PI, but No.
Okay, Yes. But that’s not the primary reason.
Would you get in line for Vietnamese food?
Yeah? Well then, phở queue!
I’ve been publishing a lot of design posts lately. Might as well get them out of the way, eh?
This particular logo (see below the jump) came to me in a dream. Oddly enough, in the dream, it was the logo for a milk distributor whose television commercial featured people in a conga line singing “Musa, Musa, Mu-sa!”
I don’t claim to make much sense in my sleep. Continue reading
A few days ago, while signing into some security-conscious website, I was presented with one of the most awesome CAPTCHAs ever.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, let Wikipedia explain it:
A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”), a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University, is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.
They’re those graphics with the squiggly writing you have to figure out to log in.
Well, this time, the CAPTCHA I got was “MAKITCHA PRECINCT,” which I thought would make a great title for a novel. To prove the concept, I quickly threw together a couple of book cover ideas, one for a sci-fi interpretation of Makitcha Precinct and one for a thriller.
And yes, the promo quote is supposed to be funny. Meh, I try.
Not protecting our valuable Arctic food species would be counter-Inuitive.
It’s an awesome font. Honestly, when I first saw it, I was in love.
It’s a gritty font, with elegant curves that seduce your eyes and sharp, dagger-like accents that threaten to stab your brain. It’s gorgeous and dangerous.
But, it’s also a very distinctive font, which limits its usage. It’s not like Trajan (which is obviously the movie font) or Arial (which is for signs) both of which are generic enough to be repeatedly used without the general public catching on. Continue reading
I haven’t posted a logo design since the Skrew Werks Hardware logo, although I have had a few ideas.
One that has been rolling around in my head for a while is based on the graphic beauty one of my favorite Arabic words, قنبر or qunbur (pronounced to rhyme loosely with “run burr”), which is a colloquial term for larks.
I thought it would make a catchy name for a corporation that does work both in the Arab and Western worlds, and would lend itself to a nice clean, semi-symmetrical logo, something with a bold look and simple color scheme.
Also, as with many companies that cross the Arabic-Latin literary divide, it would require two versions, one in each alphabet. Here is what I came up with: Continue reading
I have become endeared of the following anecdote from Tales of Yesterday’s New England
I like this quote not only for the romance, but the cleverness of the dialogue, and the archaic usage of the words “lover” and “love-making,” which referred to courting rather than sex. Also intriguing is the moral and personal strength of the female character, something we might be misled by politics to expect was impossible in the 1700s. Continue reading