Finals Week

This past week was finals week. One of my classes is called Illustration in Design, which is some computer class where we use Illustrator to manipulate letterforms or some such nonsense. My final consisted of two questions:

1. Define Hierarchy.

2. Explain the unique characteristics of each of the six classifications of typography.

My answers are as follows, copied and pasted verbatim (except for the typos which I altered to make myself seem more intelligent):

1.
The definition of hierarchy is a system of ranks and castes that separate people, places, and things into an order of importance. For instance, each morning, I myself have a personal hierarchy. Each morning I (1) pee, (2) eat, (3) go back to sleep until noon. This is how I view the needs I immediately feel around me. It has led to problems in the past.

However, in a different context, say, oh, I don’t know, layout design. Here, the eye will traditionally read an image top to bottom, left to right. This is why headlines and movie posters are usually modeled like this. A hierarchy is most often found in the contents pages of magazines, which love to display photos of celebrities surrounded by obnoxious neon borders, whilst tucking away that irksome story “War Drones On – Thousands Dead” in the lower right hand corner, where it will be safe.

As far as typography goes, the simpler a font, the less important it seems. Logos will almost always be stylized, because everyone knows what LOOKS good, IS good. Thus, products and companies will boast whatever product they’re pushing this week in huge block letters, and then, almost hastily, scrawl in bland white justified Ariel text all the poison and danger that product contains.



2.
OLD STYLE – Hey. How’s it going. I’m Old Style, and I’m from the late 1400s. Yes, I’m old. My letters always look big and swooping, and there’s a lot of thick-and-thin going on there, kinda like handwriting. You’ll see me if you go to the Renaissance Festival and look at all the cheap signs painted by hippies dressed in costumes and eating Taco Bell from a cloth.

ITALIC – Hey! Whoa, I am so totally important! Dude, you have no idea how important I am. Every time you see me, I seem really urgent. And it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying… If I’m around, people’s ears perk up. Say you’re at a funeral and a guy says. “The chicken was undercooked.” But if that same guy says “The chicken was undercooked”, then like, what did he mean by that? Chicken, as oppose to something? Seriously. Makes you think, right? Anyway, I’m all slanty. Most modern fonts have some version of me. I’m pretty POPULAR. But you know what? Wasn’t always this way. Used to be I got used all the time, just so they could fit more letters into the book. Stupid Aldus Manutius. What a cheap-o. That guy owes me like twenty bucks. If you see him, tell him for me.

TRANSITIONAL – Oh hello. Didn’t see you there. My name is Transitional. It’s a pleasure to meet you, old boy. Couldn’t help but notice you admiring my distinctly wider letterforms, wider in fact than that of Old Style. He’s a good bloke, mind you, but a bit single-minded. He’s a previous generation, you see. A different place. A different time. Did you know he’s Italian? Anyway, I’d also like to draw your attention to the more static aspects of my letterforms, they way they lock together in an almost perpendicular strokes. And while we’re on the subject, you’ll observe how much greater the contrast between my thick-and-thins is than Old Style’s. I beg your pardon, old boy. I have business to attend.

MODERN – Check me out, homies. You ain’t never seen anything like ME before. You thought Transitional was extreme? Sheeeeit. He ain’t nothin. Check my thick-and-thins! Look at those narrow strokes! They HAIRLINES, baby! You can’t hardly SEE ‘em! And my verticals are like BLOCKS! I drop a vertical on you, you be squashed FLAT. Fo’ real. And check it, I be mixin’ it up, yo! Check my capital letters; some of them be expanded, while others be narrow! I be totally looking elegant! You be seein’ me at the MALL, yo! All them fancy jewelry stores? All them places be sellin men’s suits? They use ME, homes. For SERIOUS.

EGYPTIAN – Uh… Hello. I’m… My name is Egyptian. I, uh… I’m not very interesting. I’ll be honest about that right now. I… I know you were probably expecting something… I don’t know, fancier. Like Old Style… He’s fancypants. Or Transitional. That guy’s AMAZING. I’m kind of different, though. I don’t have a whole lot to offer. My letters are all made out of slabs. That’s right. Slabs. Big ol’ rectangular slabs. There’s no different in the weight of my strokes. I’m… I’m practically a robot. I… I don’t do a lot of in my spare time. I play a lot of World of Warcraft… I haven’t had a girlfriend since 1922. Probably cuz of my slabs. I used to be all the rage, back in like 1815. Man, what an awesome year that was. I was in so many books. Man, if I could travel back in time, I’d go to 1815, without a doubt. Without a doubt.

SANS SERIF – Egyptian was a fool. A pathetic, sentimental fool. Here was a letterform classification that had it all. The beginnings of the minimalist font, the rumblings of a legend that would spawn a family, a UNIVERSE of typefaces, and what does he do with it? Nothing. He complains and he whines and he bitches and moans about how great it was in the early nineteenth century. And why? Because he had no VISION. Egyptian had no vision, and that is why he is all but forgotten now. Only I, Sans Serif, had the potential for this greatness. Only I had the clarity of heart, of mind and body and spirit, to see my own destiny. My flexibility is my greatest strength; although typically I am vertical and geometrically sound, in a flash I can transform to the organic, and become a fluid font of fame and fortune. I took the foundation Egyptian had laid down, and took it one step further: While we both retain a lack of weight change in stroke, MY genius was to lose the seraphs entirely. I am simple. I am pure. I am the next stage in evolution. I will scour the internet. I will show up in emails, websites, chat rooms. Everywhere you look, I’ll be there. Waiting. Watching. Faith through unity; unity through faith. I am Sans Seraif. Here me roar.

Greater Things

So Friday night, my friend Valentine calls me and says he wants to go see Grindhouse. I say okay, because he's been dumped, and because I miss my buddy, and because Valentine is very persuasive and can pretty much convince anybody to do anything at any time, ever. So I rest, fuel up on leftover spaghetti, and we go.

Because we are both idiots, we get all the way into the theatre before discovering we have the wrong time, and we've missed the last showing. We go to another theatre and decide to wait an hour and half, sitting on a metal bench where high school kids in red vests bark orders at each other, pushing mops around in a bucket-on-wheels.

When we finally get into the theatre, Valentine moves immediately front and center. I sit down next to him, and we chat for a bit about some stupid nonsense I can't remember. And then he hands me a little metal canister, and on that canister it says the word "Skoal."

And I go, "Yeah, okay."

If you don't know what chewing tobacco is, picture a little nugget of leaves wrapped in paper. Very small, the size of a fingerprint. And what you do is, you take this little nugget and you tuck it into the pouch between your lip and your teeth. The fiberglass in the tobacco seeps through the paper and creates microscopic cuts in your skin, allowing the nicotine to be absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream. And you can't swallow any of it, so you spit. You spit into a cup, a little plastic cup you got from the idiot running the popcorn machine, until it's halfway filled with your foul-smelling saliva.

Before the movie even starts, I'm fighting vomit. During the coming attractions, I'm getting hot and cold flashes. I'm twisting in my seat. Valentine's sitting next to me, "What the fuck's the matter with you?" It's bad, but I've got it under control... until Grindhouse actually begins. We are sitting so close, so obnoxiously close, that I can't help but watch; there is simply no place else to look. So just as the puke is climbing up my throat, here's Bruce Willis with some boils on his face. Here's ten guys who get there faces melted off. Here's an up-close flesh wound. Here's a guy missing a brain.

I bail. I calmly get up, and very casually make it into the bathroom. I am lucky, because it is empty. I disappear into a stall, bend over a toilet, and jettison puke which comes forth not in streams, not in the peaceful babble of a water brook, but as a spray... All directions, all at once. This is uncanny. But I do not question it.

When the vomiting is over, I look at the toilet. It is a train wreck. Everything is coated in the thick, brown sludge of spaghetti meat. What isn't solid is juicy-gold, leaking down the sides of the porcelain. The walls of the stall, painted virginal white, are runny with the contents of my glorious belly. And it smells exactly the way you'd expect pasta mixed with barf to smell.

Do I clean it up? No. No, I'm far too horrified at what's happened. I'm too ashamed and what I've done. So I go out into the hall and sit back down on the bench. I just sit there and wait for this sickening, awful feeling to go away. Five, ten minutes. And as I'm sitting there, the high school kids in vests keep passing. One of them stops to ask me if I'm all right. So does another one. Then another. And then the kid with the mop strolls along, pushing his bucket-on-wheels. And he's giving me this look.