blog Now that I have been doing this daily drawing experiment for a week I thought it might be a good idea to take stock. The first thing that is clear to me is that I am not very good at drawing. The second is that I haven’t got the inclination to make much the drawings I do any better. The longest I’ve taken on these drawings is five minutes and I rarely correct anything I do. Like fellow Oadbyite Glaswegian David Shrigley I prefer to be playful and amateurish rather than serious and professional. If I had unlimited time to work on all the details I would probably do something else, but I will carry on in order to fulfill my daily obligation.
What most surprised me is that despite being conceptually poor and terribly executed, I am still finding them quite difficult, a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I thought that it was going to be a doss, but it it isn’t. Maybe it gets easier at some point, presumably when you have a style and your simple cartoon is syndicated around the world. Maybe not.
We saw Nicky Bird on the train from Newcastle on Saturday and she gave us a Keith Haring calendar. Haring, who was associated with Basquiat in New York, produced great but incredibly simplistic and ugly paintings. Perhaps I could do things like that?
Anyway, I hope you find some pleasure in these drawings, even if it is only the pleasure of being able to have a good long sneer.
Flash is the best drawing package I’ve ever used, great brushes, great straightening. Illustrator, a bit of a pain.
07 Feb 2009
blog 
I got tagged on Facebook to complete a meme where you list 25 things about you that people may not know. The results of other people’s were fascinating but I couldn’t think of anything interesting. So I forced myself to write something by using the alphabet as stick to prod myself with.
A is for A rush
The first short story I ever wrote was in 1997 and was called A Rush. It was about a man who stopped time when he had a panic attack. Thinking about it makes me want to start writing them again — it was so liberating, like a whole new area of consciousness had been openend up.
B is for Ballyhoo
The worst haircut I ever had was copied from Ian McCulloch: it had spikey on top with a fringe. Ugh, what was I thinking.
C is for Cup
I always buy a new mug when I go abroad and need tea. I love tea more than any other drink.
D is for Dawdling
I often make my wife stumble, by pulling her when she is dawdling.
E is for Entropy
I want to reduce the amount of entropy in my life but I’m not sure how to go about it.
F is for Facebook
I don’t really like Facebook, thinking that everyone should have to have their own site on their own domain and display everything there rather than relying on these corporations that want to sell you rubbish.
G is for Games
I have to force myself not to waste my whole life playing computer games.
H is for Horripilating
I don’t seem to do much horripilating nowadays. I wonder why. Perhaps I am immune to cold.
I is for Impetigo
The first song I ever wrote was about impetigo. I wrote it whilst in the bath when my sister suffered from it.
J is for Jail
I used to fantasize about committing a minor crime that was serious enough to be put in prison for a year in order to avoid taking responsibility for myself.
K is for K-Punk
K-Punk doesn’t appear to blog much anymore, but his essays on popular cinema are among some of the most invigorating blog posts I’ve read.
L is for List Posts
I know that it is vulgar to have to divide your thoughts into numbered chunks but considering the standard of writing on the internet it is probably for the best that the habit has become popularized.
M is for Middle names
I haven’t got one a middle name, although I did invent one once — Geoffrey, which was kind of a joke — less funny when Midland Bank unquestioningly allowed me to open a bank account with it. Changing identity is easy, really.
N is for Neil.
I still haven’t grown into my name, but I’m getting there.
O is for Oran Haut-Ton
Sir Oran Haut-Ton is the hero of Melincourt, Thomas Love Peacock’s witty philosophical novel about an orangutan who becomes an MP. It is as funny as Wodehouse.
P is for Philishave
Despite extolling the virtues of Gillette’s six blade fusion, I have recently started using an electric razor, allowing me to be neat and tidy every day rather than twice a week.
R is for Richard III.
If you want to understand how films like The Godfather and Casino have mythic status then read Richard III (as I did last week), in which the title character’s duplicity, will to power, and downfall provide the template.
S is for Simplicity.
If I feel overwhelmed, I always do something that will make my life more simple. I am worried that I will run out of things to simplify.
T is for Tea.
Every day I currently drink puer, rooibos, peppermint, green, camomile, jasmine, and lemon and ginger. My current favourite though is Oolong.
U is for unheimlich
And other German words that are untranslatable, like Verfremdungseffekt.
V is for vacillation.
Vacillation is the cause of much modern stress. I constantly have to tell myself: just do one thing at a time and make a decision.
W is for work.
Sometimes, especially when I feel I can really get into the flow, I really love working.
X is for Xavior Roide
I don’t know him but I think he is a Basque dandy who used to be in RoMo band DexDexter. Sounds interesting.
Y is for yo-yos.
When Rob got a yo-yo to help him to keep busy in order to stop smoking, I had a go and realised that there is something quite isolating about a toy which can have someone’s eye out.
Z is for Zizek.
The other day I bought the Essential Zizek for just £12.99 from Eden Books, saving about £26.01 on the RRP! God old Christians!
06 Feb 2009
blog 
Like Waiting for Godot — in which nothing happens, twice — Bombon el Perro is without event or significant drama. Unlike Waiting for Godot, Bombon el Perro doesn’t make you think about the futility of all endeavour. The film isn’t egotistical enough to want to tell you any truths about the human condition.
Instead, it tells the story of a man who is given a pedigree dogo after performing a kind deed and how that changes his luck (he had been sacked previously) and leads him into the world of dog exhibiting and stud farming. This is done realistically, like Ken Loach, but it doesn’t adhere to the conventions of realist cinema where something awful must happen to nice people. After having watched the half-baked trash of Role Models, I found it incredibly cleansing to watch a film which doesn’t accord to any cinematic conventions.
Role Models, the new film with Paul Rubb and Stiffler from American Pie isn’t awful, indeed, it fulfills the contract it makes with the audience relatively well, providing a few funny jokes, some misogyny, and a heartwarming ending, but it is unbelievably formulaic. From the first scene, you know exactly what is going to happen: Rudd is a malcontent in a banal job who wants to find meaning but won’t do anything about it. When his girlfriend leaves him, he gets into a scrape is colleague, Stiffler (playing exactly the same role as always), and they are forced to do 150 hours of community service or go to prison. They reluctantly do the community service with troubled children (one is racist caricature of a smart alec black kid, the other McLovin from Superbad) and, what do you know, learn trite lessons about being nice and stuff.
Bombon el Perro, by contrast, refuses to play along to any formula. There is no judgemental moralizing about characters, instead we see people as they are.
05 Feb 2009
blog 
Talking to Wringham on Friday, I mentioned how I saw 2009 as the year in which to exercise my creative muscles rather than use them in any serious way. 2010 that would be the year I got down business! He questioned whether I hadn’t done enough exercising in the last ten years: when was I ever going to leave the sandbox?
It is true. I am much happier playing than being serious; and the idea that I will suddenly emerge from this year of training fully formed on the 1st of January 2010 (to do what, I don’t know) is somewhat unrealistic.
Dickon Edwards often writes about how he ought to be doing something more than diary writing, whether it be marketing himself to editors or simply being externally validated in some way. But surely it is in the nature of dandyism to do things on your own terms, rather than being swayed by other opinions. For the dandy, it is always better to reign in the sandbox than to serve in the world.
Of course, if you are especially bold, you can make the world come to your sandbox and never have to leave it at all. This was the heartening message that I got from going to see the Baltic’s sublime exhibition of Fluxus works on Saturday. It was so playful and inconsequential — art in the service of life and pleasure rather than posterity and worthiness.
More on this soon.
04 Feb 2009
blog 
I had a drink last night — two glasses of rioja — and am still alive. The Faustian pact I had made (exquisite clarity in exchange for never drinking exquisite claret) was broken without any Mephistophelian consequences. Indeed, the only effects I felt at the time were dehydration and bonhomie.
The day after, I am sluggish and undisciplined. I haven’t quite gone to seed, but I am eating a lot of nuts. Overall, I think I am probably better off alcohol because it gets in the way of flow experience, which is a greater pleasure than the light head of the drunkard, but it is nice as an occasional indulgence.
After a month of soft drinks, the taste of wine was like nothing else — so varied and complex — only a great cup of tea or single malt whisky can in any way compare. I have never understood those people who don’t drink alcohol because they “don’t like the taste.” What fools! Don’t they know that the best tastes in life are acquired tastes? An acquired taste is best because it expands your palate, forcing you to endure and adapt rather than mewl like a baby because you don’t like the immediate sensation.
*
Last night I had the brilliant idea of a Shazam but for films. The idea is that via keywords and questions, this service would work out what film it is that you’re trying to remember. As it is, I haven’t got time to develop the idea but am happy for someone else to become rich with it so long as you can tell me what these two films are whose titles I have forgotten:
The first one depicts life after a plane crash (?), which has left several men and two women (one young, one old) on a paradisal desert island. The key scene (the one that made me remember it) is where one of the men gets bitten on his hand by a snake and a survivalist character takes his arm and chops it off with an axe. This is bad enough, but the next twenty minutes have this guy wailing in agony as he slowly dies without painkillers or antibiotics.
The second is about a social worker whose case involves a forty year old man with the mental age of a baby whose mother has made it her mission to stop him from growing up, beating him if he shows any mental aptitude. At the end of the film, it looks as though he’ll be rescued and allowed to live freely with the social worker, but it turns out that she also keeps a man as a baby!
Any ideas of what these are called? I don’t think they are just bad dreams I once had.
03 Feb 2009
blog Of all the books I own, there are few more beautiful than Mesmerization by Gee Thomson. Printed on substantial matte paper, it stinks of the ink that gives it so much colour and the love that Why Not Associates put into its design.
Subtitled ‘why we are losing our minds to global culture’, the book is a key to all contemporary mythologies — from consumer society to political ideology. Each “spell” (the word that Thomson uses to denote the malignity in today’s memes) is given individual design treatment and the result is a compendium of modern graphic design trends.
The spells all follow the same logic — they convey values, target certain people, evoke fears and emotions, seduce with certain promises, and then reward. Sometimes this structure works brilliantly, as with the dissection of Cool, which punctures the rock ‘n’ roll myths marketed by Top Shop and other high street shops. Other times it feels a bit forced; for instance, the chapter on Comfort makes it sound as if the idea of staying in to watch telly was invented on 9/11.
Thomson’s stated aim is to inoculate us against these negative spells and to encourage us to produce more benign ones. As such, each one has a “reality check” at the end of it, like this one on Girl Power, which sounds a bit too much like the conclusion to a crap episode of Kilroy:
Exploitation or empowerment? Girl Power thrives on such contradictions. But the central question remains: Is the new pole dancing, porn star chic, real liberation, or a cynical con created by big business (from magazine publishing, TV, fashion, and music) to co-opt the whole idea of empowerment for commercial gain?
Nevertheless, it is beautifully designed, full of vernacular typography, contemporary layouts, and Barbara Kruger-style section headings. If you want to understand contemporary graphics look no further, it is much better than a compilation of actual contemporary design because it is parodic.
In the same vein, it is perhaps better to read the book as a catalogue of cliches rather than a work of cultural critique. As cultural critique, Mesmerization seems like an attempt to revive postmodernism and in an age of ideology. Alas, postmodernists are too decadent, too cynical, and too uncertain in their conclusions to be of much use.
However, as a catalogue of cliches, it is a fresh and exciting corrective to cultural laziness. The thing about cliches is that however fresh and original they began, they soon congeal into dead words and dead attitudes. To avoid becoming a cliche, we just need to be more mindful — thinking about why we adhere to certain cultural memes rather than blindly embracing them. So I recommend you read it, before it becomes congealed.
02 Feb 2009
blog 
Looking through some of my high school reports yesterday and the one subject that I consistently got terrible marks in was art. Apparently I didn’t try and had extremely low-expectations of my own abilities. All I remember is that Mrs. Layfield told me that my painting of a jungle scene was wonderful and would win the monthly school art prize if I just tidied it up a little. I took this to mean that I should add a cartoon tiger, a la Henri Rousseau. She told me that I had ruined it: it was awful now and impossible to put right.
Partly to exorcise the ghost of this memory, my experiment in living for February is to do one drawing everyday to illustrate my blog posts here. They are going to be simple, naive, and essentially mediocre, but I hope that I will get better and more confident each day.
My drawing inspirations are Rob Ryan, Gwyn, the London 2012 logo, and Aubrey Beardsley. I like simplicity, humour, white space, and a lot of contrast.
I did think about doing an hour a day of Spanish, but I might leave that for March as my in-laws arrive on the 1st April and I want my language learning to be fresh in the mind so that I can converse with them (“Which direction is the library?”). Also, learning Spanish feels a lot like hard work, whereas drawing is play.
By the way, if I go to Spain this year I definitely want to see Andalucia: the architecture is so moorish.
01 Feb 2009
blog We had a work experience kid in the other week. He didn’t particularly want to be a web designer — he didn’t particularly want to do anything — but we had a spare desk and if you sent him to any other part of IT he’d probably die of boredom before the first day had ended.
His task for the week was to redesign his school’s website and I was assigned the task of encouraging him and pointing him in the right direction. This was more interesting than it sounds (for me if not for him). It allowed me to think about my own processes and how I get from the design brief to the finished website.
1. Discover your purpose
There is no design without purpose. Take a look at the great taglines of successful sites: they all knew exactly what they wanted to do when they first started. YouTube has “Broadcast Yourself”. Twitter has “What are you doing?” The webdesigner Jonathan Snook has the simple but descriptive “Tips tricks and bookmarks on web development.” You should be able to describe what you want your site to do with perfect economy. Without a sense of purpose, you are doomed to indecision and vagueness, neither of which sell well.
2. Determine what you need and what you want
Now that you have a sense of purpose, you will find it much easier to state exactly what you need on your site. Forget about what you want for the time being and just focus on what you absolutely need. By focusing your mind this way, you can ensure that your message gets across without distracting people with superfluous content.
For example, if you were setting up a webzine, you’d probably need:
- a content management system (cms) to make it easy to update;
- a list of recent updates;
- body text that is comfortable to read;
- a search box to help people find old articles;
- clear navigation to all the main sections, and,
- a prominent logo that conveys your brand.
You could build the site tomorrow with the above and it would work, however you’d might also want:
- a poll to gauge your readers’ opinions;
- a small text explaining what the webzine is about;
- a simple way for people to get in touch;
- an image rotator for the front page; and,
- a list of popular stories.
Dividing needs from wants helps clarify the success of a design at every stage.
3. Look for inspiration
Read design books, go to websites like Smashing Magazine and Design Meltdown, tag sites you like in Delicious, take screen grabs, visit galleries and sketch, go on a daytrip and take photos of interesting stuff . . . search for inspiration everywhere you go.
The more you see, the more you learn what you like and what you don’t like. If you see a site that has something you need to have on your site, then add it to the previous list.
4. Sketch layout ideas on the back of an envelope
Sketching layouts with paper and pencil is, for me at least, where the magic happens. You can now take all of the inspiration and thought from the previous three steps and distill it into a 3×2 inch rectangle. At this scale you can iterate quickly and there are no overheads for mistakes. By using such an imprecise tool, you also become divorced from your inspiration — reducing the temptation to borrow other people’s ideas too literally. It is also an organic process and a far better foundation than using sterile computer designs.
Once you have a few ideas that you think might work, draw them on an A4 piece of paper and discuss them. Show how you expect it to fit together and where you think the user’s focus should go. It is important to get client approval at this stage because it will save you a lot of headaches later on.
5. HTML Wireframes
In the past I used Axure, Fireworks, or Photoshop to create simple wireframes, thinking that it was much quicker. It was only after reading the 37Signals blog that I considered the possibility of going straight to html.
By eschewing another image program you get the foundations of the code sorted early on and the site will come alive before your eyes. By making HTML wireframes, you can also increase the chance that you receive the website content early on. The content should inform the design not just be tacked on at a later date. The resulting wireframes should show the basic functionality of the site, it doesn’t have to work exactly, but the client should be able to get a picture of how it all fits together.
At this stage, you should also countenance the idea of usability testing. The earlier you see functional problems to your site (“where’s the contact us button?”) the earlier you’ll be able to react to it. There are websites which offer simple usability tests complete with a written report for as little as $19.
6. Visual Mockup
Because you have been through the process of signing-off the wireframes, the discussions about the visual mockup should focus on the colour scheme, the visual imagery and the typography without worrying about the basic layout. Using photos from iStockphoto, experimenting with the logo, playing with typography. It is at this stage that the true beauty of the site will come through.
7. HTML
Now you can combine your wireframes with your visual mockup into a neat HTML, Converting this to a CMS template may also be appropriate at this stage. Although it may sometimes seem like it, the website isn’t finished yet!
8. Instruct User in how to operate the site
In order to aid the client and reduce the amount of maintenance, it is worth putting together a style guide, user instructions, and helpful hints. The style guide while ensure that the design remains consistent, the instructions will empower people to update the site regularly, and the helpful hints just make life easier for everyone.
9. Usability Testing
Choosing whether you do usability testing now or whether your users do it for you by getting frustrated when the site goes live, may prove the difference between a good launch and a damp squib. Go through the site with a fine tooth comb, remove any broken links, make sure that the site looks good in every modern browser, ask yourself whether your mother or another user persona could operate the site.
10. Optimization
Optimize the pages so that the design brings the best out of the content. Make sure that you have allotted time to give each page on the site some individuality. A good example of this can be seen at Huge Inc.
Have I missed anything? Is this too idealized a depiction of the web design process? Let me know below.
31 Jan 2009
blog January is coming to an end and I have somehow managed to remain sober, do my stretches, floss my teeth, write here, and post to my foto blog every single day. I have written an article for the New Escapologist, performed at OMG, and finished a couple of websites. I have watched Fritz Lang’s fantastic M and read lots of Shakespeare, including The Comedy of Errors and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both of which I greatly enjoyed. Overall, it has been a pretty good month.
However, the biggest revelation I’ve had has come from limiting myself to checking my (personal) email once a day. Previously I would check email (or read a feed or check the football news or whatever) every time that I reached a knot in my thought. It was compulsive. Since giving it up, I realise that what this did was to make me lose my thread entirely so that I would have to work my way back to the aforementioned knot. By allowing yourself to do things uninterruptedly, you avoid procrastination and usually find that there wasn’t even a knot in the first place.
My method for overcoming the compulsion has been ultra-simple: I make an agreement with myself not to check my email until I get home. What I like about this quite severe information diet is that it impels you to answer emails straight away because you know you won’t get another opportunity for 24 hours.
February lies ahead and a part of me wants to surrender myself to debauchery, but I probably won’t. The Jerry Seinfeld Productivity Secret of building up a chain of actions that become a chain of habits, makes the chain difficult to break.
Of course, this may just be hubris and I could be face down in a ditch come Sunday. We shall see.
30 Jan 2009
blog With the exponential increase in the number of celebrities, death is now no longer much of an event. If by some miracle civilization persists in its current phase for the next fifty year there will statistically be a celebrity death three times a day, as the massed ranks of ephemeral pop stars, actors, and television presenters wait in line to become a brief item on 24-hour rolling news.
This ubiquity, combined with the commodification of emotion, deadens the heart to any pangs of authentic sadness. Indeed, when I heard this morning that John Updike, one of my favourite novelists, had died my first thought was to compare the reaction to the news of Tony Hart’s death. In death, and our reaction to it, we get a sense of a cultural figure’s historical worth. If we talked for ten minutes about Hart, surely we should talk for ten hours about Updike — so much greater is the latter’s contribution.
People often complain that Updike was too profligate with his talents, knocking out a book a year with unerring regularity. Some wish that he had curbed his obsessions and focused on producing a neat and tidy oeuvre rather than the actual mess of poetry, criticism, novels (series and individual), and short stories, but his genius was to capture life’s epiphanic moments better than anybody else and perhaps these couldn’t be condensed into a universal masterwork.
The best things written about Updike are those by writers who influenced by him. Nicholson Baker’s anxiety of influence in U and I, produces sparks of inspiration when exercising his memory of Updike’s limpid phrases. Martin Amis’s essays in The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, and The War Against Cliche reveal the oddities of Updike, those things that make him unlike anyone else: his lack of embarrassment, his breadth of knowledge, and his linguistic genius.
Of the 28 books of his I’ve read, my are the Rabbit books, the Bech books, Of the Farm, A Month of Sundays, Toward the End of Time, and his bountiful collections of criticism. They are the most surprising, the most beautiful, and the most characteristically Updikean books.
I remember thinking when reading Rabbit at Rest that Updike was a bit young (he was just 59, I think) to be thinking so much about death, but death was the spur that gave late-Updike all its vitality. For one who enjoyed life so much, the frailties and disappointments of ageing were a challenge that he met head on. He will be much missed.
29 Jan 2009
