Rory is trying to make chiptune or something?

Download the whole thing here (17.5MB).

Cover img by stallio.

Completed as part of National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo) — a month-long (inter)national event in which participants aim to write 50,000 words of fiction within one month.

Sans thé Épidémique documents a few days in the lives of a handful of residents and visitors of Apéritif as they attempt to escape the wrath of a grey-haired horde, inexplicably intent upon violently expressing their discontent at the late arrival of a number of public transportation services.

Praise for Sans thé Épidémique:

“Better than some blogs”

“Unsure of its own agenda.”

“Owes more to Ms. Rowling than ever it will admit.”

Let Rory know if you have some kind of inexplicable urge to read this dribble.

An EP by But not the armadillo., crafted in the early hours of 2010.

Download here (20.4MB).

Includes samples from acclivity, 2NiD, ashassin, and reinsamba.

“All this stuff we’re doing, it’s admittedly fantastically new isn’t it? But what happens when times change and it’s not quite the bee’s knees any more? Not quite so—modern?”

We seem to have dodged that bullet by checking whatever people checked before thesaurus dot com and the joys of shift-F7 and grabbing a suitable synonym, but the problem has—once again—crept up in a surreptitious¹ sort of way. It was inherent to the Modernist mindset that what they were doing was going to be the last time anyone would have to do such a thing—these values were infinitely pure and applicable to any disciple and were going to last forever and ever. They could certainly afford to expend a term or two and make future conversations for young design students all sorts of confusing.

Of course, no one could be so naïve as to think that all that has happened in the last generation or so could be so roughly described in a word and its potential prefix. Things have happened: Big Things. Attitudes have evolved, manifestos jeered at, and artists get away with most things as long as they pay for some good marketing. Nonetheless, people will want to group together, lock in, and define a series of micro-movements that currently seem so disparate, but really fall quite nicely under the same oddly-shaped umbrella—once you stand back far enough. Some people already do.

The categorisation of art and design faces the same problem biological classification might’ve, had there not been a whole lot of convenient extinctions in the intervening years. Where the ability to classify flora and fauna so nicely is derived and defined by the gaps between them, art and design movements don’t fall prey to any such predatory desires, and the bits in between movements are sometimes the most interesting to keep.

Styles are conveniently limited to whatever is the best thing anyone has thought of up to the current point in time. Previously, what with the limitations of technology, life-spans, and long distance communication, cultural movements tended to be limited to the imaginations of the small number of people who were able—or had any desire to—work on any one thing at one time. These limitations are long since gone, and with them the ease with which we might categorise.

The cultural, artistic, and design-related movements that exist in a contemporary context are not only a complex pastiche of and response to every one that has gone before, but of everything that is going on at the same time. No longer do we stand only upon the shoulders of giants, but upon the shoulders of those all about us; upon their backs, their faces, and—rather impolitely—their children. The creative and communicative tools available to any one person allow responses within minutes of another’s creation, or even in real-time alongside them.

What is created today is defined by so many gradients of dimensionality, is imbued with so many borrowed ideas and mixed, messy ingredients, that it might be likened to a certain George’s Marvellous Medicine. So many haphazard ingredients make up the final potion that it might sometimes be surprising that anything of worth is created at all.

Thankfully, something of worth is created, and the results are often marvellous, which is what maketh thine contemporary clime such a joy to behold, and within which to be a participant.

The final issue of Salient for the year. This issue’s was aptly named Failient. Several games of Photoshop tennis were played with friends in Wellington and Auckland via email throughout the week of production, and were the source of the majority of feature illustrations for this issue.

Failent: Cover

The cover of Failient. Credit to Robert Michael Wallace for the majority of the work.

tl;dr

Illustration is the result of a Photoshop tennis match between Robert Michael Wallace, Emily Macrae, Kate Arnott, and myself. Words by Josh Cleary.

Anthem for the Disillusioned Undergrad

Illustration is the result of a Photoshop tennis match between Robert Michael Wallace, Kate Arnott, and myself. Words by Nina Fowler.

No good will ever come from reading news in Salient

Illustration is the result of a Photoshop tennis match between Kate Arnott and myself. Words by Michael Oliver.

This issue—entitled “The Sell Out Issue”—had very little to do with anything in particular, except being printed on glossy paper.

The Sell Out Issue: Cover

Inspired by a technique used by Em42 in Dioptical.

Sign me up to be a Student Sell-Out

Words by Josh Cleary

More like Double-0-Fun

Words by Michael Oliver

Greenwashing

Words by Nina Fowler

Meet Jack Yan

An interview of prospective mayoral candidate, Jack Yan. Photo by Matthew Plummer. Words by Sarah Robson.

Next to that sits a fairly smart, fairly dusty black suit jacket purchased new only this year, and one that cost a good honest week’s wages. Occasionally it’s trotted out for things like job interviews, graduations, or awards ceremonies—and I expect it will be dragged out for any weddings or what not that I’m unfortunate enough to have to attend in the near future.

One of these is my favourite, and one would sit next to “the terrible amateur artwork we inherited from the tenants before us”, and “the toaster” in a list of “Things I’d rather not save, were there a fire”.

No amount of dry-cleaning, carpet-freshening, or beating-with-a-stick-in-a-river-situated-downstream-from-a-site-of-ritual-sacrifice has yet been able to completely remove the smell of that dead old man. Yet my attachment to old, useless things has currently had me accrue two non-functioning sewing machines, two sort-of-functioning typewriters, a half dozen pre-35mm cameras I can’t find film for, and more vinyl than I’ll ever bother actually playing.

I’m not about to defend or attempt to rationalise hoarding (for that is what it is). Inevitably, some of it will go next time I have to move flats. But having things is nice, and aware as we might be of our responsibility to stop getting more stuff, that’s often easier said than done.

Donald A. Norman—legend among psychologically-aware designers and hero among design-inclined psychologists—has a few choice words about things. He happily and helpfully breaks down the way in which we are affected by the stuff around us into three distinct phases.

Mixed metaphors

The first stage, and one that’s so important to any budding relationship, is that of the meeting. The first date, if you will. You arrive to the table just on time, and (discreetly) smell that subtly sweet aroma drift across the table. You (delicately) brush his smooth skin with your fingers as you wait for him to do his thing, and (delightfully) hear that satisfying POP–swish as he ejects your toast, the perfect temperature for your immediate consumption.

So far, it seems, you’re getting off to a great start in your new relationship.

And things go great—for a few months, at least.

You move in together, and happily wake up to each other’s company every morning. You feed him bread, and he slowly but assuredly feeds you back toast whenever you feel a bit peckish. Sometimes though, he doesn’t want to get up; sometimes it takes a few goes before he’ll stay down without making a big hairy deal out of it. Sometimes he’ll be an absolute twat and burn your toast even though you were sure you set it to low because you’re late to work since your alarm didn’t go off and you only needed it slightly browned so the butter would melt because the fridge keeps getting too cold for no reason whatsoever. Maybe you can do better than him.

Things aren’t perfect—they never are—but, over time, you become accustomed to his quirks. In return, he stays quiet when you feed him bread straight from the freezer, as long as you hold the button down for a couple of seconds when you first press it. Sadly though, no relationship is forever, and all people must at some point say goodbye to their things.

It is a sad day indeed when you put him out on the footpath with the recycling, peeking through the curtains to make sure the rubbish men are careful with him—that he goes out with at least a little dignity. It takes you a week or so to really grieve: frozen bread is hardly an option, and there exists no shower short enough to stop a grill committing arson upon a couple of innocent slices of bread. Eventually you’re going to have to see new people.

Lust, mollification, and nostalgia

These stages three, Norman more sensibly tags the Visceral, Behavioural, and the Reflective. The initial is one of lust: the stage in which those smooth curves, that hard body, or the ability to broadcast Freeview and Teletext initially win you over. The behavioural is when you really get to know each other, whether for better or for worse. You find out living together isn’t nearly as hard as your mothers were worried it might be, and a bit of compromise never hurt anyone. Maybe you can’t push all his buttons—some of them you’re not ever sure what they do, and you’ve never been one for remotes anyway—but the basis of a solid relationship is formed. The reflective is where it all gets a bit more complicated.

Absurd metaphors aside, things that work well tend to stick around. The memories attached to an object that just does what it’s s’posed to tend to be good ones, and help that object earn a long-term position in a company of possessions. A well-trained vacuum cleaner can be disturbingly satisfying to use, and is unlikely to be left to think about what it’s done when you next move house.

Some things get something of a free ride when it comes to being associated with good times. A watch bought on holiday is unlikely to be binned long after its foreign, pentagonal batteries expire. A watch received from a long-lost Swiss summer sweetheart will be forever endowed with a level of saccharine reminiscence able to intimidate the suavest of suitors. Photos fit into an awkward category, being of the ultimate worth to those involved in the participation of their creation, whilst containing an innate ability to bore—harrowing to anyone unfortunate enough to have to sit through them explained and described.

Often, a thing might be kept due to its ability to impart a modicum of self-reflection upon its beholder.

A new diamond ring contains almost precisely nil sentimentality, and yet exerts from its wearer an aura of unbridled wealth, conscienceless greed, financial naïveté, and—to a few—attractiveness and envy.

If something is still yet to be binned a generation after it was originally conceived, it’s probably doing something right. Whether through its ability to generate or store positive memories, to display or represent some deliciously enviable quality, or to be in the right place at the right time, some objects have that certain je ne sais quois that keeps them out of the bin, and in our possession.

A certain word

There is a certain word, one I daren’t even type, that has about it an absolute air of abhorrence within design circles. That’s not to say it’s an unimportant word—only that every designer on this planet is sick to the teeth with it. This is unfortunately really, because it really was a very useful word. It had several synonyms, most of which started with ‘e’, though sometimes with ‘s’, and was very often associated with a hue commonly found loitering between what the Italians describe as blu and giallo.

What you should know is this: keeping things in your possession and making full use of their ability to perform their designated job is advantageous to not only yours and the thing’s life, but to those directly and indirectly associated with you and your being. This is important.

It is also very convenient, as nice things are a pleasure to hold on to. Make full use of this fact by only bringing into your possession things which you imagine yourself continuing to possess. It can be hard to guess which way a relationship is going to go—especially at its beginning—but for every toaster, teddy, or touch-screen telephone you ditch out of dissatisfaction, detachment, or dispensability, the tears of a designer drip disappointedly into his morning porridge.

I like your old stuff better than your new stuff

Liking old stuff is one thing, but what about ‘new’ old stuff? Objects with strong sentimental significance enjoy a free ride down family lines, and apart from the occasional guilt-ridden trip to pawn shops, carry with them memories of those long since passed—even if they weren’t someone we ever even met. There are, however, objects about us which display anything but any kind of historical lineage.

Ross Stevens, senior lecturer at Victoria University’s School of Design, devoted an entire thesis to the subject, in which he discusses the wear of modern items, and the creation of a ‘contemporary history’ that we partake in forming in our use of everyday items. Common electronic appliances—cell phones, MP3 players, and the like—that wear in graceful ways (or at least should).

The story an object may tell through a certain pattern of wear is written simply by its use. An object can mature and contain real physical evidence of its history by the way it rubs everyday in a pocket, is fingered in frustration whilst trying to phone a friend, or is accidentally polished smooth by habitual use. The patina formed is one tied to ownership and interdependence, and one pertinent to the contemporary design of everyday things. Cell phones might tell a shorter tale than the rotary variety, but it is an important tale no less.

The chase

Maxe Fisher, programme director of Culture+Context at Victoria’s School of Design, attempts to explain her love of things. It’s a love not without its downsides.

“Once a year, I go back to Canada, and look through these boxes and boxes of objects I’ve found in abandoned factories, but I just can’t throw anything out.

“There’s the history of our own thinking in those objects, it’s something about the hunting and the finding and the discovery of these objects—it’s something unique, and it’s mine, and no one would have it otherwise. New products don’t have that; you can’t find that in a store.”

The aging items that litter our lives enrich and surprise us in ways current stuff can’t, and won’t. Whether through revealing past naïveties and the forgotten ideals of times past, or the kind of craft and materiality we can only hope to witness in a contemporary context, old stuff has stories to tell.

Maybe I have gone and defended and attempted to rationalise hoarding (for that is what it is). Old things make archaeologists of the best of us, and I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Some things really are worth lugging around in unopened boxes between flats, and some coats are worth smelling like a dead old man for.

The Olde Skle Issue. There were early plans to do an entire issue on typewriters, but this turned out to be a bit ambitious, a bit boring, and a bit naff anyway. This issue was rife with imagery from the US Library of Congress, which recently uploaded a significant number of copyright-free images to the Flickr Commons.

The Olde Skle Issue: Cover

The first in a series—one dominated by frighteningly large people looming over mountains.

Why we love old things

A feature written by myself as an expulsion of material collected over the course of my final BDes (hons) project. The full feature may be read here.

IS INTERNET BIGGER THAN UNIVERSE?

Words by Jackson James Wood.

Rule Brittania!

Words by Josh Cleary.

Men: How to be a better lover, the interview

Words by Nina Fowler.

Lessons I have learned from my mother

Words by Sarah Robson.

The New Zealand Politics Edition: Cover

Paper Borders

Words by Nina Fowler. Photo by gato-gato-gato.

Sleeping with the enemy

Words by Sarah Robson.

The News

The beginning of the news section this week. Words by Michael Oliver, Jackson James Wood, Jessy Edwards, and Rebekah Waller respectively.

Amongst your peers, however, there’s no secret to your failure. Your type choices are, quite frankly, embarrassing. Your cramped, centred text is unsightly, and you seem to want to get far closer to the edge of your paper than your printer is entirely comfortable with.

It is a strange and wonderful thing, that despite the vast number of ways in which something may be said, the overwhelming majority of those ways are at best flawed, and at worst objectively and assuredly wrong. These ways are likely to cause tears of disappointment in all who care about such things, and so too it is with typography and its typographers. Despite having at your disposal a plethora of tools with which to impart your world-changing, environment-cleansing, kitten-cuddling messages, almost all of these should be inextricably banished from your “C:\Windows\Fonts” folder. The rest should be used with the utmost of respect, adoration, or at least a waning interest, for they shall forever contain the ability to transform your well‑crafted prose into a humorous office memo. One that can only hope to alleviate some of its attributable damage by being, at least, recycled.

Some History

Since Johannes Gutenberg first put bits of inky metal to paper in the mid-1400s, typographers have required typefaces after which to name their otherwise quickly floundering profession. Gutenberg’s earliest faces were calligraphic Blackletters—including Textura, and the slightly more modest but certainly no easier to read Fraktur. These proudly live on today on the covers of albums going for that ‘Gothy Metal’ look, a kind of ‘Scary Hip‑Hop’ look, or spelling out someone’s name at the top of the windscreen of that car that’s still doing laps at 1am on a Tuesday. As your mouse hovers threateningly over OldeEnglish.ttf , remember that they have no place on your hard drive.

Encouraged by Gutenberg’s new invention that the Chinese had already invented, new typefaces began to spring up all over Europe—predominantly in the ‘Roman’ style. Italian calligraphers, in their determination to create new faces in the supposedly superior style of the Romans, had mistaken Carolingian minuscules for the One True Script of the Ancients. They hurriedly combined it with some capital letters they’d found on an old pole belonging to some guy called Trajan, only to be horribly embarrassed when they realised what they’d done.

Nonetheless, these formed the basis for all later ‘Roman’ typefaces, and after making all the letters look a bit more like each other, and borrowing some italics from somewhere else so it didn’t read like they were shouting every time they tried to emphasise a word, the typographers of the day had set in stone, so to speak, the various forms of all western lettering to come for the next few hundred or so years.

These new faces were highly legible, and shied away from recreating what could otherwise be done by hand. Blackletters, unreadable to all but Germans and vampiric ducks, were replaced by Roman faces such as Jenson’s Jenson, Garamound’s Garamound, Caslon’s Caslon, Basker­ville’s Baskerville, as well as faces by less conceited typographers such as Griffo’s Bembo, and Voskens’ Fell types—imported to Britain during some unfortunate bureaucracy that halted the production of any British type for a bit.

The Bit Before Now

This was all very well, until the mid-1800s birthed a group of scalpel-wielding pre-Modernists, who took great joy in lopping off the lovely serifs that had been gradually refined over the previous four hundred years. Having thrown off the shackles of their oppressors, these new sans-serif typefaces recruited an appropriate lowercase shortly thereafter, and now make up the other half of the majority of contemporary typefaces.

In a move that isn’t representative at all of general technological and creative advancements in the 20th century, the last hundred years have shown more subtle advances in the way we understand type. We’ve long since given up looking for any absolute answers, and have instead embraced all variants upon a theme in that post‑ironic way we do so well. Soft, bouncy humanist sans‑serifs now live happily alongside more seriously international neo‑grotesques; contemporary serifs remain very nearly structurally identical to their 15th century great‑great‑grandparents; geometric type comes and goes depending on how cool computers are at the time; and some people still aren’t bored with Helvetica.

It’s hard to say who’s the most naïve—the hip café‑dwelling Italian masters of the 1400s who thought that old retro‑chic 1st‑century AD look was back for good, or those annoying graphic‑designer friends you have who still think that Helvetica is God’s (read: Max Miedinger’s) gift to the world, and have the Swiss flag tattooed on their egos. Typography, like anything, is liable to show its age. Contemporary typographers are often happy to explore anything resembling type—from the minimalism of pure geometry to the maximalism of arranging your name in hair.

The Bit Where Things Are Bridged Together

As you write, you are partaking in an exercise oft referred to as ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. It should, therefore, come as no great surprise, that it is very much in your best interest to borrow said giants’ typewriters, keyboards, type sets, printers, and any other possessions they happen to have collected on their way. If possible, sit yourself comfortably around their eye level, so they might notice and chastise you as you attempt to set your latest prose in Verdana.

There is a reason you have so many delightfully banal fonts on your computer. Most early designers were too preoccupied with witch-burning to have the forethought to think about how their delicate strokes were going to look when converted to vectors, then pixels, and finally displayed on that old CRT you’ve still got.

It is only fairly recently that computers have found these new jobs for typefaces, or fonts, to do. Whereas previously typefaces were designed with ink‑traps, so words didn’t get too smudgy when over‑inked, fonts are now hinted, so words don’t get too smudgy when they’re converted to pixels. Default fonts supplied with operating systems are loaded with nice big character sets, and as sick as we are of seeing them, they really do do a commendable job of rendering pretty much anything that gets thrown at them.

As the internet matures, blossoming from a 20-something alt.binaries.warez.linux Usenet moderator, to your 40-something mum who has all the time in the world to blog about her cats’ favourite recipes, so too does its typographic component. There are currently a great many very long and very touchy conversations about how to display type nicely on the net without letting people pilfer them too easily. Add to this the challenge of getting Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and the rest to play to the same rules, and you end up with some fairly primitive typographical technology.

The interim solution to all this is a collection of fonts designated ‘web-safe’. This means everyone has them, and you can slather your band’s MySpace page with them without any unsightly rectangles or question marks popping up. They do, however, tend to have the unfortunate side-effect of looking incredibly bland on paper.