keyaar.in / Exif: Blog

MetaFriction

→ March 31, 2019 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink

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Some meta book-books I think are worth their weight in paper pulp laced with gold during the great Kerala wedding season: Kalpetta Narayanan Master’s Kayar Murukukayaanu (The Noose tightens) on books, people, places etc., and Kavithayute Jeevacharitram (The Biography of a Poem) on po-etry and -ets; Nilanjana Roy’s The Girl Who Ate Books; Neil Gaiman’s View from the Cheap Seats on people with books in them; Browse: Love Letters to bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings on places with books in them; Eco-and-Carriere’s This is Not the End of the Book where they talk about the book object; Kavitha Rao’s The Librarian with a girl who goes to work in a large library in Bombay; Stephen King’s On Writing; Yoda Press’s weird collection of imaginary libraries in Invisible Libraries; Phil Baines’s Penguin by Design, on book covers and the people and places that make them; Nick Hornby’s Stuff I Have Been Reading with a self explaining title; Pradeep Sebastian’s witty and relatable Groaning Shelf on book people and book places; P.K. Rajashekharan’s book memories in Bookstalgia (not as fun as Kalpetta; the title is what sells it). The list is defined by the length of my scan-bed; off-screen, working as props and caught in a Kindle are Seven Hundred Penguins, David Lodge’s Lives in Writing, Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, etc.

Up-hoot #1: Found Love Among the Bookshelves today at the State Public Library (this, of the dust-jacketed—not the just-jacketed—kind.) Too many book-related coincidences this week.




Paul Vikramadityan Rand

→ March 17, 2019 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink

Classes were held in the local elementary school. Because the students had the summer off, we were able to [make] use of the cafeteria as a classroom, two students sitting at each of eleven large tables. Paul would go from desk to desk carrying a collapsible garden stool with him so that he could sit and talk to each student about his or her work. Each tête-à-tête went on as long as was necessary to set the student on the right track and was laced with stories from Paul’s vast career as they were appropriate to the issue at hand. When he worked with students, he poured his heart and soul into it.
Paul remained part of the core faculty of the Brissago program until it ended in 1996. It didn’t take long for him to be convinced that this kind of concentrated and intense interaction with individual students was the best way to teach graphic design. He tried to transplant the one-project/one-week arrangement to the Yale program but because of the academic and extracurricular demands placed on the students, it never quite worked.

— Philip Burton on Paul Rand, Paul Rand: Conversations with Students

Part of the fun in teaching is all the -related literature and films and songs and anecdotes one reads oneself to sleep with. The other part of the fun is vacuously imitating the not-so-important parts and hoping things unfold well. There is a txti in there somewhere—of all the ‘material’ on teaching, waiting to be put into HTML. Point being that nothing can replace this extended bakchodi with individuals (on their work), showing them related work, showing them seemingly unrelated texts that make sense, showing off some of one’s own work, etc.


Patience (nts?) and Scissors*

→ March 16, 2019 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink

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I started teaching typography and accoutrements (mostly accoutrements) in August 2018. This course has me really painted into a corner with the constant struggle with whether to preach the thin-stemmed crystal goblet or twirl a moustache a-la Victore. (Fuck your middle-path.)

It continues to be a process of getting paid for learning new stuff. And I think the learning equation is heavily tilted to the wrong right side. Here is the course-as-a-commentary HTML thingy. (Updated often; some useful links.)

The one on top is Miss. SJ’s attempt at subtly commenting on the course. (I kid.) The bottom one (I need a New Cubicle) is from Miss. AS. She’s repurposed an otherwise dry exercise real well as a back/fore ground.)

* An up+coming Indianie band with its roots firmly in place in the underbelly of a forgotten surgical procedure.


Gridnook

→ March 10, 2019 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink

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It will take me justsixcolumns, I said. You can pay me by the column-width, I said. Ooh/meh.


On Giving a Shit

→ February 26, 2019 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink

On the other hand, cheap, rough paper with a beautifully set textblock hanging just so on the page makes those in the know, smile (and those who don’t, feel welcome). It says: We may not have had the money to print on better paper, but man, we give a shit. Giving a shit does not require capital, simply attention and humility and diligence. Giving a shit is the best feeling you can imbue craft with. Giving a shit in book design manifests in many ways, but it manifests perhaps most in the margins.

Craig Mod, Let’s Talk About Margins


Them Dashes (Or the Offical Em Dash Policy here on exif)

→ February 20, 2019 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink

Part of the trouble with setting the blog in monospaced type and letting the browser decide what is best (the CSS reads ‘font-family: “Courier New”, courier, monospace;’) is that there is no guarantee the em dashes will be distinct enough to not have them mistaken for their shorter, less fancy cousins. There is an advanced typography course I’m tutoring soon and I was rereading Bringhurst this time with intent. I realise it is odd and all kinds of unprofessional to have left it run this way—without distinction—for four years. There are spaces around the em dashes now (see last sentence) for making sense’s sake and I don’t recommend it used this way otherwise. (A little piece of javascript runs at the end of each page to replace all instances of the dash with a space-dash-space string. So the ‘actual’ text in its editable form stays the right way, for when the monospace phase passes.) Bringhurst recommends an en dash flanked by two spaces over the em dash without spaces around (which [the actual em] is what the Chicago Manual prefers). The Practical Typography website has this to say on the matter. There is a beautiful bit of prose on the absence of an ebook version of the site, elsewhere.

I shouldn’t have used the word “content” to describe what writers make. Writers make writing. So let’s call it that. Because “content” isn’t a neutral word. It’s anesthetizing jargon that encourages us to see the best (and worst) parts of the web as fungible commodities, like soybeans. Writers are not content farmers. Recognizing that fact is a prerequisite to improving the economics of writing.

— Matthew Butterick