Brandt.Kurowski.net - Blog

No one belongs here more than you

2008-02-23T10:25:00Z

Here’s a book that I read straight through as soon as I got my hands on it. It’s just taken me a while to get around to writing about it. What reminded me to make this post? The fact that the book’s cover is set in Helvetica, actually.

It’s difficult to describe this book. Let’s start by saying it’s a collection of short stories by Miranda July. Each story is unique, but they have common characteristics that bind together the book as a whole. The collection is witty, original, thoughtful, but above all, poignant. There’s a compelling dichotomy between loneliness and connection felt by the characters in the stories. And the settings for the stories range from banal to bizarre.

But that doesn’t really help describe the book. The best thing I can recommend is that you page through the web site for No one belongs here more than you, as it should give you a feeling for the atmosphere of these stories.

I hope you enjoy it.

Helvetica

2008-02-23T04:31:00Z

I finally got around to watching the Helvetica Documentary. The film had been rattling around in my brain for a while, because I’m something of a typophile. On the other hand, I’ve never been a Helvetica–lover. As a matter of fact my iPhone is currently sporting Veer’s I hate Helvetica wallpaper.

Having watched the film, I must say that it was most enjoyable. The selection of interviewees is what makes this film. I am only just beginning to explore the world of typography, so this film was the first time I’d seen many of these folks. I’ve always loved Hermann Zapf’s work and writing, so seeing him speak in the film was a real treat. I’m less familiar with Massimo Vignelli, but he is clearly a force to be reckoned with. I’ve read Michael Bierut’s writings on Design Observer, but the Michael Bierut in the film is almost a different person. Erik Spiekermann was, for lack of a better word, entertaining. I mean that in a good way, and I can see why so many people like him.

Then there’s the subject matter of the film, of course. Not only people’s love and hate relationship with Helvetica, but also the lack of relationship many people have with it. I won’t go into it, suffice to say that if you’re at all interested then you should see the film.

If you’ve seen my home page in the last month or so, you’ve noticed that it has gone fairly undesigned until now. I’ve taken this opportunity to pare down the use of color, to institute a grid layout, and to clean up the typography. Finally, though the navigation and headers are set in Avenir, the rest of the text is all Helvetica.

Enumerable#sort_by{rand}

2008-01-05T03:40:00Z

I came across this Ruby code today in a colleague’s work:

collection.sort_by{rand}

and was about to report it as a bug, since I had always assumed that sort_by required the comparison to be consistent, i.e. a <=> b should be equal to -(a <=> b), just as Java’s Comparable.compareTo requires. Then I realized that sort_by must not be calling the block for every comparison—it must be calling it once for each member of the collection, then using the results to sort the collection. Kinda like our friend the Schwartzian transform from Perl. Neato.

Consolidating

2008-01-02T08:18:00Z

You may have noticed some changes around here. Don’t panic! The changes are just superficial. I’ve taken all the tools that I use to post things online (writing in my blog, photos on flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and random bits on tumblr) and merged them into a single stream. I did this to make updates easier: I found myself posting to my blog every time I uploaded photos to flickr (to be sure people knew about the noew pictures), and using my tumble log for a lot of things that should’ve been bookmarks (because the tumble log got more attention).

Now I have the liberty of posting items just once, using the best tool for the job, and everything will automatically show up in chronological order on the home page of my site. An added bonus is that people who visit my site should see new items much more frequently than before. So check back often! And please don’t be shy about scrolling down: as you go down this page, your web browser will automatically fetch more of my posts to add to the bottom. It just keeps going!

This new unified view is still under development, so please bear with me as I continue to improve things around here.

The Helicopter

2007-12-21T00:43:00Z

Ben Tucker got a remote control helicopter, and Albert has been having a grand old time chasing it around the office.

It had to happen...

2007-12-02T17:15:00Z

What can I say? It got cold, and Albert needed a sweater…

Pet day

2007-11-20T17:21:00Z

Don't Tase Me, Bro

2007-09-20T15:07:00Z

A brilliant t-shirt (via Wired) made in response to the already-infamous Meyer stunt.

I want one, but the police in my town are probably a bit sensitive about tasers right now, having recently fallen under intense public scrutiny for their tasing of two non-violent protesters. I’d hate to send the wrong message by wearing this shirt, because I think we’ve got a great police force in this town. On the other hand, I think that the issue of inappropriate taser use across the nation is worthy of public discussion.

Your thoughts?

Pets

2007-09-18T03:09:00Z

Today we added two new members to our family. Holly, an eight year old cat:

And Albert, a one year old Dachshund:

Both are from the Windham County Humane Society, which is a wonderful place. The puppy and kitty are getting along famously. Solveig and I are having a great time trying to keep up with them.

One year

2007-09-16T20:11:00Z

Solveig and I were married one year ago today. We’re having a very happy anniversary!

Thanks to all our friends and family for helping to make it a great year.

Twentieth Century Type Designers

2007-08-31T21:17:00Z

I happened across this book on a “Clearance” table at the Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH. The book certainly looked promising, but since it had been put on clearance I figured that it was probably middling at best. However, knowing I would be in need of something light and interesting to read at the beach, I picked up a copy and let it sit untouched until my vacation this month.

When reading time arrived, I picked up Twentieth Century Type Designers for a quick perusal, planning to switch quickly to one of my more serious vacation books, Number Theory and Its History and The Codebreakers. I was in for a surprise, though, since the time to switch never came.

In <u>Twentieth Century Type Designers</u>, Sebastian Carter has masterfully recorded the history of the typesetting industry through the transition from hand-cut and hand-set type to machine-set hot-metal type. His telling of the story is worth study because it doesn’t focus too intently on how the transition took place—typesetting technology and changes in letterforms are described only briefly. Rather, Carter chooses to focus on why the changes took place—going into details about the personalities of the key people in the industry, economic forces on their work, and even the political and personal influences at work.

The result is a riveting prologue that, through the story of the Monotype Corporation, takes the reader on an informative whirlwind tour of movable type from it’s invention through the first half of the twentieth century. This is followed by biographies of fifteen influential typographers of the period, including some beautiful illustrations of their work alongside concise stories of the motivation behind their work. I found myself quite surprised at what I learned—it turns out that the dowdy Frederic Goudy was actually an interesting character, while the much-revered Eric Gill was quite a bore.

The second half of the book begins with an exposition of the transition from hot-metal typestting to photosetting and eventually digital typesetting. I expected this material to be less engaging due to my familiarity with the subject matter, but was again pleasantly surprised. Carter’s focus on the people involved, and the influences that drove their actions, gave me fresh perspective. Likewise with the biographies of latter-twentieth century type designers that followed. I knew nothing of Matthew Carter or Gerard Unger, but reading their stories gave depth to my existing appreciation for their work. On the other hand, I’ve never been a fan of Adrian Frutiger’s typefaces, but having learned about the goals with which he designed them helps me see them in new light.

In conclusion, I have to say that this book isn’t just light summer reading, but should be considered required reading for any serious student of type. It is certainly widely accepted that, in order to use a typeface well, one must understand the intended purpose of the face. I find myself no longer satisfied with that, though. To fully appreciate a face, and to do it justice through use, I now feel a need to understand the historical context in which a face was designed, and to familiarize myself with the motivations and pressures felt by the type designer while creating the face. If you care about the typefaces that you use, I urge you to do the same.

Back from vacation

2007-08-28T01:54:00Z

Solveig and I have returned from our two week vacation. It was fun, but exhausting. In retrospect, we were crazy to think that we could have a relaxing vacation with 20 people in our vacation home. As I said, though, it was still fun, and I believe that everyone involved had a good time.

Here are some photos for your enjoyment. You’ll notice that these are mostly boring shots of scenery. Before I upload photos of people, I need to separate the wheat from the chaff (I’m referring to photos, of course, not people).

Seawall reconstruction View the slideshow.

I woke up early one morning, and when I saw the sun rising I grabbed my camera. View the slideshow.

I can never resist taking a walk on the rocks. View the slideshow.

Anyway, now that we’re home we can finally start moving in to our new house. More information on that will be coming soon…

Luna Park

2007-07-06T21:08:00Z

My brother just launched Luna Park:

Long in planning and development over caffeinated late night discussions, Luna Park, a review of little magazines and literary journals, is now online. We are very excited to finally share our own passion for little magazines with the greater reading public. As a review of little magazines, Luna Park will feature excerpts from contemporary magazines and journals, reviews of these same magazines, a daily “Found” of an exceptional or interesting piece of writing or work of art from little magazines, excavations of long lost journals, and much more.

It’s presented as a blog for now, but keep an eye out for big things coming from this little publication.

MakeMeSustainable

2007-07-03T14:37:00Z

GreenRiver.org launched a new startup yesterday: Cambridge, MA-based MakeMeSustainable.com. MakeMeSustainable is a carbon footprint calculator, but it beats out other carbon calculators with the one-two punches of ongoing carbon management combined with social networking. Check it out!

For the geeks out there, this site was built by Ben Tucker and myself using Ruby on Rails while practicing Behavior-Driven Development using RSpec, rcov and ZenTest. We also adopted Piston, Capistrano and CruiseControl.rb for this project. It’s a lot of infrastructure, but without it there would’ve been no way to deliver all the software that we did in the limited time we had.

Ear candy

2007-05-30T16:25:00Z

DJ Doboy, The Vocal Edition Volume 19, 08:37