Dailiness

Typical. Type-ical. Typographic.

Love this post from Cameron Moll on Techniques for Designing with Type Characters. I’ve been a typography junky since I was quite young and still have my childhood manual on how to form calligraphic characters by hand.

A while back I found myself assembling a Tinderbox research file that required me to roam the web for examples of type used as art, type used to create pictures and tag clouds.

Font designer Manfred Klein has some font examples (of images made from words, letterforms or type elements), including one featured in Symbol & Icon Fonts Online called TypeFaces…

A little bird I know is blogging about the the prep school experience, mainly to debunk some of the popular misconceptions:

If you only take one paragraph away from this blog, let it be this:

• Prep-School kids do a lot of work.
• Life revolves around homework first, food second, and friends third.
• “College” is a four-letter word.
• And you will never be the best at anything at prep school.

I’ve never worn much make-up. Most days the face I show the world is 100% sans liquids, powders, gels, pencil, paint. Untouched-up, unairbrushed.

I account for this partly because the aesthetic of my teen years was a very natural look, partly because I was always lucky to have nice skin, but mostly because the idea of putting all that glop on my face was/is repugnant. It feels uncomfortable, hot, itchy. Even now, on the brink of 50, I wear it only sparingly, as an uneasy concession to the expectations of business-formal occasions. Like the stage make-up I wore when I acted when I was younger, it signifies that I’m playing a role. Most of the time, I’d rather just be me.

I once had a discussion with a woman who earnestly argued that make-up is necessary to the “preservation” of skin. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense. Women are being sold a bill of goods.

Think about it: make-up — foundation in particular — is just fancy dirt. If you are young, you don’t need it. And if you want to keep your skin nice as you age, regularly putting dirt on it is not going to be good for it.

Addendum: from Salon Broadsheet, this article on lead levels in lipstick.

I’m in the middle of porting a new design to my main site at Hit Those Keys, so there will be a period of time where the various sections don’t match. Life is messy.

[Whilst completing tax returns...]

Doing one’s taxes

• is just reading directions
• and simple arithmetic

Hold that thought….