Notes on Graphic Design.
(Previously: 'Speculative text (in progress), full of mistakes and generalisations -- part horrible rant.')

PART 1. "A production ain't no thing baby."
[an introduction to a notebook full of disappointment and hope]
Operating in the left field and also in the midst of processes – they are unrealised (as yet) in terms of their potential. Alternative ideas of production might offer possibilities only if they can fulfill a requirement [however abstract] that will circumvent or replace another one. Production in graphic design, in this case, might be re-thought; in terms of paradox, exercise, reception and exchange. Because now it operates, mostly, as something rather defensive and clearly ambivalent. Simply showing processes is not enough. Have you seen the film? You might propose a halt to production, or a subversion of the means and outcomes of production that goes beyond that [wildly relied on] 'outcome is not important, the process is the product' paradigm; the outcome is important. How stopping or subverting production fits into language, personal and civil, is as important as it is complicated. Voice can be easily stripped of voice: stripped of talking; word; of thing; of act – facts. But for the utterance of individual and the choir (filter, container, shelter and sign), no objects are required. But outcomes are still, eventually, produced ... upset upon each other. You must but you may not at all. Paper / folded / archived.
So then, are you going to relinquish distance? Might as well. Towns are being replaced by clusters; coupled with easy access to a means of creating a surrounding culture, one without too much detail [or attention to it] for that matter. An example of this: Towns have websites. This might be a part of a point. A point to begin with. Things packed up and put against the wall soon relinquish spirit and access. It is then the plugs – the ones that give the juice to the lights – that have a strong part to play. They provide the means for these things to be made found again. This re-discovered matter eventually winds-up more removed, rough and general; like snacks becoming more nourishing than meals, projection suddenly becomes more powerful than print. All these packed up things might really need is the appearance to bleed colours and light. While the other sort is still – and simply absorbs. Then: What becomes the neutral thing here? What is speaking to what? Without much practice. The following becomes force-fed: composition, exchange, resonance, maintenance, material, this font – all acting nimble and itchy. And all this irritation so you can finally wear your voice on the outside. These things play to your voice like insects. Reminding us that, sometimes, in our bodies (that will never be worth it), there are parts that can be heard – not listened to – but heard. Restricted by the tongue lapping on the inside of the mouth. And some cramped fingers. The acquired parts for making seem – essentially – each time the same and yet the process is always very different, so backwards ... Maybe you must act in-kind to the matter in the outset. This must be how it becomes activated and finally able to transmit clearly back inside? Apparent, maybe, but not obvious.

PART 2. In not an entirely pleasing way all software has started communicating, don't worry, it just happens in the background. You might be happy about it! In this place backgrounds and skeletons become very important. Not there to be fully-noticed, just fully-functional. These things that seemingly aren't even 'made', they simply (nowadays at-least) exist; contingency? Inside wood, inside stone, inside friends, inside bone, inside paper (& even ink); just inside – structures we have for all the creeping messages – mine and also yours. Makeable additions, always mutable, transforming, communicative, anesthetised [vice-versa]. Acting with a thing. Acting with anything. Being told and (op-)positioned in a forceful way towards it, from influence to subject. There is the dialogue which takes the outcome back to influence again. There is the dialogue repeated. Adding all this up, these seem to be the possibilities available for now – maybe the most overlooked.

PART 3. Typedesigners and linguists. Now that might be a meeting :) Fields of paradox, but of inspiration.
Ambivalence, that of choice.
Fallacious, like the melody.
Method, familiar, all wound-up; strangled.
An instance of Memory that might cause chaos.

PART 4. Image the bastion and text full of contranyms. Just try to justify your own now-a-days when going it alone. When did this change?

REPETITION
to the effect of eating itself
& forgetting how
it might begin to differentiate itself, again
like the head that vomits itself
like necromancy
parculiarities
never to be,
when ornamental, again, becomes organic, again, when ornamental becomes, again, organic.

INTENTION
to risk and to find it's vocabulary
by decipherment
to find lost details, obliterated because of the limitations [and needs] of design software
(find a place called context)
re-visit the consequences of roles changing, and instigation of said new-roles
in accordance: speaking will change, spelling will change, recognition will be altered
mistakes, built in, visible, penetrable
erasures
and disconnected to commerce, at all costs
knowing that it is not the technology that will change it.

RELAPSE
inevitable
on all sides
always
metaphors
call that rearranging
and a word is erased

PART 5. Begun in process, then becoming outside of it. Development - is this why all the performances? The human printing press, I finally saw it. After years of producing he finally became. The process, the transformation, are to easy to compare. The starting point is clear enough: first material is eaten, this material that is exchanged mostly by a group of insiders. Then material is then added a level of aesthetics and arrangement (layout, formal decisions). BUT, suddenly something is missing! Output is the usual design object - a contrivance. Expected, worn, dishonest. Like they ate the ink, but only with the intention to please others. The printing failed. Did it take courage? NO! Repetitious drawing of curves to makes forms will eventually result in [a set of] sensible and legible patterns. The light that was sucked back in kinda sucked!

PART 6. Sucked out of the air. The material tested, from the shelter, out the back, 50% (only). [Frontage is the thing that only moves around]. Eating form. Not critically! Saw a child's bicycle parked out the front called 'Snake-King'. Impossible to describe what that looks like. The spit drips off the pencil, missing the page but only just. "Briefly", it will see. The way it's written, signed. Never a way with words. Keep an eye out for the too prolific – they are bound to be completely dogmatic, y'know?

PART 7. Graphic designers are generally mis-using the word research in two ways. The first is that conclusions that might result from an editing process are rarely offered, facts remain facts, only beautified. The second is that the word 'research' becomes conjuntional: 'my-research'. The appearance that that would be of any help, or use, to anyone else is whimsical and produces enormous amounts of waste. Maybe these things, instead, could be called 'exercises', 'investigations' or 'collections' - their graphic form is usually not translating the content but only formalising it. Can graphic designers only answer questions that are given to them? What does this mean? (It's fine right?)

PART 8. A watch viewed as a demon. A demon viewed as a watch. All children float. All children fall flat. 'I'm in the O, that stands for ocean', can you say this? You just say anything. How, can, you, say, anything. Why put this in public? The dog could see the park. The dog, on the leash, could see the park. My friend told me: "Book market –> Reading market." Book market –> Reading market.

PART 9. All our formal properties are transferred to the creation of objects. The hair on the porcelain fallen, a letter. Meddeling with ideas that he stored in his lover. Bursting out the thighs. She. The female dance-music voice, also a type. A stylised representation, a mimetic object, used like a typeface. Pale, can't get comfy in this seat. Massive. Next to me playing card-hands. Out the window, a void. The neck: An outlet. Standing outside is always anticipation. Like the cover, annexed.

PART 10. I can feel these people. I can hear the ones that will speak. The anticipation is complicated. During the typing I know there have been thoughts erased. Not presumed as important, or neccesary. The room is cold. The air is thick with sandwiches and mumbling. If only it adds to the content.

PART 11. The allure of business is violent, a sport. The structure of this society a super-imposed series of mixed and hierarchical messages, a sport.

PART 12. It's quite funny that guys, about my age, begin to write like this, these kinds of things. Kind of sad in a way. Already in a year I've seen most of my opinions change. That's what seems to happen. What follows, is usually contradiction and prospective grappling with materials. The gamble begins, the big ape. When in doubt, use reggae colours.

PART 13. Finding your way with a new language. A photograph of a well-kept hedge, a metaphor, obligatory and universal - we get it. Little flies wandering around the stainless suface. People chatting about porno on the left, not really being able to hear the right. Are you little flies out of control when you fly? It seems that way. Weak shapes, quick from the hand. Un-accumulative, self-confident, ironic. Especially – conceptually – weak. Vunerable. Busy indexing. Doubt eyes the hopeless.

PART 14. In the bedroom the little peg lying on the ground looked like a mistake. I wondered, it being small, then all of a sudden looking bigger and slightly fierce-ish – not pretending because a peg can't pretend – what was it doing there? Close to the floor everything looks longer. Cramped conditions, dampered with soft-card forms, recording in, leaving. My desk, a game of piles, annoying to me. Conversion: Sanding an object older than an average life-expectancy, restoring and preparing the surface: removing previous registrations, information, memories. The object's history manifest as a distribution channel of passing, periodical and elementary thoughts within a family system. On three separate occasions now i've seen women writing in foolscap note books in Amsterdam Central station. Always the lines are filled up to the brim; justified: Breathless, continuous, steady, text. They looked urgent. This was exciting to see, this was quite inspiring. Should we write more in public this way? Drug-addicts imitating architecture, yes; becoming the shape of the archways, roofs and screens – they are also their shelters. Supporting the spaces they occupy; themselves. Without them these spaces would also be empty.
Endearingly rendered flat composition.
Sunday if [it was] a full daisy.
A generation of Dutch Designers is slowly dying.

PART 15. (poem)

3 layers needed
to serenade the first leg,
to whine
whine at a distance
to yearn,
like a sequin
and be witness to the afternoon
when farina was less well known
for me-yeah-nee-jaa-ah-aiyja

colophon is sad
don't mar me again
marked by the fact that i
that i saw my body
if all was sincere
maybe
i would fall comfortably into the day
maybe
all of the waste
will raise itself up
ooh-aay-ahh-ahh

something special that will never end
i fell up
to get up
maybe, or long
maybe, or too long
too old, too tight
first, second, third
a base
nah!
protect me from advantages, and then, from ambition.

PART 16. It don't take much to say "Alright!"
Especially if it's via-via.

PART 17. Is design always to be about the expected? Out of your parents bedroom, a flat, a hotel room: What flows, rather than the object? That would be a sort of historical ephemera [sentiment] paradoxically remaining in the present; our written articulations of success and failure are still clearly templated...

PART 18. The DVD logo looks like a tribal mask. The mouth of the sock, looking for the other. Publications looking through cracks. Towards the unspecific. Soft, brittle, feeble, fragile, unsure: The forms I prefer. Tracing can be an incredibly fruitful exercise, but where precisely does it lead to? I know it has an effect on thought. I know that it also leads to a type of development. Someone always asks "what is critical?" at a given moment. Then there is a quiet lack of time, so, we wait.

PART 19. That this LED light is related to falling snow is a nice metaphor. It looks like it is merely something to trace over to make words. An exercise that was related back to the diagram (the first thing he saw that made sense on his arrival in the big city) as well as his own-versions off-shoot. The possibility of creating an awareness of spaces. Do these readings have a right to turn themselves back on the world? For a slight second I saw his wrinkled, black hand suctioned onto the cold bench-top. It seemed to mimick the relentless downloading of me and my peers. He was more worried about being trapped in the airport. Outside, the wind went through their teeth. This note will eventually snake-over into an earlier one.

PART 20. What if the alphabet was comprised of more dis-connected elements, more 'satellites'? Would this open up the possibility for more juxtapositions, more meanings? Or, would it just be a pain. The feeling of being in a room with content where nobody is watching you and the mmmmmaterials are open, accumulating [physical/formal] thoughts and circumstances. Hoping the message will be seen before the knowing of who did it. There is one, built in, repeat.

PART 21. Generally you begin to develop a working process by using forms and struggling with and through the development of them towards something meaningful. How is intuition to be included in this? 'My concept of a three dimensional language is the energizing of objects, relative to everything, and within a spatial sequence or configuration.' – A. C. McCoy, 1968

PART 22. Flock to the work like seagulls. Pick at it like seagulls. Or do little like frogs. Forced reading patterns on websites are completly irritating and formalise perhaps more interesting uses of hypertext. While we were waiting to see the doctor we heard Rod Stewart and Whitney Houston in the reception area & then, moving to the meeting room, a crisis fan in the corner quietly faced two small naïve-style paintings of a coastline. This is where my mum cried the next part of her soul away – for the stupid doctors and nurses. Back at home: Flecks of sugar on the table, dust on the balustrade; dog hair almost everywhere. These were the details in the slightly unkempt home, representative of the current psychological state of it's occupant.

PART 23. Is this flickering cursor to be considered a glyph?

PART 24. It's been a while. Funny thing is that it is a hairbrush on my couch that has inspired me to touch you again. We don't have a hairbrush in our house. We do have a comb, but it is never used. The hairbrushes bristles were pointing up. Why did it annoy me? Well the first thing is that it blended in, it was pretty much the same colour as the couch. Then, what if I sat on it? We don't brush our hair in this house, so faced with the realisation that i'm sub-conciously against brushed hair, I turned to you.

PART 25. As I scratch my back. Little pieces of text fall off. Or was that from the plaster cast? Which - i'm well aware - is not a poem, but a trophy.

PART 26. The footage of the open mouth is full of points, some waver & some differ. To the extent which is best decribed by the foot. The foot [without socks] being the open mouth in this case.

PART 27. The file; the hand's thought's record. The file: The thoughts hands record.

PART 28. About a way of doing things. Yet, objects - but only some typefaces - seem to acquire meaning over time [antecedant to their inception]; the original intention (if any) is distorted; due to conceptual and abstract circumstances (in the first place). So it is also about circumstances. But these seem to be surpassable, or superceeded i.e. through restoration. Full of possibilities and dead-ends. *TALENT*. So, Design, where do YOU come in?

PART 29. Describe going around the world by gesturing wildly with your hands, and then your place within that world with your body. While that goes on (in the lesson) – in the vacuum of a nervous gasp – the broken [grammatically incorrect] answer plops out. The right combination of chemicals towards acceptable behaviour, right? & how to deal with the world as a construct. As it commonly isn't.

PART 30. Death shave, or was it death drive. The runt of the litter. The final seagull. Flame licks, as if affectionate. A suggestion of blackness outside the image. Fresher than flowers, fawner than fawns. For the process to be kept alive the means were collected and kept so we could use them again. He was in suddenly in a group – the receiver – his dream. He decided that we don't need to record them, they do it themselves; to send la rage rage all over the place. An insect crawling on my neck, i'm ready. Nelly was a train, she rode the class in perfect noise! (see over).

PART 31. The images of the milky, perfect, kids were hung.

PART 32. A night in the 'F'. Like the reverb spring in The P Brothers' 'Outta Control' I went for the burn it in the ceiling behaviour.

PART 33. The haunted practitioners of letter-design live in the beautiful forest. They toil over thier work. The glasshouse next to the old bomb shelter (used for storage, but in a state of readiness) is covered in moss, faeces and plastic netting. Where they lay each other down and talk about function. About making signs and being signs. They make this joke to each other: "It's a long & lengthy process!"; indeed it is. Bent around the chair leg is a set of curves. Infact, curves cling to all furnitures in the covered-up glasshouse. In the night hours, when the internet connection is at rest, they work on the spacing. In the daytime they trawl and draw, on screens and on sheets and scraps of paper. Like one of their colleagues, they sometimes use experimental methods to find forms. They often desire to describe something that is - like - torn, because they have little contact with the people who will eventually use their work. They also know that the world is somehow fucked, or was it always to be this way? How do you design that into a typeface? Was it the image of the devices they wanted to reflect or more to confirm their usefulness? Both seemed like rather finite options. (Like engineers, one dreams of an alphabet of essential forms; one takes from the ordinary forms of nature and the social world). Well, until the new one comes along, that is. One of the unique things they would do – that no-one could know about – was to make things that they hated but knew would be acceptable. A kind of a definition for a service-practice! The name of the one they are working on at the moment is 'Mandy', She is their longest and most complicated project; because there is no intention, no projected ambition, no projected need – they are doing it because they want to. She is designed from pencils that lie in icecream containers on the floor, all over the glasshouse. She is also designed by intuition, rather than normative approaches to the process, a DEEP, UNREAL and UNDERSTANDING intuition. She can't be traced because it is a life drawing [in mind]. She might be slightly illegible, poor thing! She is only intended for those who accept certain ideas and conditions for HER cooperation and will only be distributed with this intent.

PART 34. Lunch time, waiting in the sun until an important delivery can be made. A reading on, not the final word. How was I supposed to know you were sick? It's more about the design, that's hard! A reality check [the club], even harder! Stealing from each other is exchange and a consequence of that is solidarity. It's not really following if you aren't involved and it's not really stalking unless you never meet. To put this back into forms... because i'm frustrated and eager. When was this exercise invented? It's time to make a break, you never! Why is everone into rocks and stones at the moment? Why doesn't social networking work? Why is my hairdresser asking me such private questions? Why are people who are now activists also classy artists? Why is cooking so important?

PART 35. The world operates, is awash, with blue blood and it's entrenched mechanics. They have the power to make the red flow and also active it's neurons – in their favour and for their productions. Perhaps the blue is the ocean? Once symbolic for discovery, or maybe even imagination (before it was commercialised). Yet, the lag of this idea permeates nearly everything we do or see. To be subjected to this, it's repetition, and the occasional utterances of dissent (like islands) seem the best we can hope for. Blue's dominance must be diluted. If I see another nice cotton shirt with a bad tie, jeans and shoes i'm gonna puke. This one goes out to the provocative Party Poker.com guy.

PART 36. Standing around in an exhibition listening to a practitioner describe themselves, quite funny. At exactly the same time I enjoyed the sense my hand makes patterns when employed (I think my arm is ugly in space BTW). Or, When it had jobs that is. I felt this could only be figured out by tracing. Tracing spoiled and bored. Differences in approach and attention span. Interested in hand and decorative mystics (that you go through). Something is missing, which hurts. Some have the JOY, or a charasmatic set of approaches to things, some don't. What was DES again? [everybody seems to hate his work but he still wins prizes!] A proper dagger it seems to me...

PART 37. Design was the books dream. Design isn't thinking made visual, it is more like dart-board wires, that were unloved in the community – until now. A revival. Pub sports; Casino sports. Not healthy, but connected to certain skills, which are now to be considered SPORTY (as they are sponsored and broadcast). A once hidden type of person is now on the screen, the bedroom, backroom, pub-type person. Like this development.

PART 38. If you think about it, concepts are still more valuable than work and objects. A concept is your pay packet. A concept is a trace and a cultish thing. It is equally elusive and strong. A reflection of the time we are in. This is why universities are cashing in, to the detriment of the actual thing they are supposed to be doing. Which should be called experimenting. Instead the mandate is to dlguhsdlfnghlsnkcgvlx.

PART 39. Is the skeleton – the 'thin' – the noun that can help you truly question something, in an esoteric sense? As describing a fragile invariance. Skelethin.

PART 40. Is collage ruins? This will to steal from others, not own.

PART 41. Book competition dream: 1. Not necessarily successful, 2. Experiment, outside of commercial imperatives/structures; 3. Collabrative [not tacit, or 'socialised' talk], or at least collected; 4. Must inspire jealousy-magic (challenging and evasive, irritating); 5. Un-continuum; 6. More than usual; 7. Desparate and curious; 8. No type-wank; 9. Not imitative, in a fetish way; 10. Combinations; 11. Contributive to the field; 12. 'Useless as a possibility'; = C-A-S-H!

PART 42. Design is the thing that comes in. The hotel that i'm staying at sounds like they are dragging bodies around in the kitchen... In between button, screen and test. And that is not the thing that is eventually produced. But the production's result behaves like the final thing. HOLLA / CACHET.

PART 43. The plane was no longer a flicker, but a tube-y object sucked on to by a walking gate. It was an older model and the insides of its decals looked drought-ridden. Also like chemical symbols - indicating their current nature based both in visual representation and scientific observation. A sort of ossification, we are always referrring to our bones. "More fading, more discontinuity", he said. "More dissolved, more revealing", she said back.

PART 44. A weird, prevailing feeling of cynicism; that is probably digitisted fear. I'm a sponge this week, "Language is a photo, on which the resolution of it's own image depends". Sitting here, in different places during the day, a location stripped of the work of joy and replaced with it's – perhaps more fascinating – derivatives. Or, is this just always manifest in a nervous presentation? Production? [Morphology of linguistics?] Here, the similarities between the form of language and the form of space become dissolved; some play power-games as a way to wade through this. Against these manoeuvers others make conributions. Taking the object very seriously/gravely. Morphography comes later. Promise self not to say "discussing the notion"... OR "is dealing with" ... A promise as if it was only a line ... [of circumstances].

PART 45. Thing that's always there, a double adumbration.

PART 46. Cathode ray tube: RADAR, then found to contain a matrix for making early digital type (light), and also this became a tool for weather prediction and also TV advertising. This older way to do design is quite interesting, it takes longer, it is a kind of 'enthusiasm'. On reflection the other way begins to seem kind of lazy, perhaps because it's familiar. With this application, the things in the background are the things that will be printed invisible. Every decision seems to have a consequence on everything else, if multiplied... it's alone in the group [a contemporary image].

PART 47. I'm so confused. I want to do technical things but worry about the nature of them as thoughts. I'm so confused. I want to do techinical things but worry about the nature of them as needs.

PART 48. That there are all of these things to be reduced feels nonsensical. Or, is it my job to undo this?

PART 49. ... Unlike shadows, which are always a bit see-through.

PART 50. Digital typefaces huh? With intention built in (but with no inherent meaning), both function and void. Are custom tools for for writers/typists, helpful. Before write[r]s, not tools.

PART 51. The LED dot-matrix signs in the trains of the Dutch national rail service, the NS, ['indicated'] - showing the final destination of the train - are being slowly replaced. In the new trains these signs are no longer built into the structure of the train but are attached to it, on the trains cabin wall. The dot-matrix signs are being replaced by LED displays, which are becoming cheaper. The LCD displays show up to date journey information, behavioural guidelines or rules, and – new to the game – advertising; while also indicating that the train is connected to the internet (telematic choo-choo). The higher resolution of these displays curtails a visible structure while amplifying the number of elements to represent the letterforms and images. Less imagination is needed to read these new signs. The signs are more demanding for sure.

PART 52. 6 ovens in a room, time pressure. Logo voice, describing the outcome; then more 'animated' discussion, judging the outcome. Balance achieved. Why all the fuss about technique? Arrogance of the judges, the jury; after all, they are the experts. After the scoop an assessment. Cooking shows are quite disgusting. They like it! [even though it always, naturally, needs to be 'taken to the next stage'} Humiliation always plays a part. An emotional night in the end at the IBIS.

PART 53. Did it, but feel a slight regret. The bubbling paint. The overheated paint produced things like jittering dots, which distributed themselves rapidly around the focal-point of the heat. Sometimes they merged to form a larger blob, yet stoppped reacting just as quickly when the flame moved on. This is the most vivid memory I have of the action. Failing to concentrate on the actual thing i was trying to achieve. The ruins were sooty burn-marks and charred pock-like lumps. What remained at the end of the process – in terms of an overall image or design – was a failure, a disaster, at least formally speaking. So, yeah...

PART 54. Good design will always represent the mediocre.

PART 55. Thinking in-appropriate during question time at the lecture. Concerned about the relation to the scruff up the front. His life becomes the content of an unresolved project.

PART 56. I own 'D'.

PART 57. He has a Police history and he believes in ghosts and i don't. (Years later) I do believe in ghosts.

PART 58. Profanity is a striving (or, perhaps a struggle) for happiness.

PART 59. A night in the 'F' Part Two. Wandering past the prank, the construction in scene is applied. Learn to smoke the drugs. Get the same threads as my friends. Learn to cook. Learn to invite people. Learn to converse. Touch the insides of someone.

PART 60. Typefaces are not designed, they are conceived … they are systems, they are plans. Only as style are they called 'Design', superficially. Where fashions must be the focus of this products border. Only the applications made to produce typefaces are designed. The type designer then needs intent. The rest is paths, labour and metadata.

PART 61. Practice becomes like you get this because of that, and so forth...

PART 62. "The more you produce the cheaper it looks."

PART 63. Walking along, but more importantly, looking down while walking along. The ground that you see when you are on your way --- home (from a night out), or the other way – to work perhaps? You might be interested in letters, the things that usually [seem to] go back on themselves. You are always looking for things that remind you of them, things that change your conception of them – things that will lead to new designs, new formal solutions, or simply comforts making you feel less bad about yourself. Sometimes these things are best found by chance, or better, by detritus. Detritus with limits. These things you might want to collect, carry around with you; in your phone's memory. Tech-Contractions, as disguised.

PART 64. Rotten rubber band. Holding streams of economy reports. While societies find it harder to vote; their decisions might only describe general disillusionment. Turnout worsens. When turnout improves it only reveals further divisions.

PART 65. Platform is a silly term for facilitating production.

PART 66. Spending most of my time typing in CAPTCHA codes, which is also helping i think.

PART 67. State visit on the left, line for Madame Tussauds on the right. In-between was the middle - a street performer.

PART 68. A new middle: "Technology is based on the intellect of human beings. But tools, in general, are based in the minds and intellect of animals." [STERNE]

PART 69. Oh, have you ever wondered who isn't a type-designer?

PART 70. Parents ask how school is. School is OK it seems.

PART 71. Loftiness. It's a quality, a decorated-self. Pins through fluff and weave, through the cloth (M/F). Covers. What touches here. The crowd. Mixed levels of perspiration, participating in the heavy angles and irony being thrown at us from the stage. Somehow it works, somehow it doesn't. Yet on the way home I realised it was all on. The map of side-streets reflecting the construction of the songs. Like a brick next to a paper sheet. The silence of the printed word was crippling. Immutable and against forgetting. Was there a purpose in this? Not such a optimistic one. As the music saturated the room and inside me. I could simultaneously hear - on the floor below - the trebly-clinking of glass bottles. My place here was affirmed, movements like a glyphic tick.

PART 72. Imagine seeing or hearing something for the first time. oooooooohhhhhh. unnngghhhhhhhhh!

PART 73. It's not easy, with the tips of your fingers, doing that.

PART 74. At 02:33 I was looking at myself on the stainless steel bathroom cabinet, with the oily nose. Before I was the bar. An adumbrated reflection in the porcelain tiles was making what I was doing quite clear. At this moment I felt fortunate for Design and decided that through its distortions I feel my place in the world.

PART 75. Annoying, like folding fitted sheets.

PART 76. Is it principle or comfort? Structure or filament?

PART 77. The year of... the rate.

PART 78. All of my favourite bloggers are stopping with their blogs and the inevitability of it is painful to me.

PART 79. Topical subjects processed by topical designers. Tropical subjects absorbed by tropical designers.

PART 80. The devil was reflected in the back of the printing plate. On the front side the lasered image was mixed with his really gooey ink.

PART 81. Graphical identity 4 a cultural institution in crustacean.

PART 82. 'Political' designers accepting advetorial style awards from large car manufacturers.

PART 83. Gave design assignment at Reality TV.

PART 84. No record label field in iTunes, is this revealing? No real hope for organising the iTunes either.

PART 85. "Sort of like an idea for a concept."

PART 86. (Silver Hair, thinking about Wim Crouwel): a period of contradictions, what then? function, fashion or obsession: neo-appearance. he was a computer of his time, a surface of a screen, a singular trigger for the visualisation of ideas of their commissioner. was his use of colour unique? (like in the mayonnaise tube), does simplicity produce 'silence' in your work? legends of design, part of our vocabulary, our 'idealism' (one tenet of design education). can i see temptation and desire in these grids? he appears by disappearing, so we pretend to copy to hide our frustration. 1. The Debate, 2. Crouwel's Earthquake, 3. Designer as Moderator, 4. "OH WIM!", 6. Another Theory

PART 87. more like 'modes of aggression'!

PART 88. can it be a strength to make images that corrupt the messages of others?

PART 89. as a graphic designer, how can i separate my 'creativity' with my industry?

PART 90. rich people take up more room but there are lots more poor people who are subjected to the idea that they take up even more.

PART 91. * fonts in useless *

PART 92. "is that crisp vectoring or what?" - Nick Falzone (John Cusack), Pushing Tin, 1999

PART 93. "i look at the scopes and all i see is your face." - ibid.

PART 94. * 'guys complain about girls making duckfaces but they're biting their lip and squinting like they're tryna read somethin in size 3 font' *

PART 95. Michael Douglas grimace.

PART 96. the first time i discovered that you could command a font into manipulable paths was my entry into graphic design. the organisation of language is inherent in a type-font system. in many cases this idea of organisation carries with it non-linguistic desires from its designer, realised into the abstracted forms of its design. these desires would constitute a way of seeing the world and shelter particular concepts of formal and ideological organisation that are related to the designers outlook. this aspect of a type-design includes a notion of latency woven into its end product. looking at the history of the discipline of type design – which, in a practical sense, is a story of technology, craft and artistic practise – we might then be able to disentangle multifarious approaches to notions of property, power, ownership, organisation and even dissent in a type-design. afterall the [latin] alphabet in itself is a technology begun as an object of accounting. applied in recordings of amounts, of money, of trade, of ownership and of political power: things often out of the control of an ordinary citizen.

PART 97. handwriting fonts are the most deceitful and therefore the most amazing. a handwriting font has more in common with ideas and actions associated with technology-aided copying and forgery, rather than being an honest representation of hand-writing itself. yet this copying or forgery it isn’t even convincing. this is a conceit that is built into many designed objects, with the goal being the production of an emotional relation through senses of familiary, mimicry and organisation. a handwritng font, instead, reveals clumsy distortions and insentient repetitions through its format. for a recent project i digitised the handwriting of a celebrity and philanthropist, at the end of the process i discovered that she wanted to find out what her handwriting revealed about her. i ended up saying "well, nothing".

PART 98. perhaps there is no form of communication that can adequately or truly describe our thoughts. ah well: * 'guys complain about girls making duckfaces but they're biting their lip and squinting like they're tryna read somethin in size 3 font' *

PART 99. *Latent Stare* - Technical Images for Social Engineering.

PART 100. keep it 100.

PART 101. at the design conference, where social policing takes on new forms. splatterings of 'Margiela' in front rows of the audience. their cotton crosses projecting back, limiting questions from the audience.

PART 102. in the train on the way back from the conference where i was confronted, once again, by the radical publishing practices of the 1960s conceptual artist guys. while smart designers from today have taken cues from their systems of infiltration and consistent inclusion of each others work in the publications of which they were often on the editorial board. i can understand how people can be cynical about publishing, doing it takes a certain mentality.

PART 103. the only modernist house in the village cast real shadows. the youth centre down the road is also a Modernist design, but this one casts drop shadows.

PART 104. i tried to read myself to safety
but each line of text was a series of bricks (blocks)
i became lost in their qualities
therefore, my reading shifted towards a formal contract,
and wondered:
these curves aren't mine, what do I have to do with them?
the ones that aren't mine, I still operate them,
my thoughts turn to writing, which is now typing
Aaaaaaand if writing [and typing] requires fluency, what can I bring to it? (To be satisfied) [to be relied on for recognition?]
even burning something seems like an old concept, for example burning something to disk
the dude across from me is looking at a razor
in a space where matter doesn't matter
and space is more like work flows
which is not an exit:
but a meeting of writing and typing, and production.
do not prevent me from working properly and don't ask me for more, (/96with your eyes/96)
the internet tells me to liberate my desires, but, how can I do that on 5 euro an hour?
at the epi-center of the directors office today is just the usual
more pay cuts
or Less Hours
he called it 'Digitization'
"Do you know what i'd do if i had the whip hand?"
"Bring me my Chariot of Fire"

PART 105. Profanity and graphic design.

PART 106. How many times has Soulja Boy hopped out his Lamborghini?

PART 107. Am I enjoying, too much, design that is intentionally unclear?

PART 108. I hate centred type.

PART 109. Hi there, I represent a digital marketing agency and I am currently working with a great website who works in the gaming marketplace, similar to William Hill and sky Vegas. I noticed your site has published a very interesting article, The most, the least. The former, the latter., which is why I think a collaboration between us could work well. We are in the process of securing some collaborate placements for our client and we were wondering if you were interested in featuring some bespoke and tailored posts on your site. For the privilege of being featured on your site, we would be happy to offer a fee in the region of $100. Kind Regards, Max.

PART 110. Feelings might get in the way more.

PART 111. Emergency.

PART 112. Next Emergency.

PART 113. There's a discussion going on between blaaaauuuwwwghhhhh and urrrggggggggggggghh.

PART 114. People were like crystal that night. In the middle are people, and in the circumference are all the things that they liked. In the pin-point the magnetic polarities produced a great dance. Unfortunately some on the sides mis-interpreted this particular magnet, understandibly; on reflection. Eventually leading to total blackout this font got escorted outside into the soft rain, sunrise only revealed the grey blanket of the day, leaning on the window of the raindropped Uber car. My mans on the side of me, my boys, my bros.

PART 115. Another night: In a plant leaning-standing, the plant is actually leaning; in the moment I assume I lack curiosity, of course. Being in the plant seems productive, so its not that kind of plant because that's impossible. Its own object, its own subject; leaning-standing – its critical. The 'buds' of the plant gather regularly [often running THEIR hands through MY leaves] and make it home in the wee hours, more leaning and standing.

PART 116. Type design and proportions, a panopticon.

PART 117. Sometimes bureaucracy just has to wind us up, i start to love it a bit, like it's somebodys job you know.

PART 118. 50/50 split now.

PART 119. Unicode embalms language; complicating its claim being to a benevolent technology.

PART 119.2: THE REPERCUSSION: i'm a graphic designer, i embalm information in order for it to be purchasable.

PART 120: Flirting in the republic of the tragically killed idealogue, his kids are now running the place. One building has been sold off as a private residence (their father's former studio). The other buildings no longer house the conception and production of graphic design, and one can feel the stillness. When an idea is over, but is still visible, and silence only enhances it, and it gives shivers, pangs, ...

PART 121: NOTES FROM THE 2013 TYPE CONFERENCE IN AMSTERDAM: DAY 1. 14pt lo vision, DIN relies on everything WE see. conventions, something about 'vision angle'. its a mechanical way of talking about legibility, and adults ring. is normalisation cynical? legibility is more typography than type design. write a letter to god about DIN. "Diecut letters encode expert form" <-?. art/respect/epiphany. masculinity in type design in renaissance. are graphic designers not people? bold is slower reading, not the most fast yet still comprehension. pewter, engraved. humanism humanism humanism huumaaannniiiisssmm hhhhuuuuuummmaaaaaannnnnnnisssm ...

PART 122: The student was crying and I felt nothing. Not a good feeling.

PART 123: I don't like entertaining.

PART 124: This condition of uncertaintly is clearly profitable.

PART 125: The paper-maker rubbed his hands together and it sounded like paper.

PART 126: windmill/hardrive.

PART 126: Victory for humanity would be transcendence, ummmm.

PART 126: Favorite definitions of a type design/font: 1. Letters that you can’t write 2. The font is a set of code snippets, not images 3. Letters are things not pictures of things 4. A font is a global or local brand 5. A font is content strategy for a modern customer journey, it is a real consumer image 6. A font is a system of desires 7. A font is a latent transaction between everything and everyone (at anytime) 8. A product that has the responsibility of music 9. My fonts are slowly made selfies against dying 10. A font is a global comment 11. A mid life crisis priority 12. Important jobs love young men. But important jobs love precision even more, and he decided to come support her, at the site of her erasure, before he himself could be made redundant. - Cécile B. Evans (1770-25k) 13. Type design is a conflict of interests, and an interest in (resolving) conflicts 14. A measure of writing and a product of its control 15. A device for extensive writing (Frank Adebiaye) 16. Type design is behavioural economics 17. Type design is like skateboarding, there is one basic set of tools and an ifinity of tricks and styles to be applied to them

PART 126: Graphic designers working on couches man, they’re working on couches. Type designers working in bed man, they’re working in bed.

PART 127: depressed by invitations from ex-students to join Linked In...

PART 128: Ray Hudson has said "a goal is a dream with a deadline". i struggle with these kinds of sentences.

PART 129: even today the lines of text in our bodies require translation, because of fonts. because our bodies are working memory, because they are property, because they will never be the same.

PART 130: I was interested in the people that were interested in the pylons.

PART 131: 'Words are just words' he typed in the emails, the self-labeled 'Right Wing Nationalist' father and their latest excuse for irresponsible language use. A format. i found out later that the 'words' thing is a monument...

PART 132: Watched hours of 'The Wire' for a screenshot of a telephone booth with not a pictogram of a telephone drilled with holes into the side, but the word 'PHONE' instead.

PART 133: D. Aftermath

PART 134: Chad Butler.

PART 135: To what are we in service?

PART 136: LAZY PITCH

PART 137: shouldn’t graphic design be anything more than ‘happy socks’?

PART 138: its like the closer i get to being precise the more complicated the thing becomes. i’m O.K. with this now. precision is a somewhat desirable, and perhaps rightly celebrated, quality in graphic design practice. yet it is also a form of power that can shut things out rather than open them up. is precision anti-contingent? is it exclusive?

PART 139: Independence. Whatever shred of self-respect and dignity I had left in me last night was obliterated this morning when I opened my in-box. Fuck it, I am angry + sad and I’m going to admit I’m angry + sad and I’m going to be proud of it and I’m going to use it openly to my advantage. By making defeatist, self-pitying statements in public when I feel like it. Distorting reality to proportions beyond reasonable *human* logic. By not being warm, but being either cold or fire. Leaving always when I feel IT coming on. Not scared to hurt myself. Always choose flesh over stone. Wait. Is there a good god who is just waiting for us to die? What are we on earth but in the company of fonts. Can you make me more? What are you holding out for?

PART 140: do i s(w)ay?

PART 141: Ah yeah your lines are so fun and they dope too, its just me and you, in the blue, do what it do.

PART 142: it’s not the taking of drugs that i miss, it's the them taking me.

PART 143: when did u do it, and how long did it take; tell me a lie.

PART 144: jewellery day people: Hoops 4 the lady and those diamond tip needles 4 moi.

PART 145: hybrid part, you are appreciated, you are appreciated. let's go, let's go, let's go. dedicated to the front line people – you are appreciated, you are appreciated.

PART 146: fee paying students wanting to be left alone. fair enough.

PART 147: music and crime, crime and music.

PART 148: watching, seeing, my old school troll itself on social media is a thing...

PART 149: i spoke to mum last night and she told me that the demons were back. her enveloping darkness. what can you do when your demons have no form? when you cannot recognize them, and the torture? it’s an enveloping feeling that’s all. demons, darkness and torture does not listen. [she does not want to be considered a mad woman at all, by others; or to let people down – i guess this means that she is not mad at all?] must take the time to listen and to want to tell that.

PART 150: the style of the last decade could be named 'inside out'.

PART 151: discipline. desire needs, rights and choices, engine. feel me, let me. wanted be arrive at, to be inspired by in be inspired by be inspired by be in it. don't make me set the type like that, make me make it accessible, don't move me in the direction of setting the type like that, make me make it accessible, get remains, and my thoughts are, are informed by my arrrrrrmmmmmmmmsssssssssssssssssss.

PART 152: watch ants dart in-and-out of cracks in the sun-heated pavement, while enjoying the sensation and sounds of switching a cassette single from A to B side in a Sharp walkman, it was the same content on both sides, the same content on both sides. pungent teenage Boustrophedon layout.

PART 153: inter-and-trans-disciplinarity-is-neo-liberal-in-both-culture-and-practice.

PART 154: outlined fonts, stroke the path, path the stroke. tedium of tracing gone, but tracing is about tedium. tedium is ok. boo to the word tedium anymore. tracting tracing tripple six

PART 155: ignorant cruelty.

PART 156: no matter what get real.

PART 156: what do it do to designers who do it.

PART 157: institutional violence is low-key real.

PART 159: we are all telegraphists, cryptographers, gossips, secretaries; telematicians.

PART 160: looking forward to Ron Trent this weekend. (didn't disappoint)

PART 161: post weekend report: Carry the Signage through; to the ‘Fresh team’ and the Team of Spatial Awareness where they Flooded the Auditorium of an abandoned and lost school. out loud said something hubbubbb

PART 162: *It Seems Time Does Not Heal All Wounds Yet* (2MC)

PART 163: the busy artist is currently a member of 17 collectives, many of which consist of 2 or less people

PART 164: 'dealing with' / 'confronting' / 'oppressive systems' / 'warmly' / 'strongly' / 'condemn' / 'community' / 'other' / 'I'

PART 165: Joe Smooth 7", 'Promised Land' B/W 'Inside My Mind', Saint-Chinian market, 1 EURO!

PART 166: SET BUT NOT SAID

PART 167: cared about a form last night, which called me drunk in the dreams, it was magnetic and bubbly; it ossciliated generously pimp

PART 168: izza in the head, izza in de, snare, izza in a high hat flickktikkertikerer-ing

PART 169: its been weird experiencing

PART 170: 'The new job is to hitch ‘opposites’ to a central pivot. [Everyone is going to hell around here.]'

PART 171: people projecting their trauma onto objects. these designed objects then surpass their teleological function ...

PART 172: when a dominant system is replaced then the one that replaces it becomes the dominant one [x2]

PART 173: i wonder how critics, philosphers and theorists feel when people quote their texts to ensure dogmatic positions (better off dead)

PART 174: empty, sucked dry, nothing left to give: Reptilian Reasons

PART 175: Some philiosopher said "Spirits are useless because they serve no purpose beyond providing names for the systems." –– but, as practitioners of various magical and bureaucratic systems know; To name something is to gain (compelling) power over it.

PART 176: what trees do

PART 177: what trees don't

PART 178: it is the inverse of something that makes its copy conceivable

PART 179: the hegemony of mental health

PART 180: designer as snake charmer

PART 181: The Brain Of The Fruit Fly, on the radio this morning

PART 182: Nah it’s graphic-based design!

PART 183: Results describe empty region

PART 184: being sexted by the ocean, washing invisible ink ashore... tide beckoning, work reckoning, rhyme mind cloudy lazy foggy blurry lappy – help me – heirachy is not in this star map, it is glistening and blinding, a disk with which to inform and where no one direction is pre-eminent. it provides the navigation/trust one needs to get from one to another place, to relate and contextualise; so feel the swells and wait for the rising ones; drift drift in honour, don't speak just lap along. sums up the storm and whingeing gifts. angled text block, directionless. mangled relationships, subjective.