Week 7: Blurt communication

Not much introduction for this one as it the product is an essay. However, it is based on spending a lot of time in the past week or so getting to understand twitter and how it can be useful, and playing the signtific game "Free Space" during the week.

The confluence of various activities I've been involved with and the conversations I had at the AAAS meeting in Chicago brought many ideas into my head all at once. One way this has manifested is the essay: "Blurts: The value of short, rapid, open communication to collective creativity"

Comments encouraged!

Week 6: Elementary exercises in type

Who'd have thought three hours per week was hard to find? I could have easily made it today except that I spent most of a day beginning to catalogue my books, courtesy of a barcode scanner I acquired during the week, and the very useful goodreads.com. If you want to know what I have on my bookshelves, feel free to take a peek.

While I was digging through my books, I came upon the most excellent The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. The book itself is beautifully designed and printed, and has more information about typography than you could absorb in a long time of study. Picking it up I recalled that it had a list of the traditional names for the different sizes within a typeface tucked into the margin of a page. I figured that I could play with them a little as an exercise and set a guide to type sizes.

Because these are older names for typefaces, I thought a fairly traditional typeface would be best, and having spent some time reading The New Yorker earlier today, decided that Caslon would suit well. I had Adobe Caslon available so used it.

I chose to set this in a 5"x3" format, with the constraint that I wanted to be able to print it on a laser printer directly onto an index card. That meant 0.5" margins, which definitely constrains some approaches to playing the text, especially with respect to a title for the card.

So that a right-handed person would hold and turn the card easily, I ran the title down the right hand side of the card. A 14-point font meant the title ran the height of the main text block, so I used that for balance.

The automatic leading set by InDesign didn't quite feel right because of the mix of ascenders and descenders so I tweaked that a little to get a good vertical sense of rhythm down the lines, although I'm not sure I have it quite right. 

Using the text figures in the left column didn't feel right with the standard settings so I needed to kern them a little tighter, or else the 10 seemed to stretch far too wide, especially in relation to the 11 below. The mix of ascenders and descenders was particularly challenging to deal with so I had to hang the occasional numeral a little higher or lower. I also played with using titling figures but they just swamped the text given that I set it all lowercase.

And so, at the end of the playing, we have a 5"x3" index card with the old-fashioned names of the font sizes. I suspect that a real typographer could do a lot better but this is all about learning!

Week 5: A numerical photographic tour of SLAC

This week's project has been in progress for a little while already but I spent a few hours playing with it this week. 

A couple of years back, an excellent photographer Satoru Yoshioka visited SLAC to take photos for his portfolio. Since then he has been named Best Science Photographer of the Year 2008 by a British photographic society, for his portfolio of work from many of the world's high-energy physics labs. But back when he took photos, I was very taken by his spare style and spent a long time looking at his photos. I noticed in a few photos something that stood out. Many of the locations and facilities at SLAC have numbers painted, engraved, or somehow imprinted on them. And that had some appeal to me that I couldn't quite explain, but I found it interesting.

And so the idea was born: I wanted to create a tour of SLAC by the numbers. I would take a set of photographs on the site of SLAC, each outdoors and containing a number, and then pin them all to a Google Maps layer so that somebody could click through in numerical order or just dash around the virtual site and see a different view of the lab.

I make no claims to being a good photographer. This is more a proof of principle project.

I haven't found all the numbers yet but have posted a bunch of them in a custom map, without any of the real bells and whistles that the Google Maps API would allow, but it's a start.

As time goes on, I'll find more numbers and add more photos, but here it is for now:

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