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Trick or Treat!

This is part of an animated station ID I did for work.  Those of you in Canada who get Space can tune in during the next few days to see what Halloween horrors happen to our floppy-eared friend on his trick-or-treating excursion (the rest of you will have to use your imaginations).

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You Could Win a Rabbit

I went with Patricia to see book designer, author, and Batman aficionado Chip Kidd speak at the International Festival of Authors last night.

I had seen him speak once before at an event organized by The Beguiling, and I think he must’ve practised since then.  He was wildly entertaining the first time I saw him, but he has since mastered to perfection the art of being a cross between a campy and wry New York intellectual, and a book-designing stand-up comedian.

He’s exactly the kind of speaker I like—one who engages the audience with pure concentrated charisma, and gets you excited about design.  He clearly enjoys what he does and does it well—even his most banal-looking pieces are deceptively intelligent.  Chip answered for me one of the most important questions I had about his work, and that was that he tries to read every book that he designs the covers for, and allows his work to represent the words and themes in some way.  Friends in the publishing industry assure me that this is not always the case with designers, so it’s comforting to know that Chip is one who values meaning and context.  We are taught in design school to ask ourselves, “What are you trying to say?”, but too often we side-step around the question in order to get the job done.

He is also fearless in his dismissal of troublesome clients (we learn that it’s no accident that the two L’s in Daniel Liebskind’s name, on the architect’s new book, are stabbing him in the eyes).

I went to the lecture because I knew that I’d be treated to a witty look at the process of designing book covers for major literary clients, but having seen him before I was not expecting to come away with any real insights other than “Aren’t clients picky!? Yuk Yuk!”.

But one thing I picked up on that Chip didn’t intentionally emphasize, but he mentioned enough times (directly and indirectly) for it to impact me, was his attention to “the human element”.  I saw that his most powerful and effective pieces were those that abandoned the mechanical and the sterile in favour of things more personal and warm—designs that looked touched by human hands are infinitely more inviting and familiar than something farted out by a computer.  Instead of set type, he’ll use hand-lettering.  Instead of scanning artwork, he’ll light it and take a photograph (prime example, his book _Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz_).

I encourage anyone interested in design to hear him speak if you get the chance.

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Joining Faces

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones are featured in a New York Times article in which they explain that their love of letterforms began at an early age.

“I got the idea that somebody, somewhere, has the job of deciding what these letters look like,” Mr. Frere-Jones said. “It was like someone was designing water or designing air.”

I think most people’s passions are those that have been cultivated since childhood.  At least mine are.  I, too, at an early age was aware of type design, fascinated by the variety and shapes of letters.  But I also watched a lot of cartoons, so this could very well explain why my forays into type design evolved into something decidedly more frivolous than, say, Hoefler and Frere-Jones.

One of these days I, too, will create a serious, smartly-crafted, usable typeface.  But I cannot promise it won’t be named after bodily functions or luncheon meat.

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From the Neighbourhood

Another entry in the “people from my neighbourhood” file.  I’ve seen this delightfully greasy fellow on the Bathurst streetcar a number of times, sporting his child molester moustache and chest of wiry patches of hair.  He’s what I envision Har Mar Superstar‘s father looks like.

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Ptui!

To the guy at work who always hocks a giant spitball into the urinal before peeing: you look like a horse’s ass.

Also, stop staring at your own wang.

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Know When to Hold ‘Em

If you haven’t noticed, a giant Kenny Rogers has taken over Brett’s blog.

But he has enlisted the help of several bloggers to rid himself of the Texas Terror— we’ve piled into a submarine, and we’re goin’ in!

I play the part of the robot.  Also up for adventure are Armchair, Christie, and Chip…

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Do You Have Anything Without Spam In It?

I’ve recently been inundated with a crippling load of spam comments here on RoJo.com, so please, mind the mess.  I spend every morning cleaning out comments from such loyal readers as “horses having sex with women”, “shemale cocks”, and “panty pissing”.

And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the readership of “generic propecia” or “free hentai movies”—I surely do—but something tells me I’m being taken advantage of.

I want to believe in you, “enema fetish”, and that your intentions are pure, but I’m afraid I’ve been hurt too many times before.  So, I’m installing the new version of MT-Blacklist to hopefully deal with you once and for all, “gay cumshots” and “teen thong”!

So long, “dog rape”, I hardly knew ye.

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Cover Song

In the spirit (read: plagiarism) of Foreword and BookLust, here’s a book cover I’m lovin’… this is one that always grabs my eye when I’ve seen it.

It’s probably something I will never read, but I think it’s a flawless cover.  Just by looking at it, you can determine not only the subject matter, but the attitude and humour of it as well.  And it makes you look twice, which, in a sea of bookshelf upon bookshelf at the store, is an enviable feat.

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A Roar By Any Other Name

Every child, even those that can’t string together a full sentence know at least one thing.  Cows go moo.  Sheep go ba-a-a.  Kitties go meeeeow.

At least they do if the animals in question speak English.  Sure, a Japanese frog may _sound_ like it’s saying, “ribbit ribbit!”, but it’s actually saying, “kerokero”.  Sounds of the World’s Animals is a pretty enjoyable collection of other examples.

In some cases, animals sound very much alike around the globe.  Cats the world over say meow, miaou, myau, meo-meo, and meu.

But other times they differ wildly.  Dogs can’t seem to make up their minds, and say woof, ham ham, gav, gonggong, wanwan, haf-haf, and voff, depending on where they live.

Particularly interesting is that in almost every language except English, a rooster makes some form of “kukuriku” noise.  Where the hell did we English speakers get the “doodle” from?

Speakers of English—put your doodles away!

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The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

I saw this at the bookstore at lunch and nearly made a mess in my pants.  I have several heavy tomes of classic New Yorker cartoons, but certainly not of _every_ cartoon, and definitely none of the contemporary stuff.  As much as I dislike Bob Mankoff, I’m taking one home very soon.

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100 Years of Illustration

My prolific e-pal Paul has started another blog: 100 Years of Illustration and Design.  Looks promising, Paul!

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Hogwash #6

Hey kids, it’s that time again!  Time for more embarrassingly corny cartoons from my days as a foolish young boy… *Disclaimer:* Gagging may occur.

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Senses Working Overtime

In Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson’s travel journal through France, Barcelona, and Morocco, he stays with a family in the Alps whose dinners are like banquet feasts of cheese, crepes, fois gras, and fondue.  During the preparation of dinner, one of the family members explains, “Eating is the only experience, other than making love, that exercises all five senses.”

But, as someone who loves the smell of musty sketchbooks, woody pencils, and pungent ink, and who loves the sound of graphite tracing across a thick pad of toothy paper, and as someone who chews on pen lids and reshapes his sable brushes with his mouth, I believe that drawing is also an experience in which I benefit from all my senses.

So take that, food and sex!

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Pipelined

Evan points out that I’ve been linked in this week’s Pipeline over at Comic Book Resources.  Cool!

Hello, visitors from CBR.  The mention in the Pipeline mentions my highschool comics, but more recent things can be found in my Sketchbook Journal…

Also, Alex Turner, the director of Dead Birds links to my review of his movie on his personal site.

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Pixar and the Uncanny Valley

In addition to their focus on a well-told story over a star-studded, a-list cast, an article in the New York Times, A Part-Human, Part-Cartoon Species, illustrates why Pixar’s latest film, The Incredibles, aesthetically rises above the rest of Hollywood’s 3D animated fare.

The article discusses director Brad Bird’s dedication to refining the look and movement of the movie’s characters to be, ultimately, cartoonish in nature.  One of the reasons I don’t like Shrek is that the human characters have no, well, character to them.  They look too human, and not like cartoons at all, and so have a stiff, “dead doll” quality to them.  The same goes for the human characters in the Toy Story movies.

The moment I saw the trailer for The Incredibles, I knew that Pixar had done something that no 3D film had done yet—they had created human characters that had some style to them and that didn’t try to emulate life.  I agree with Bird in that those who think that creating something absolutely lifelike with animation are missing the point.  What’s great about the characters in The Incredibles is that they are first and foremost cartoons.  They look like they’ve jumped out of a Chuck Jones short or something Disney might have produced in the 60’s.

This uneasy feeling with characters that are “too human” is something that I think has a lot to do with a theory in robotics called the Uncanny Valley.  Basically, the theory states that people feel a certain affection and comfort towards objects that have certain anthropomorphic qualities to them.  Applied to robotics, people gradually begin to feel more comfortable when robots have a higher level of anthropomorphism, and more closely resemble people.

However, there is a dip in the curve when the robots too closely resemble people.  We feel uneasy and creeped out by robots that are too human.  But then the curve suddenly spikes back to a high level of comfort when robotics has achieved perfect mimicry of a living human.  This dip in the curve is called “the uncanny valley” and it’s where, I believe, the human characters from Shrek and Toy Story lie.

Finding the perfect balance between being human and being a cartoon has finally been realized in three-dimensional animation, and I am excited like a kid at Christmas for this movie.  Pixar + superheroes + Brad Bird = one giddy robot.

More information on the Uncanny Valley

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