Prague, Czech Republic
Time does indeed slip by quickly (and yet little seems to change)… I vividly recall the Russian surprise-invasion of Czechoslovakia on this day in 1968. Living in (West) Germany at the time (the event sent shock-waves throughout Europe) I joined peaceful protest rallies in Basel (where I was attending school, just across the Swiss border)—my first active political involvement as a 14-year-old. Read the NYT invasion story here.
(location and source unknown)
Orange County, California
A backpacker named Brian Quines has started Hiker Hell, a blog that catalogues the myriad outdoor mishaps and tragedies that make it into the news. There is no shortage of material: in the past week, Hiker Hell has covered a man stuck under a boulder for 16 hours, a missing father and son in Ohio, a hiker rescue in Phoenix, a fallen rock climber in North Carolina, a crevasse fall in the Alps, a rock climber rescue in Australia, a rock-fall death on Mt. Hood, missing hikers found in Colorado, a hiker rescue in Alaska, and a “drunk bastard who got what he deserved when he jumped down a 30-foot waterfall and injured himself.” Read enough of this stuff, and you may never want to leave the couch… :-)
Visit Hiker Hell here.
Banff, Alberta
I’ve just spent the past two weeks mountaineering with friends in Canada’s fantastic Rockies. For the first week, I joined an organized outing with colleagues from the Alpine Club of Canada (11 each from the Manitoba and Thunder Bay ACC Sections) based out of the Elizabeth Parker Hut at Lake O’Hara (Yoho National Park, British Columbia) and the Abbot Hut (perched precariously on a col straddling the Alberta/B.C. border and continental divide). Highlights of my week included various alpine hikes (Mt. Yukness, Obabin Prospect, etc.), a solo ascent of Mt. Feuz, and a long and spectacular descent from Abbot Pass to the Chateau on Lake Louise via the Fuhrmann Ledges on Mt. Lefroy (first used as an alternative to the ‘Death Trap’ route by the Swiss Guides some hundred years ago, then re-established by Peter Fuhrmann several decades ago).
For the second week, I hung out in the Lake Louise and Banff area (using Bettie as a ‘base-camp’) with long-time climbing buddies Gregor Brandt, Janice Liwanag and Simon Statkewich (along with Simon’s lovely girlfriend Stéfanie Gignac). As the weather was hot(!) and sunny we opted for mostly R&R and took in our fair share of dips in chilly alpine lakes… though Simon and I did pull off a sweltering 8-pitch rock climb (5.7, 335 m) on Mother’s Day Buttress, Cascade Mountain. The week ended with a jaunt down to Kananaskis Country and some climbing at Wasootch Slabs. All in all a fantastic fortnight—refreshing for mind, body and spirit.
Images (from top): Lake O’Hara with the ACC’s Elizabeth Parker Hut (grassy clearing in foreground); Cathedral Mtn. in early morning light (taken from the hut); solo on Mt. Feuz; the Abbot Hut at 2925 meters elevation (on the narrow col between Mt. Victoria and Mt. Lefroy); looking down the Death Trap from the col with a forewarning of inclement weather; descending the rubble-strewn Fuhrmann Ledges of Mt. Lefroy high above the glaciated valley (photo by Simon, thanks); “Stella-time” at the Chateau Lake Louise (with Josee Lavoie, Gregor and Simon)—admittedly smelly and grubby after the 7-hour descent, we made a bit of a stir by climbing the stone wall to the lavish outdoor patio rather than traipsing through the 5-star hotel lobby with our packs and axes).
Lake Louise, Alberta
I met the famous mountaineering guide Peter Fuhrmann on the way up to Abbot Hut about a decade ago. He was busy painting blue-square route-markers on the few stable rocks that seemed to survive the annual avalanche-flushing of the nasty 670-meter scree gully that one has to scramble up from Lake Oesa (altitude 2265 m) leading to the col straddling the continental divide that the hut is balanced on. The following day, I saw a party gingerly traversing the lower glaciated slopes of Mount Lefroy, having ascended via the “Fuhrmann Ledges” (a century-old route established by the Swiss Guides that Peter F. re-established a half-century later). Ever since, I’ve wanted to suss out that ‘alternative’ route to Lake Louise, and last week finally presented the opportunity (the highlight of this year’s mountaineering holiday). Highly recommended (the crux is route-finding [getting onto the correct ledge is crucial] not technical, as the most exposed sections are protected with fixed hardware)! Total distance from Abbot Hut (at 2925 meters) to the Chateau is an estimated 13-14 km, with a vertical drop of 1215 meters—count on 5 to 8 hours for the descent… enjoy!
Photo/topo: Joe Mckay (who allegedly ‘improved the route’ with fixed ropes). From the hut, traverse the lower glaciated slopes of Mount Lefroy (leave early to avoid excessive rockfall; roped travel is recommended as there are crevasses) in a downward angle heading due North, descending more or less in the middle of the talus/scree slope (half-way between the cliff bands on the right and the drop-off to the Death Trap on the left—look for round orange paint marks as you pick your way through some delicate obstacles). At the North end of Lefroy, move to the lower outside edge of the large ‘balcony’ and look for one of numerous stone-men (cairns) and more orange paint daubs that mark the route to the correct ledge system to circumnavigate the steep cliffs. Follow these ledges right around Lefroy (towards the East, then heading directly South for nearly 1 km), exiting onto a (somewhat nasty) 300-meter-high scree cone which leads down to the large lateral moraines (the glaciers have been melting remarkably fast of late) pointing down toward Lake Louise. After crossing the exit stream below the Lower Victoria Glacier (we had to wade across this year, as the flow was considerable) head left across the valley just before you hit the trees to get up onto the established hiking trail returning from the Plain of Six Glaciers Tea-hut (2075 meters elevation) and leading back to Chateau Lake Louise (1710 meters elevation).
Los Angeles, California (amidst the malaise)
If you liked Married to the Sea, there’s a good chance you’ll get a kick out of Wondermark.com… (thanks Ian McCausland).
Ottawa, Canada
Serendipitously I stumbled across a wonderful online animation resource the other day… a content-rich website by the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Explore the NFB’s rich animation heritage (from 1941 to today), learn about the diverse range of production techniques used, and discover some of this country’s internationally acclaimed animators—check out some 70 animated shorts here.
Gimli, Manitoba
Ev and I have spent the past two nights taking in outdoor screenings on the beach (the big screen sits out in the water, viewers spread out on the sand) at the Gimli Film Festival— remarkable fun under our huge prairie skies. On Sunday we took in Paris, je t’aime, and last night the Jane Austen Book Club. Just a ten minute drive north of Winnipeg Beach, Gimli is home to the largest Icelandic population outside of Iceland, a fact which gives the town its nickname “The Capital of New Iceland.”
(from DT&G Magazine)
“Thoughtfully written, concisely edited, beautifully designed…”
There is more to being a designer than using tools to re-form and regurgitate our thoughts. There is more to design than balancing concept with execution. Design is intent: the process of understanding relationships and making choices based on that knowledge. We make our thoughts real when we put them into the world, and they give us back the world we live in. Worldwide Identity, Inspired Design from Forty Countries is thoughtfully written and concisely edited by Robert L. Peters, beautifully designed by his team at Circle (Winnipeg, Canada), and published by Rockport in partnership with Icograda (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations).
Rob is very concerned about how we make our thoughts real in the world—as he should be, with the depth and breadth of his background. Rob is a renaissance designer. Founder of Circle, a former president of Icograda, an internationally respected teacher, juror and speaker; mountain climber and solar home-builder; he has more than smarts and experience—he has passion and he has vision. He ventures into the world and the world sends him back with questions about our future. He entreats, “Aware of the advancing threat of monoculture, can the world’s identity designers help conserve and revive those things that make human culture distinct and unique?”
The opening pages are written with an urgent intelligence, and give an integrated overview at where we now stand as a species from a designer’s point of view. As designers in a globally connected world, it is our responsibility to contribute towards a shift in this place we find ourselves, and Rob drives that point home. As he has said, design is a verb and not a noun—a gestalt, not a thing.
As with most design books the verbal content is brief, but is well written and informative. The first few pages of preface and introduction are worth the price of admission alone. They make you think instead of react: something we all need to do more of. The visual content has a museum quality of wayfinding in 2 dimensions: each country’s opening section is displayed as a keyed demographical brief, describing the conditions through which the designs were conceived and birthed. It is not only a quick reference, it allows cultural comparisons of design produced within various countries in an accessible way, something of interest to all of us in today’s technologically connected world. The identities are collected both as encapsulations with background briefs, and fuller histories as case studies. Many are culturally flavoured, a reminder of how wonderful and necessary distinction is in the face of the “emergence of nonplaces (uniform airports, generic shopping malls), and the advancement of what some theorists are calling ‘serial monotony.’” He also points out that more than half of the world’s top economies are no longer countries, but now belong to the corporations. This explains a lot, doesn’t it?
The book opens with “Identity lies at the very core of culture, and it is the key to our understanding of self.” This is a book to remind you of that and it should be on every thinking designer’s bookshelf. Better design leads to better choices, and better choices lead to better design.
—Maggie Macnab, author of Decoding Design, principal of Macnab Design. Read more reviews of Worldwide Identity here.
Bowen Island, British Columbia
I heard from the amazing Marian today (in her disarmingly direct way) about a project no one is likely to see unless they are a subscriber to Creative Review—this issue’s accompanying “Monograph” features 14 new works of illustrated text in a series she calls “‘Love Stories,’ because each one was an illustrated text of the story of someone I love.”
Those who know and admire Marian will appreciate her quirky sense of humour and the inimitable intimacy (unapologetic, and often startling in its directness) with which her work is imbued—those who don’t will be drawn in by the originality and obsessive, painstaking nature of her exquisitely expressive typographic renderings. Thanks for sharing, Marian—as your “Love Stories” once again reveal, you continue to be a creative powerhouse, and a real Mensch! See more (and larger) works from this series on Marian’s website, here.
Image captions (from top): “Gillian Muir, my best friend (watercolour); My dentist (watercolour & ink); Rod Bantjes, my brother (acrylic paint).”
Somewhere in Iraq…
From today’s New York Times feature: “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images:” clearly, the U.S. military has been controlling the dissemination of graphic imagery of deaths and injuries resulting from the illegal, immoral, and unjustified war this “superpower” has been staging for over five years on the hapless citizens of Iraq (estimated Iraqi war casualties are between 90,000 and 700,000, depending on which source you cite). Read the story in the New York Times here, and view a slide show here.
“We don’t do body counts.”—U.S. General Tommy Franks
The human brain can and does (re)construct internal 3-dimensional worlds modeled on flat retinal images…
From Michael Bach’s ‘Optische Täuschung’ (Visual Illusions): “The upper contraption consists of the so-called “devil’s fork” (top right, also known as “blivet”), the “Penrose Frame” (centre) and the “hexnut” (3 of them at bottom left, an enlarged specimen at bottom right)—mind-boggling to envisage building such an object.”
M. C. Escher’s 1960 lithograph “Ascending and Descending” based on the Penrose stairs.
Melbourne, Australia
Spark was recently commissioned by Australia Post to develop a series of stamps utilizing landmark modernist architecture. Their successful design depicts the buildings in their purist form, expressing each as a sculptural piece and focusing on the play of light, shade, and form. Read more about the stamps here (from Icograda’s Galeria).
To learn more about Australian graphic design, you can access a PDF of the feature article “Design down under…” that I wrote for Communication Arts magazine last year here.
A clever response to the seemingly ever-more-ubiquitous surveillance camera… source: unknown Banksy.
London, U.K.
Furniture designer William Warren has come up with a practical set of solid plywood shelves that… when your time arrives, can be taken apart and reassembled as a coffin. As Warren explains: “We’re all going to die and we will need a coffin in the future, so why not make your coffin from something you’ve owned and loved for years and save your bereaved family having to choose one (and pay for one) at an already difficult time?” Why not indeed.
The Shelves for Life retail for £350. (seen in a back-issue of Wallpaper)
It’s Pi (Approximation) Day today ( 22/7 ) first celebrated 20 years ago by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Pi or π is the mathematical constant which represents the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean geometry—it’s also an irrational number (it cannot truly be expressed as a fraction, and its decimal representation never ends or repeats), as well as a transcendental number (no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers [powers, roots, sums, etc.] can ever produce it). More on Pi here or here.
Happy Pi Day :-)
(no comment necessary…)
From GOOD magazine…
A short history of black gold, from the ancient Persian army’s flaming oil-dipped arrows to today’s piercing pain at the pump… at a glance, here. (Thanks to Adrian Shum, a colleague at Circle, who has been a fan of GOOD for a while now…).
Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba
We’ve spent an interesting day of serendipitous garage-sailing along the lake… lots of stimulating objects (old tools, whatchamaycallits, etc.) that will find themselves repurposed and/or fashioned into art objects.
Stimulating images of reuse near and far… sources unknown.
The Modulor, by Le Corbusier…
Winnipeg, Canada
So… I’ve been thinking a lot about “bias” of late (“a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result”) and the not-so-nuanced role that it plays re: objectivity in this communication age… especially cognitive bias, for which Wikipedia offers an excellent resource list here.
Thanks Chris Lee (an intern at Circle last year) for the brain-image; thanks Marie-Aline Oliver (in Ottawa) for pointing me to the bias list.
Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba
Well, we finally launched my old canoe this past weekend… Ev’s been living on the shores of Lake Winnipeg for five years now (it’s the largest of Manitoba’s 100,000 lakes, the 11th-largest freshwater lake in the world, and at 23,553 km² [9,094 sq. miles] it’s larger than both Israel and Slovenia) and we’ve only been out on the open water a few times. Thanks to a special arrangement with Boundary Creek Marina, the old red Obukwin now has it’s own exclusive mooring on the island in the middle of the harbor, allowing effortless access. (For any friends in the area—if you care to use the canoe, just drop by Ev’s first for the padlock key and paddles—access to the island is across the dock-bridge you can see in the photo above).
Amazing as it may sound, our canoe seems to be the only human-powered vessel in the harbor… among the hundreds of yachts, cabin cruisers, sea-doos, and commercial fishing boats. As we sipped a cool beverage on the yacht-club deck on Sunday, I’ll admit we felt a little smug—we couldn’t help but overhear the party beside us discussing the cost of the 600 liters of fuel they had just pumped into their own cabin cruiser.
“Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll go canoeing.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) has honoured Ronald Shakespear, founder and principal of Diseño Shakespear Design Consultants in Argentina, with the 2008 SEGD Fellow Award. Ronald is an internationally acclaimed designer and the “father of environmental graphic design in Argentina.” Diseño Shakespear is an award-winning design firm specialising is the planning and design of signage, wayfinding, and identity programs for a wide variety of facility types, including the Buenos Aires Underground (Subte), Municipal Hospitals, Buenos Aires Signage System, Temaiken Zoo and many more.
SEGD Fellows are selected for promoting the highest values in environmental graphic design, and significantly contributing to the direction and growth of the field. Past SEGD Fellows include Garry Emery, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Lance Wyman, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, Deborah Sussman and Massimo Vignelli.
Congratulations, my friend!
London, U.K.
Banksy, the mysterious guerrilla artist famed for his lightning graffiti art attacks, is a 34-year-old former public schoolboy called Robin Gunningham, the British newspaper Mail on Sunday claims… read the full story here. To be determined: how this may affect the man’s remarkable work. I’ve long admired his satirical take on politics, culture, and contemporary ethics… and I’ve posted re: Banksy before, here and here.
Adrspach, Czech Republic (from the New York Times)
“While it may seem suicidal, leaping across a gaping crevasse is actually an extreme sport that is gaining in popularity. Called rock jumping, or simply ‘jumping’ by the locals, this adrenaline-charged activity is taking place in the Adrspach-Teplice Rocks, a remote nature preserve in the northeast part of the Czech Republic.”
Known for its roughly 11 square miles of phallic sandstone formations, the region has been a breeding ground for lifelong rock climbers, including Jaroslav Houser, 63, the purported conqueror of more than 1,000 sandstone spires. In their frenzy to subdue as many unclimbed tower tops as possible, seasoned climbers like Houser unwittingly gave rise to rock jumping in the Adrspach. “The objective is to get to the top of as many towers as you can,” said Vladimir Prochazka, known as June Bug, a 59-year-old climber and a collector of Czech rock climbing histories. “You try to reach the hardest summit, sometimes by jumping.”
Read the full story in today’s New York Times here and watch an action-video here. Reminds me of doing the heart-in-throat Jump Traverse above 600 feet of air on Durance, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming….
Milano, Italy
The aim of Good 50×70 is to use designers’ skills to raise awareness amongst the creative community of the power we have to be a force for good (posters can have a positive impact on thousands of lives). There are 7 briefs from 7 charities on 7 issues that affect thousands of people around the world—participants pick a topic that inspires them and submit a poster on that theme. 210 posters (30 from each brief) are selected by a jury of leading designers, are then exhibited around the world, and are published in a catalogue—more importantly they are presented to the 7 charities for their use in potential campaigns.
Larger down-loadable versions of the posters are available at the Good 50×70 site. View this year’s winning entries here, and the 2007 winning entries here. (Thanks Adrian and Mark Simpson).
Manitoba, Canada
Well, another day of tornado touch-downs in our northern province… the weather patterns have clearly changed here over the past few years, and it now feels more and more like Kansas (look out Dorothy). Local weather over the past six weeks has been rife with tornado-watch advisories (e.g. as I write this), warnings, and documented incidents… catch a drive-by video of last year’s F5 tornado at Elie, Manitoba here or here (the latter shot by Hutterites from a nearby colony).
From a remarkable French website featuring thousands of antique postcards (of every genre)… century-old photographs (from around the world), poignant illustrations (like the Raphaël Kirchner above), and delightful ephemera. View the online collection at www.cartepostale-ancienne.fr
…from Frank Chimero’s Inspirational Design Posters.
…from a beautiful Flickr collection of vintage ephemera, here.
…from The Ampersand blog (& many more there as well).
…with colorflip (beautiful in its high-chroma simplicity).
Washington, D.C.
From the “did you know” and “almost beyond belief” departments… according to the CIA’s “World Factbook,” the United States spent some $623 billion last year on its military (that’s $1.7 billion per day!) which dwarfs the military spending of all other nations combined. Yet this “leading superpower” gun-loving nation of 304 million people is already nearly $10 trillion in debt (view a debt clock here), the average U.S. citizen’s share of this debt is over $31,000 and the U.S. national debt continues to increase an average of $1.6 billion per day! Hmmm…
Image: a page from the May/June #77 issue of Adbusters
Shepard Fairey’s apt expression of the same dilemma… (read a great interview with Shepard on Fecal Face; see an archive of Shepard’s posters here).
Fiat currency as illustrated by Brian Romero.
