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Signage, Cedar City, 2005

Tangents, explorations, diversions

As graphic designers and visual communicators, we try to absorb as much as we can. From modern art to current typographic trends (typophile.com), from the Bauhaus to William Morris to David Carson, from the architecture and art of the Anasazi Indians (they were here first) to new media convergence and internet-based artforms of today (rhizome.org), and so much more, so much farther back in time — we need to take it all in and absorb as much of the visual and verbal culture, past and present, as we can.

Sometimes I wake from the most vivid dreams.

Intense sheets of color circling me, entangling me, and I wake and look out at the dark shadows of mountains to the east and hear the highway. The mountains, rising from 5800 feet to 10,000 feet, have become part of my world, part of my dreams. Each morning they are there, dark and abstract, and then the sun rises over them and the world is suddenly, beautifully, astonishingly real, and the darkness of the night thoughts vanishes. Sometimes I have the hardest time waking, and struggle within the dream to realize that I am in the dream. This particular night as I write, nothing could be better than this warm light on this wooden table in the dining room at 3 in the morning. Tangents, explorations, diversions. David Carson is still at it, and Tibor Kalman died a while ago, but colors lives on. At night, during the peak dark hours of the soul's midnight, we dream poetry weaved through with light and sound and bornmagazine is out there, creating new forms of narratives.

I go on.

I live at the base of mountains, at the dry dead shores of the desert, and I know in my heart this landscape is slipping away beneath us, under paved desires and the untruth of limitless horizons. Orion magazine gives me hope. Recently, Fernando Castro spoke here at the university and I sat fascinated by simple color swatches that spoke of racism, tolerance, understanding. We absorb it all.

Believe every moment is your last, or close to it. Priorities shift. A heart might open, unexpectedly, in a new place. A simple, handmade sign declaring, "Fresh Ripe Oranges," the hand-drawn beautiful black letters on the white-painted plywood, might give you pause in the blast of noonday sun as you walk along Main Street. Tangents. Explorations. Diversions.

Fluff and stuff on the wind. —3.05



Poster-covered wall at the Hatch Show Print shop in Nashville, TN, during UCDA conference


Hand-drawn signs, fading letterforms

Letterforms of every kind — I love them. From the fonts of House Industries to Hoefler and Frere-Jones' elegant rebirths to the hand-lettered sign announcing a hair-cutting business that has just opened for business three blocks away from us on Main Street. Driving around the West, you encounter the most wonderful hand-drawn letterforms on signs everywhere. "Hay for sale." "Shooting range ahead." "Cafe." So many dead or dying cafes. Half of these signs are fading and disappearing in the sun, a testimony to failed business ventures. Well, you have to sell a lot of coffee and doughnuts to tourists when you are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere (say, Angle, Utah). But I see and feel the personal attention to detail in these signs, the wonderfully considered curve of a lower-case "f," the interesting take on serifs in a font that has no name and never will. I never grow tired of seeing the hand-drawn, personal letterforms on a building or a sign. The West seems to have its fair share of these signs, baking in the everpresent sun, fading away, vanishing, their letters bleaching away like bones in the desert sand. —7.05


Detail from a poster by David Carson, for Tsunami Relief, 2005: davidcarsondesign.com

Terry Tempest Williams

The power of language — She spoke at SUU a few weeks ago, and her talk was riveting, powerful, inspiring. The power of democracy. The beauty of the natural world, and our need to protect it, always, and to take a stand on issues. Engagement. Engagement. Damn, we need more engagement. Check her website: Terry Tempest Williams. I sat transfixed, once she got rolling. One of the most powerful and engaged and genuine speakers I have ever seen. I'm reading The Open Space of Democracy, reading her distinct, true voice and feeling her genuine love of the natural world and her engagement and her sense of rage sometimes. Her words — simply put — inspire me. —5.05