Christopher Mackay's Blog

May seem needlessly crude, but I think it helps provide some much-needed colour in what would otherwise seem hopelessly dull:

• Believe in your fucking self
• Stay up all fucking night
• Work outside of your fucking habits
• Know when to fucking speak up
• Fucking collaborate
• Don’t fucking procrastinate
• Get over your fucking self
• Keep fucking learning
• Form follows fucking function
• A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas
• Find fucking inspiration everywhere
• Fucking network
• Educate your fucking client
• Trust your fucking gut
• Ask for fucking help
• Make it fucking sustainable
• Question fucking everything
• Have a fucking concept
• Learn to take some fucking criticism
• Make me fucking care
• Use fucking spell check
• Do your fucking research
• Sketch more fucking ideas
• The problem contains the fucking solution
• Think about all the fucking possibilities

[updated to add: if anyone knows the author, I'd love to link to them...]

Tonight, as part of The Sackville Film Society’s fall series, I watched Werner Herzog’s wonderful, quirky documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

The film was an exploration of what it means to be human, to share experiences through story-telling, through what people in the art community call mark-making.

Reaching back as far as 35,000 years, these oldest known cave paintings show that their makers had an intimate knowledge of horses, bison, rhinos, lions, bears, and more, that mocks the facile notion of the artists as primitives. Their lines are as practiced, as stylistic and as skilled as any human can make.

As someone whose personal drawing style tends towards contour drawings, I felt an immediate connection with whoever rendered these magnificent images on rock. It’s impossible to know if they were teaching aids (be successful; be safe), storytelling devices, spiritual touchstones, pure decoration, or the only thing an artist could do to express something inside them that they needed to share in order to feel human. To be human.

I also couldn’t help but wonder what these people would have thought of the technologies we have at our fingertips today; cameras, smartphones, video, communications satellites. We’re not really doing anything fundamentally different with them than they did with these paintings. We congratulate ourselves that our great-great-grandparents would be mystified by iPhones and instant, global communication, but we use them to tell the same stories. Be successful. Be safe. Learn. Share. Marvel. Wonder.

These long-dead artists can’t see us, but we can see them. They’re a little out-of-focus, but they look familiar. They’re not so different, are they?

I’ve added typekit functionality to this blog, as a test of the service.

You’re presently* (unless you’re getting this via RSS or an unsupported platform/browser combination) basking in Future PT (sadly, not Adobe’s Futura) and Adobe Garamond.

So far, so good.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: 20 signs you don’t want that web design project.

These are so funny they’re painful. Or is it the other way around?

(Via twitter.)

A great site full of useful typographical advice. And not just for lawyers.

Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: everything you ever wanted to know about the typographic anachronisms in the Indiana Jones movies…

(Via Daring Fireball, by way of Kottke.)