Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I’ve been re-reading Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s Local recently, and oddly one of the things that’s stuck with me the most has been Brian Wood’s design and specifically the use of type. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I find images like these resonating with me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, never mind explain:
In lieu of new content – I’m trying to wrap up enough work so that I have all of July 4th to myself – here are some portraits I did about a decade ago for a friend’s book project. I hadn’t thought about these for quite some time, and then got an email the other day asking if they could be used in a reissue of said project. Nostalgia!
Purely because I’ve listened to this a lot today, now that the studio version has been released, and because it – if anything – adds to the melancholy of the live versions leaked online earlier:
It’s still just lovely, isn’t it?
But comic book fans need to feel perpetually beleaguered and disenfranchised, marginalized by phantom elites who want to confiscate their hard-won pleasures. And this resentment — which I have a feeling I’m provoking more of here — finds its way into the stories themselves, expressed either as glowering self-pity or bullying machismo. There are exceptions: Mark Ruffalo’s soulful Hulk (though not Eric Bana’s or Edward Norton’s); most of the X-Men. But even that crew of mutant misfits turned protectors of humanity exists in a circumscribed imaginative space.
That’s from the New York Times’ discussion between movie critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis about superhero movies and comic book culture. There’s lots of sweeping statements in there, but this one stuck with me as being close to the truth.
You’re thinking “Is this the first day Graeme has missed a 366 Songs entry in awhile? He was doing so well!” To which I, sadly, have to reply “Yes, it is, and yes, I was.” What can I say? Time was not on my side today, despite what Mick Jagger might have you believe; it’s the kind of day when I just want to sit down and let my brain unfurl for a few hours. Stuff tomorrow, really.
(* If you’re Dylan Meconis, you’re possibly also thinking “If you don’t come into Periscope tomorrow, I will hunt you down and kill you with my eyes.” I will! Honest!)
“Marvel didn’t pay Kirby for The Avengers idea?” I find myself saying. “The idea that a bunch of pre-existing work-for-hire characters could continue existing together? What jerks, not predicting in 1963 that kids’ disposable pulp heroes would be worth billions of dollars half a century later and cutting their employee in for money they could have kept for themselves. The bums.”
This is one of those “What? I can’t even, I mean, whuh? Really” things. I can get not necessarily joining protests against publishers for their shabby treatment of the people who created the intellectual property that made the company literally hundreds of billions of dollars, but I really don’t get this new “You’re surprised by that? You clearly don’t know how the world works. I have disdain for you” mindset that seems to be emerging in response.
This may be the greatest opening page to a comic that I’ve seen in years, both in terms of writing and visuals. Just wonderfully ambitious and evocative; you know immediately whether you’re in or out for the whole thing from this one page alone (It’s the first page of Zaucer of Zilk by Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing, which ran in 2000AD recently and hopefully will get a collected edition sooner rather than later).
In the early days of my career, when I was young, I used to happily work long hours and regularly pull all-nighters. It was fun and I enjoyed my job. However, this set a habit in my working life that continued far longer than was healthy. Eventually I became stressed and fell ill. In the end things became so bad that I was completely unproductive.
This high-intensity working also sets a baseline for the whole industry, where it becomes the norm to work at this accelerated speed. No longer are we working long hours because we want to, but rather because there is an expectation we should. This kind of work/life balance can only end one way, in burnout. This damages us personally, our clients and the industry as a whole. It is in our own interest and those of our clients to look after our health.
This means we cannot spend our lives sitting in front of a screen. It simply isn’t healthy. Instead we need to participate in activities beyond our desks. Preferably activities that involve at least some exercise. A healthy diet wouldn’t hurt either. Getting away from the Web (and Web community) offers other benefits too. It is an opportunity for us to interact with non Web people. Whether you are helping a charity or joining a rock climbing club, the people you meet will provide a much more realistic view of how ‘normal’ people lead their lives.
This will inform our work. I often think that, as Web designers, we live in a bubble in which everybody is on twitter all day, and understands that typing a URL into Google isn’t the best way to reach a website. Not that this is all we will learn from others. We can also learn from other people’s jobs. For example, there is a lot we can learn from architects, psychologists, marketeers and countless other professions. We can learn from their processes, techniques, expertise and outlook. All of this can be applied to our own role.
Replace “Web designer” with freelancer – or creative person – of any kind, and I think this is true (From here, by Paul Boag).
