October 20, 2020
Don’t Appear On No Stamps
This isn’t my first attempt at having a personal website; it’s closer to my… fourth, I think…? And that’s not counting the various blogs I had before they were called blogs — yes, dear reader, I did post for two years on a site actually called Diaryland, because I was young and the internet was younger, and collectively none of us knew any better. (I had a .blogspot site for a handful of months after Blogger launched that, I seem to remember, but I cannot remember the name of it for the life of me. File under thank heaven for small mercies, I suspect.)
I started thinking of having a personal site way back when I was still writing on Diaryland, because it felt as if it would be something that would say to the world “I’ve arrived!” I had no real experience of the internet at the time, but it was 1999 and, let’s be honest; no-one really did, back then. More to the point, however, I had no experience about what it would take to actually build a website, and the various WYSIWYG tools that make that possible now didn’t even exist back then. (This site would not be possible without WordPress making everything easy on the back end, I have to shamefully admit.)
Nonetheless, I knew exactly what the front page of my 1999 website would look like. I could see it clearly in my mind, so clearly that, even 21 years later, it still comes to mind as if it actually existed.
At the time, single-use disposable camera were very much a thing, pre-smartphones when people still took photographs on film and had them developed; Boots, the chemist, made a disposable camera styled after the colorful plastic look of iMacs of the era, and I loved them as much as I loved my iMac. I collected them, unwittingly; I’d have multiple camera around me, unused — or, worse, used and never-developed — at all times, it seemed like, because as much as anything, I just liked the way they looked.
The front page of my 1999 website would have been two of those cameras placed on a light table to make them glow against a brilliant white background, with the text “Neville Brody was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me” in bright orange Helvetica placed over the top — a paraphrase of a certain Public Enemy lyric about Elvis Presley referencing a beloved graphic designer whose work had been often referenced during my art school days, to the point where I’d grown sick of him.
The site was never built, the front page never existed. I should probably be grateful for that, as much as I am embarrassed about that imaginary front page. Instead, though, I find myself nostalgic for something that didn’t exist, and imagining what might have been different if it had.
October 19, 2020
October 16, 2020
Givin’ It All He’s Got
Every now and then, the THR newsletter graphics feel like the bright spot of a particular week, because they’re something that I don’t have to necessarily spend a lot of time working on, or preparing for: I get my marching orders and I go do it. It’s a relief, it’s a break from the norm — and it’s something that, when I look back for these posts, I realize that I occasionally don’t even remember that some of them exist, despite timestamps showing that they do. The first graphic below? I guess I did that? Maybe?
This is an unfinished graphic for a story that ended up not coming together in time for the newsletter…
No joke; the headline rewrite on this might be my favorite pun that we’ve done in all of the newsletters to date, even though the actual story ended up not running at all…
October 15, 2020
New New New
It’ll come as little surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to… all of this that concentration has been in shockingly short supply in 2020, with seemingly every single month apparently running down the international supply that little bit more. The simple act of just getting through the day when so much is constantly happening all the time, without becoming distracted by 20 different things at any given moment, feels like an achievement in and of itself, with the end result being that every single day feels exhausting on a level that we’d previously only managed to achieve in entire weeks in the olden days.
There was a point the other day where I wondered if that was just me, and if it was more to do with my increasing age — my half century is on the horizon now, shockingly — than anything else. Maybe everyone felt like this at 46, I wondered half-heartedly, before checking the news and discovering three separate things that would have made jaws drop just five years ago, all happening at the same time and snapping me back to reality.
It strikes me that, at least twice within the last four years, there’s been a mass movement of people reassuring each other that we’re living in a New Normal that was particularly stressful — unhealthily so, in fact — and that we should be kinder to ourselves and those around us if we happen to fall short on stated goals. And, of course, the second time — when COVID hit, and we all went into a lockdown that’s still happening, despite what some might believe — came before the end of the first, meaning that we’re just living in New Normal on top of New Normal. Does that mean it’s a third New Normal, or a New Normal Squared? I’ve lost track.
All of these thoughts come up, of course, on a day when it feels as if everyone’s struggling a little bit harder than they expected to get basic tasks done, myself included. I’ve started to wonder, is there a way to do this differently?
