When normal people play hooky, they go to the movies or the beach or Vegas.

When nerds take the day off, they go to see this guy, and come home 8 hours later, drunk with possibility, clutching a set of books so beautiful in both thought and execution, you get a little dizzy just opening one up.

I took a ton of notes, which I’ll share with the class at a later date, but the topline is this:

Edward Tufte really is “the Leonardo da Vinci of information” (New York Times quote, not mine), and seeing him in person really is worth every penny of the not inconsiderable sum it costs to do so.

You get all of his books—he’s up to four—which are impossibly priced at the low, low figure of $40 apiece. I say “low, low” because from the little I know about book production, there’s no way you could print these conventionally for that price. (Tufte has his own publishing company, Graphics Press.) They are exquisitely produced works of art so full of wonderful information it will take me months—nay, years to absorb it all. And if you go to the lecture, he uses them as the support material! Makes those crappy PowerPoint leave-behinds looks pretty lame. Which is, of course, the entire point.

Edward Tufte is not as anti-PowerPoint as even he says he is.

The essay that put Tufte on the map with the hoi polloi (he’d been rockstar-popular with the geniuses for far longer) was, predictably enough, the one where he tells everyone’s favorite meeting crutch where to get off.

He hates PowerPoint, to be sure, but he was careful to qualify his hatred:

1. ET says that PowerPoint does not ensure sloppy thinking, it just makes it more likely
2. ET reserves the bulk of his wrath for those who misapply PowerPoint in “serious” presentations—people who are cutting off feet to fit bodies in beds, either unintentionally (well-meaning scientists who abandon their language of notation and explanation to fit PowerPoint’s low-resolution, limited character set world) or intentionally (evil people obfuscating or outright fudging data with visual double-speak, and he hates those people no matter what medium they’re using towards their nefarious ends)

If you wanna do a PowerPoint about kitties, I don’t think ET is gonna have a problem with it. PowerPoint as infotainment is relatively benign. So my work as a presentation designer is not moral compromise, provided NASA or the Federal Reserve don’t engage my services. As if.

Watching Edward Tufte is an exercise in head-exploding newness and, simultaneously, a joyous feeling of coming home.

My brain is still reeling from playing catch-up with some of the finer technical points, but the rest of my body is still vibrating with the shock of recognition. Over and over in my notes, I have little asides with stars and underscores where I realized his points were essentially the credos I’ve been living with for the past 10 years or so: “Tell the Truth” and “Form Follow Function” and, less pithily, “Figure Out How to Say It So People Will Get It, Asshole.”

It’s the content, stupid.

‘Nuff said.

Now, back to the business of delivering information in an elegant, useful fashion…

xxx
c

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the work of Edward Tufte, here are some good places to start:

• Edward Tufte’s website (link)
• Salon review of Tufte’s book, Visual Explanations (link)
• Jason Carr’s notes on a Tufte speech several years ago (link)
• A brief post by a software engineer on Tufte’s relevance in new media (link)
• Wikipedia entry (link)

Image by unertlkm via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, communicating, Design, Edward Tufte, information design, Nerd Love™.

Well, a mere five months later, we have launch!

With the able coding assistance of master (or is that ‘meister’?) programmer, Michael Grosch, my new friend from Germany (by way of Austin, TX and SXSW), I’ve finally got the communicatrix | designs site up and running.

It’s brand new, so there may be a missing link or two, but overall, I couldn’t be happier with the results. Please do drop by and take a peek…and if you would, drop back here and let me know what you think.

Next up? The communicatrix | presents site, along with a complete overhaul (or at least, a serious retooling) of my presentation design portfolio. Four days at Son of NerdFest (a.k.a. PowerPoint Live 2006) and the underwhelmed reaction of one of the rockstars in the presentation design business made it painfully clear that I’ve gotten waaaaay too lazy about keeping my output updated.

But that’s an electronic story for another day…

xxx
c

LINK: communicatrix | designs

TOPICS: Design, Shameless plugs.

Here’s one thing I learned pretty quickly in my capacity as self-taught designer: fonts suck. I mean, fonts RULE—they totally FUCKING rule—but they are delicate and unwieldy and fuck with your OS* like you wouldn’t believe.

For years—seven of ‘em, as long as I’ve been doing this design stuff—I’ve suffered in silence (HA!) as my system froze, crashed, hung or otherwise made my life a living heck because of fucking font problems. For those same years, I’ve shelled out good money for font management software to try to lessen the pain of dealing with fucking font problems. (Of course, if I moved to web-based design instead of print, 99% of my font issues would vanish instantly, but hell, I can hardly be expected to give up the glamor that is low-end, gang-run print for the pedestrian world of web publishing. No…that would be too EASY.)

This weekend, I broke down and bought FontAgent Pro. Let me repeat that, and maybe scribble it in a notebook with “Mrs.” and my name before it like a silly schoolgirl in love—FONT AGENT PRO!

As we say in SoCal, Dude…duuuuuuude!!!

It auto-activates in every goddam program, including Photoshop. It stays in the background until it’s needed, instead of launching at startup and lurking on the desktop, causing trouble. Fonts launch in MILLISECONDS, I tell you, MILLISECONDS, instead of the minutes it was starting to take in That Other Font Management Program. There’s a genius font-comparison panel built into the program’s main window where you can line ‘em up with your own sample text (fucking DUH!!!!)

And best of all, my OS has not hung, crashed or frozen once this weekend since installation. Not. Once.

So FUCK YOU, Extensis. And just so all the search engines can find it:

REASONS TO BUY FONT AGENT PRO and NOT Extensis Suitcase:

1. FontAgent Pro compared to Suitcase KICKS ASS!!!
2. Suitcase IS ass!!!
3. FontAgent Pro is the only font managment software you should buy and is worth every bit of 99 bucks and finally, because from personal experience I know that this will show up in more searches than anything else I could ever write…
4. FontAgent Pro. AND giant labia AND colorectal singalong AND Jane Kaczmerek naked.

Nyah nyah nyah.

(Sorry, Jane.)

Peace, out.

xxx
c

Above graphics use Arsis, launched with FontAgent Pro, and lovingly crafted in Photoshop, which did NOT fucking crash during use due to evil Extensis Suitcase.

*OS = “operating system”, in case you are even less geeky than me

TAGS: reviews, FontAgent Pro, Extensis Suitcase

TOPICS: Design, Rants, Shameless plugs.

Much as the Avid changed editing both for better and for much, much worse (back in my ad days, we called it "the version machine"), desktop publishing has forever altered the messy terrain that is the 99-seat theater’s lobby flyer table.

Why use a boring old photo when you can add FIVE FILTERS in Photoshop…for FREE? Why use one or two fonts to tell your story when you can get all the fonts you want on the web…for FREE?!?

In fact, why worry about creating your own image at all—just lift some JPEG off the web, rez it up and call it a day? (Okay, okay, I’ll admit it—I’ve been I’m guilty of this one.)

The striking, solo image—simple, evocative, and laid out with taste and restraint—is getting harder and harder to find. Which is why, I guess, when I do find one, it’s so striking.

The Center Theater Group’s gorgeous flyer for Electricidad reminds me of the excellent images created by legendary illustrator/designer, Paul Davis. (Good WNYC interview with Davis here, where he also laments the piss-poor state of theater graphics.) John M. Valadez did the extraordinary illustration, and the designer knew enough to let it speak for itself. Great concept, beautiful execution.

Similarly, I really liked the piece for Ken Roht’s Echo’s Hammer, now playing at the Boston Court in Pasadena. At first I was miffed when I saw the flyer on the table: Ken is a good friend of mine, and for years, has come to me when he needs a flyer designed. In fact, in addition to being directly responsible for my pursuit of acting as art, it was Ken who got me started on the road to print design, some seven-odd years ago. (And I’ve heard similar stories of artistic awakening at the hand of Ken Roht from a number of people. I guess that kind of faith is to be expected from a choreographer who hires non-singing non-dancers to populate his kick-ass musicals, but still, it never ceases to amaze me.)

The illustration for Echo’s Hammer by Iona Egg is simple and beautiful, and the piece itself was beautifully produced (crappy Internet rendering does it no justice, believe me). The nature of Ken’s shows is very much the whole being greater than the sum of its already excellent parts; what I like about the illustration the designer chose for the show is that it isn’t just a Photoshop collage of all the representative facets of the show—the art couple, the regular couple, the gigantic sculpture that’s built over the course of the play—but one, simple, elegant image.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to find that image. Really, really hard. I don’t usually throw down my own work as a good example of anything (except maybe the extraordinary open-mindedness of my clients), but I’m actually proud of my recent design for The Blacks and thought it might be interesting to examine why.

Typically, I’m under the gun with my designs for the Evidence Room. There are a few reasons for that: we usually choose our plays one at a time, which doesn’t leave much time to let the ideas bubble up slowly from my deep, messy consciousness; also, I’m spread way too thin and free work (alas) usually ends up taking a way-back seat to commercial work and paid design work.

But we knew we were doing this production of the famous Jean Genet play last year; indeed, I’d been a part of two readings of The Blacks for director Lee Richardson starting two-and-a-half years ago (if the Crohn’s wasn’t a part of my life, I might even be in this particular show, but alas, the physical demands of this kind of ensemble work are too great for me nowadays). So obviously, I’d had Blacks on the brain for awhile.

Still, the image eluded me. It’s a big, sprawling play with big, sprawling themes, including racism and class-ism, which make me distinctly uncomfortable (which, in turn, is exactly why we should be doing this play). But the tenor of the play is pretty gonzo: Jean Genet subtitled it "A Clown Show," after all, and rightly so.

I kept having this vague idea of an all-type treatment, but I wasn’t completely sure whether it was because the idea of pickanninny art (that’s "Black Americana" to you, boss) made my whitey-white skin crawl or because it was the right tool for the job. But other ideas started floating in—vaudeville and placard, specifically—and the capper came when my usual cohort in design crime at the theater also tossed out the idea of an all-type treatment. And when I mentioned the turn-of-the-century poster idea and he actually had a book in his possession with samples of just such a thing—well, it was Kismet.

Or The Blacks.

Which you should come to see, by the way. Because in the same way that true daring in design is often using less instead of more, addressing a simple, scary idea in theater can make for some gripping fucking drama.

xxx
c

THE BLACKS
opens May 21 at the Evidence Room
2220 Beverly Blvd (at Alvarado)
Los Angeles, CA 90057
Tickets on sale now: (213) 381-7118
evidenceroom.com

TOPICS: Design.

I always thought auditions were horseshit.

Let me clarify: I knew they were (a) necessary (evil), but I found it maddening the way people on both sides of the camera looked at them as a one-way proposition, with the power flowing from the producer end to the (ahem) “talent” end. Because frankly, that was horseshit. Too often—and I know this because I was guilty of it myself as a copywriter—auditions are used to figure out how a commercial works…or doesn’t. What is or isn’t funny about the script/premise/action. And sometimes—horror upon horrors—auditions are actually used as a means for old ad chums to get back in touch with me.*

And then there’s the whole pathetic actor-y side of auditions—the Just tell me what you’re looking for/I can play that—gambit, which is a bigger, steamier and infinitely more treacherous pile of horseshit. I am fairly certain there are street people wandering around Los Angeles right now who were driven over the edge trying to discern that elusive whatsis that the producer/director/whoever wanted. Which was usually just to be anywhere but in a room that smelled like feet, stuffed full of M&Ms and bad deli.

At some point in my checkered career as an actor, I began hearing people—teachers, casting directors, random passersby—pay lip service to the notion of using the audition to show what you could do rather than what they’d asked for. As someone who grew up being handsomely rewarded for coloring within the lines**, I immediately recognized this as yet another manifestation of horse pokey, and happily freed up precious gray cells for important things like remembering my own phone number and what I’d paid for a particular shirt back in 1977.

Fast forward to…this weekend. I was working on a design job for an actress putting up a one-person show. They’d delivered a full-on, finished photo for me to work with, which is usually nice—all I have to do is figure out the font thing and bing-bam-boom, we’re off to the races.

But every time I sat down to apply type, I got this funny feeling that something wasn’t right. That even though I’d been given a complete image, the show—with its suggestive title and goofy provenance (the actress is an Ivy-educated woman who’s done time on MAD TV)—needed something else. Which is, of course, craaaaaazy thinking. And yet…

I messed around. I shredded the image, blew it up so the client’s (very pretty) head was out of frame, stripped it of color and instead saturated the card with garish printer’s inks. And I sent it off, knowing full well it was nuts—I mean, the client’s HEAD was cut out of the frame…and she’s a BEAUTIFUL ACTRESS—but also that, nuts or not, it was what I had to offer the show.

There was a little, um, back & forth. Wanting to see the head. (Visionless ingrates!) Wanting her name to be legible. (Bourgeois killjoys!) I could have succumbed or I could have pitched a fit. Actually, I did both, quietly, in succession, at my desk, before making what changes I could. I sent off several of the very-next-best things that really weren’t nearly as cool, but hell, if I want to be an artist, I should get out of the postcard game.

And then, a miracle. The actress wrote back saying that I was right—that my original vision was the way to go. And thanking me for all the work.

If I could, I’d comp the job. It was gratifying having someone respect my ideas, yes, but more than that, it was such a great, simple lesson of the essential rightness in doing what it is that you do, regardless of what conventional wisdom says. I might not have gotten “my” way with the card. I definitely am not always going to book an individual job, even if I knock it out of the park doing what it is that I do. Sometimes, you’re just a cruller living in an onion bagel’s world. But I keep my integrity, my compass and my identity (hey—next time maybe they’ll want a small, sullen bitch…er…pastry).

So thank you, Kathryn Fiore, my newest teacher***. And long may you run…

xxx
c

*Note to old ad chums: if you want to say “hi”, contact me via my agent, invite me out for a
drink at Shutters on your expense account or send me a goddamn e-mail. Do not drag my hide all the
way across town on a call I’m clearly not right for so you can say, “Remember me!?! We used to work together at [former agency long since swallowed up by Publicis, Saatchi or other media megacorp]!!! Because I will be remembering your sorry ass all the way home in traffic on the 10 and then I will remember it for posterity on this blog. You have been warned…

**I worked in creative, yes, but mostly packaged goods, not the sexy stuff. You do not work your way up the ladder by writing breakthrough advertising for BirdsEye and Jell-O Gelatin.

***And I do mean newest—girlfriend was born the month before I started college. Oy, am I old…

Link to large size of the graphic here.

Link to more of my theatrical flyers here.

TOPICS: change, Daily Cosmic Shoutout, Design.