NEW! BLOG!

YES! IT'S TRUE! Sallow & Wan is dead, long live Sallow & Wan et cetera. I'm now moving this blog to http://joshuabradley.co.uk/blog. Reset your Feeds! Bleed your daughters! Mewl with the best of them.

Why the hell am I doing this?

I'll tell you (though you neither need nor want to hear it)

Wordpress is a joyous thing, and it promises me much better features (RECENT COMMENTS! TWIT FEED! etc)

Because it took 3 hours

Because I hate that fucking search bar at the top of this blogger site and I really seriously cannot be fucked to work out how to fix it when I can just leave and its gone

Because wordpress imports all my posts and I don't have to do anything boring or lose everything

Because nearly all of my favourite blogs use wordpress.

Because Jonathan (real name: Jayfresh) uses the cut down paid version (wordpress.com) like an idiot when he's supposed to be somekinda like open source technology specialist (yeah)

Because I thought it would be more fun than it was

Because I just want you to be happy.

Interrobang! (Or wtf is this black spidery stuff between the photos‽)

Published in Notion Magazine (issue 36) - an article on magazine typography... Links and Images to follow...

Forgive my ruthless universalising: when it comes to a word, you can speak it or you can write it. But every time a word is used, it is subject to an infinity of contextual and gestural modifications, qualifications, stipulations, provisos. You could call typographic language the 'body language' of the written word- but because of my horror of bodies I prefer to think of both written and spoken language in terms of accent and rhythm, whether visually or sonically perceived. But that perception is usually unconscious, automatic, instinctive. If after reading this cursory miscellany you feel even an iota better able to identify and understand the sensations you already experience in reading, I will be a little happier.

As with the skills of oratory and rhetoric, the ability to manipulate the form of the written word to influence others should be used with care. This is not a new idea: the Dadaists saw typographic tradition as another means employed by the establishment to protect their own economic and hegemonic interests. Playfully contorting and recombining elements of the ubiquitous print culture, their periodicals- for example Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Kurt Schwitter’s Merz- threw open a new realm of typographic possibility. Typefaces and sizes clashed and vibrated upon the paper, text ran in all directions, at all angles. Marcel Duchamp went so far as to abominate the ‘tyranny of the alphabet,’ claiming ‘the only thing worse than a serif typeface is a sans-serif typeface.’ Yet at the heart of their reproach was an injection of nihilistic and fearless multidirectional energy, as Tzara pontificates in the 1918 Dada Manifesto:

“Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed.”

But the magazine was always a kleptotype: fertilised willy-nilly by the distinct design conventions of books, newspapers, advertising, packaging; it gives birth to a hybrid offspring of intricate flexibility, vast possibility. Look at a magazine now and you might see the co-dependent growth of our entire typographic language: justified narrow columns with inset drop caps, text colour variations, illuminations flowing free from text areas and out into the margins. These were all methods used in the earliest substantial printed book of the west- the 1455 Gutenberg Bible- in its struggle for life and expression.

Perhaps it is fair that typography has been dubbed the most conservative of the arts- guarded as it has been by a stubborn clique of highly specialised terms, practitioners, technologies; but from another vantage it’s the most abstract, freeform branch of anatomy, of ergonomics, of optics, of neuroscience. The study of legibility- which is not the same as readability- has been the task of both scientists and typographers for centuries and probably longer.

But whilst our eyes and hands have remained the roughly same for the last 250,000 years or so, the same is not true of our habits, and especially our reading habits. So although relative proportions of height to width, of page to text, of heading to body, of margin to gutter &c. have remained to an extent stable (notwithstanding fluctuations in fashion) their application in our textual material serves an ever changing set of purposes.

Unless you’re some kind of bootless Edwardian hack, you most likely read magazines between other times- on the way somewhere, waiting for someone to shut up, as a papery respite from your glowing Mac labour-unit, whatever. So you might digest the whole thing gradually over the course of a week, in uneven doses: sometimes a minute, others an hour at a time. And typographers have their own part to play in making this as simple and pleasurable as possible: the text must both enliven the page and be readily understood- not just in terms of legibility or aesthetic fluff- but also by providing an instant visual map of the content, so that it can be read or skipped past. Pull quotes, box outs, headers and sub-headers; all are cues, instant orientation points for an article or feature, a scattered précis, allowing the reader to flick quickly through masses of information and choose unswervingly the word, sentence, paragraph or page that suits their whim.

The very best magazine typography takes all of this into account- it knows the magazine as an object, it knows how it will be browsed listlessly in bookshops, and it uses the very rhythms of apathy across its entire structure- mimics them and then takes them elsewhere. Those relaxed, anthropometric proportionalities are twisted in on themselves, given new breath; the typographic frame and the written painting work together to improve one another. I think of layout in terms of rhythm- the beat of contrast and accent- negative space and positive text image- and as with my favourite glitched out Euro-crunk or minimalist phase composition- it’s where the rhythms deviate and disintegrate gracefully that the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Check out the Non-Format team and their work on design rag Varoom, or the small and beautiful movie mag Little White Lies. Or Hello! Magazine- purely typographically it’s an ocean of bright, bland, shouty, seemingly infantile volatility- a potent smack in the eye for those who’ve spent too long cultivating unworldly perspicacity- but I defy even the most snobbish of aesthetes to flick through it without respecting it’s bull’s-eye accuracy in targeting a demographic of brain-dead illiterates. Just as the Sun is written exclusively by Oxbridge literature grads, there is often serious typographic talent behind the most apparently garish publications. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.

As we move grudgingly but seemingly inevitably further and further away from print and from paper magazines, our typographic rules are reinvented- our reading and writing is undergoing a shift of context, which brings with it a shift of content. The miniscule resolution of computer monitors, the crudity of XHTML and CSS when applied to type and layout and the limitations of font usage on the Internet seem to conspire against our ability to express through text. But as ever, it is these obstructions that will refine our senses, and gradually we will overcome them, or simply get used to them.

Gemma O'Brien

I saw this lady's work on I love Typography dot com, and I think it's great. Go and see.

Hot Dogs & Hamburgers & Kebabs

OK. So I have two favourite types of lens. I like a lens to either distance me or force me into the proximity of my subject. I don't think there's anything strange in finding the latter the more taxing occupation. London teaches us it's often easier to not interact at all than interact and risk a stabbing, a gay-up, or, worst: the unutterably, impossibly, shit-on-the-flawingly banal. And so there's a lot of enjoyment in spying down from the concrete walkways above, and capturing (literally stealing!) a moment from unknowing, unaware models. And what a set! I couldn't do this in my studio. Though the lighting would be better.


It might not be better than this, however: the kebab shop on the corner of Primrose Street and Bishopsgate, and its owner. When I asked them if I could take their photo, the guy in the background said: 'Oh no... I did this before... And the next thing I knew, I was in a sex magazine. It's disgusting. I'm not doing that again...' But the manager was happier with the prospect, and approved of this shot, which is reassuring. The burger I had was delicious, if a little over-spiced.

Orientation

This reminds me of a dream. Do you like Christopher Doyle? I like Christopher Doyle. I saw a film last night, Dumplings, which was quite fun. Certainly sumptuous. It had that disappointing quality where a director/writer seems to pick up a vivid image or allegory, does it, and then still has an hour and a half of movie to fill. C'est la.

New! Lens.

It's been a while since I posted and now everything is new and different, because that's what happens- that's how we roll. I have new plans.

I bought a new prime lens for my camera last week, and I've been using it pretty much exclusively since. 'Prime' means it is fixed at one zoom position. This makes it less flexible for general purposes, but it means that it can be built with a very large aperture (for the price).

This means two things to me:

1: Narrow depth of field! Get everything really blurry (yeah!) except a tiny bit chosen apparently at random by the autofocus machine in the camera! I actually like this.
2: Great in low light! Which my other lenses aren't.

It also looks really squat and chunky on the camera body, and I find this appealing for some reason.

Wet Letters

This happened a while ago, when there was a mystery mini-flood in the offices downstairs. It's one of my favourite inanimate things to look at right now. I love the strong, hard-edged letterforms and their swirling, organic dissolution, I love the yellowy echoing after-image. I love the contrasts and the sentiment. I love 'MANY THANKS' in a smaller face, flush left. I love that the evidence of water is so redolent of water itself- that something which evaporates without trace can be so readily traced.

Yada yada yada. Whtvr.

Scan Glitch

I made these semi-accidentally by scanning photographs for Johnny Flynn's website, and moving them around slightly. It's a technique I'd like to experiment with more deliberately- I'd like to find out what motion and timing has what visual effect, and choose images or combinations of images I think would work.

I'd like to try scanning a graphic visualisation of a number series and apply motion, or vibration according the corresponding musical scale, or tempo. A way to look at numbers and chance.

Seems I'm using this blog now as a reminder for me to think about things at some undisclosed point in the future: it's a half-baked collection of half-thoughts, half-images, half-ideas. It's a half-blog. I think I'll redesign it with that in mind. At some point.

Often I Say Offen

Is this a poem? I have no idea. I don't even know what it means. We found it when Victoria was going through the box which used to be behind Harry but is now a cupboard and contains the same stuff in a better way except for this which I don't remember writing but must have written at some point.

I'm vaguely interested in the possibilities of applying typographic metaphor to verbal communication. I might think about it in more detail one day. I might not. Thank you?

New Portfolio Site

Well. This is, I hope, the solution to an issue which has been bugging me a little. Not a lot, you understand, because I'm really not the type to care, but a little is enough to merit measured attention, I'm sure you agree. The problem was that I became uncomfortable using this blog as a portfolio, a place to show my current/recent work &c. I felt I would much rather use it as a visual journal, not a place clients and professional contacts might peruse to get a feeling for my services. I did receive certain threats, against which at the time I defended myself fiercely. Perhaps this fervent ferocity was down to a troubling inkling that my detractors were in fact correct: I had blurred my work/life boundaries to such an extent that I was able to engage in neither effectively, and had to take steps to regain control. This blog was in itself a demonstration of my descent into inhumanity, and made troubling reading for me- the odd snatch of a restrained though angry personality jammed between page after page of hark and trumpeting. Ugly as sin.

And so: http://www.joshuabradley.co.uk is once more a website, and once more it contains examples of my recent work. As with everything, it is still in Beta, and there are issues. Please let me know if you happen to have any suggestions, or if anything is broken or displays badly for you.

I worked with esteemed colleague Mr Lister (real name: "Jayfresh"), javascript extraordinaire, who is currently working with BT Osmosoft on a Thing called Tiddlywiki, an open-source JS framework for browser-edited web pages. It's really very powerful, and runs the content management for my new site. It's early days yet, but J's project, 'Tiddly Templating' strikes me as a compelling new possibility for flexible CMS creation. After my experiences with dishevelled giant Joomla (which actually makes me want to die), and Cold Fusion (ugh) this was a joy. I'm going to work with Jon on developing a non-programmer-orientated set of tools for using Tiddlywiki this way. Very exciting I'm sure you agree.

And wonderfully, this all means that I'll not be bothering you with any more irksome updates on my Absolutely Fantastic Career full of Pure Genius and Inordinate Grace™. Unless I realise there nothing else to report. I will still dazzle you with beautiful shreds from the floor, but they will no longer be sullied by careerist wittering. I promise. To think. And explain interesting things to you. And communicate faithfully. And believe in consensually appropriate truth &c.

ERGO:

My father and I, in fertile conversation, produced the above image. I hope you enjoy it.

Boom Barcelona!

So I was in Barcelona last week working with a creative director on a fairly simple portfolio site for him. I say fairly because it was actually pretty complicated as the budget & deadline (a week) were too tight to bring in other people or get any backend framework sorted out. So the whole thing had to be hard-coded(ish) page by page. And there was a lot of content- this guy was prolific. Seriously. Check out the site here.

Anyway, whilst there, I went to my first bullfight. OK, I've always been pretty ambivalent about that kind of stuff... ritualised killing seemed somehow unnecessary in the absence of ritualised life. Or somesuch. And the demographic who tend to approve of such stuff tend in my experience to be every bit as clichéd (4x4 at Waitrose, Victorian wallpaper patterned wellington boots, country retreat for the odd bank-holiday) as the bedreadlocked, badgewearing, soundbitten solipsist student classes who make up the bulk of the protest contingent.



And contingent there is- Barcelona has banned most of its bullfights: there is only one ring left. As we approach we are flooded in the roar of the protesters, a team of samba drummers punctuate the looping meter of a grand mob of dissident activists.

However, today the ring is packed out. One of the Toreadors, "El Juli" is apparently the best in the world, and we are in for a treat.



What happens next I can't really think about. The fights are pretty messy, apparently, and the bulls are, it seems, gradually stabbed to death. Amazing animals, and some amazing displays of sheer nerve. But not an awful amount of grace. However, my back and legs went tense, and remained tense throughout. I was pretty much transfixed.

I suppose my genuine feeling is really one of slight mystification at the emotion this stuff brings out in people. It seems as if the lead protesters are just riding a PR wave to pick up the casually squeamish (a lot of people) and assign to them rather more intense viewpoints. A pretty standard method for padding out a small movement. But that makes me find the whole thing a little revolting- sure the bad guys use massive media agencies to cleverly manipulate information and sway public opinion, but should you really fight fire with fire? Won't that just burn your house down? I don't know.



It is clear that these bulls are seriously healthy (at first). I was taken to see 'Our Daily Bread' recently. It is an amazing documentary about mechanised farming. I won't tell you about it because you should see it. The bulls we eat are not even bulls. The 'issue' of 500-1000 bulls a year being killed in ritual fashion seems to pale in comparison to the issue of the hundreds of millions of bulls who's entire lives are part of a production line. And that seems pale in comparison to the reality that it takes 5000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of beef (next to 1000 tons of water per ton of grain), we are currently depleting our finite subterranean aquifers at a rate of 160 billion tons per year, and the emerging middle classes in India and China (who will more than double the affluent population of the world) have beef on their shopping lists... Ho ho ho.

Vanessa Caswill

In 2007 I put this site together for a friend, the brilliant director Vanessa Caswill. I thought I would put it up here because I really like the site and her films. You can watch a couple of them on TVBomb if you have Joost. Enough shameless pluggery, sir. I bought the book, which I think is a Dutch grammar guide, at a bookshop in London a while ago. It reminds me of something. It actually has a title and stuff, but I tend to remove it, because it's unsettling.