It’s been a long time coming, but the ISO50 Playlist Archive is finally open. There you will find all past playlists archived for your listening pleasure. Just click the “Play” button and the playlist will load into the player (top of page — RSS readers must visit site to listen). It took a lot of code wrangliing and hacking to get this to work so let me know if you encounter any issues. Enjoy!
On a side note, I’m scheduling this post to go live after I leave on vacation so hopefully everything is working when you read this. We’ve been having some issues with the site lately so if you get an error just try again a little later.
You are probably familiar with the illustration work of the exceptionally talented Kevin Dart. His most recent project is the trailer above — promoting a hypothetical film and his new book Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7. The film was a collaborative effort between Dart, animator Stepahne Coedel and composer Cyrille Marchesseau. I have a soft spot for trailers of films that don’t exist, and this one is truly amazing.
Art of the Title Sequence recently posted an in depth interview with the three creators. They walk through a lot of process and really go into the fine details of the production. Very interesting read if you enjoyed the trailer.
Joakim is back and he brought the computer vocal speak n’ say with him and I gotta say he makes it work. If this came out earlier this year I would of counted this as one of my top “Hangin’ in my room summer jams”.
Lets say David Byrne and Sun Ra had to make a soundtrack for a film featuring Jacques Cousteau and Serge Gainsbourg spending time in Detroit, MI diving in old sunken ocean liners on the bottom of Lake Erie and walking thru abandon buildings in the day and at night they live it up in Denmark’s port bars planning out the most luxurious submarine ever, thats what I see when I hear this song by Seth Troxler and Matthew Dear.
The label DFA is on a tear, I mean its like a 12″ release every week and an album every month, i’m not complaining i’m just impressed. I wasn’t too big of a fan of earlier YACHT but with this album everywhere this week and solid art direction I had to give it another chance and i’m happy I did. Think if The Slits had to adjust their sound to play a Goth bar one night, that actually sounds like something I want to hear and Yacht did that here in this song.
Metric is the girl from Broken Social Scene right? wow what a change, she’s going for YYY’s status i’m guessing, I definitely have a thing for the intro of this song, it kind of reminds me of Bloc Party.
So a couple of months ago I realized that I haven’t really been on a real vacation in my entire adult life. Sure, I went on that trip with my brother a couple years back, but there was a fair amount of business mixed in there and the rest of the time it was more about seeing and doing everything we could and less about relaxing. My neighbors got married in Tulum, Mexico a couple years ago and all of the stories and pictures they came back with made the place seem amazing. Fast forward to a couple months ago and throw pig flu into the mix and you have a cheap, awesome vacation in a tropical paradise. We’re flying into Cancun then driving down to Playa Del Carmen for the first few nights and then it’s on to Tulum. Staying at this awesome hotel called “Basico”. Looks very well designed.
In keeping with the vacation spirit I have decided not to bring my laptop or the big camera. I know I will regret this at some point, but sometimes you need a break from everything and with those two things anywhere near me I just start thinking about work. I will be bringing my little Canon Elf which can take HD video and does a surprising job at still photos for how small it is. Besides, it’s a pretty good feeling knowing I’m going to be leaving tomorrow morning for a week and everything I need will fit in a carry-on shoulder bag. I think that fact alone is enough to make up for leaving the D80 behind.
So I’ll be leaving the blog posting in Jakub and Alex’s capable hands for the next week. I will have my iPhone so I’ll probably post some stuff up to Twitter now and then. And hopefully the site itself doesn’t completely implode — if you didn’t notice today (what timing!) we had a lot of server issues which seem to have been resolved for the time being. Anyways, see you all in a week, time to disconnect from the matrix for a while…
I went to a Minimal Wave show once here in New York, probably one of the more memorable shows i’ve been too because of the dark atmosphere and hidden venue. The girl that djed played some stuff that sounded like Oppenheimer Analysis at times and I recently just found out that they originally came out on Minimal Waves label, well that was a nice coincidence, definitely a great synth pop song.
Policy of Truth.
Anyone ever see Air France LIVE? i’d like to know how they would do a show of their music live? maybe they just DJ? either way if you’re sick of MGMT and need to pull it back a couple notches than try this song No Way Down.
Simple yet to the point, Onra has a nice hold on abstract hip hop world right now with Nosaj Thing, Mux Mool, Hudson Mohawke and Samiyam.
Track Listing: Flying Lotus – Massage Situation
Wax Stag – Folk Rock (Bibio Remix)
Jorge Ben – Cinco Minutos (5 Minutos)
St. Vincent – The Strangers
Todd Rundgren – I Saw the Light
Maria Helena Toledo & Luiz Bonfá – Whistle Samba
The Long Lost – Woebegone (Flying Lotus’ Luckiest Charm)
Isan – No. 1. (Lent Et Douloureux)
Peace Orchestra – Shining
Mount Kimbie – William
Metronomy – A Thing For Me (Breakbot Remix)
Superpitcher – Sad Boys
Bullion – That’s Not Dee
Césaria Évora – Angola (Get Down Dub By Pepe Bradock)
Ecstatic Sunshine – Duck
Born Ruffians – Litle Garçon
Cass McCombs – I Went To The Hospital
George Harrison – The Light That Has Lighted the World
Johnny Cash – Country Trash
Santo & Johnny – Sleepwalk
I have 39,447 fonts on my computer. Or at least I did, up until about 30 minutes ago when I cleansed my machine of all the typographic nonsense that was polluting my list. I had thought about doing this font purge for some time, but hesitated, just in case I might one day need to design a document using the official Jedi Knight font, or something similarly ridiculous.
I remember hearing Massimo Vignelli say in the Helvetica documentary that he only uses about three typefaces. I was embarrassed at the time, thinking of my infinite list compiled over many years of dafont downloads and “BEST FONTS!!!” torrents. I guess I considered myself a typeface collector and I worked hard to “get them all”, even if I had no idea of what use some of them would ever be.
As I progressed through school, I noticed that just about everything I had ever designed used the same 5-10 typefaces. Every time I opened Illustrator I scrolled endlessly past hundreds of handwriting fonts, “distressed” fonts, you name it; always searching for the same go-to options. When I did deviate, the work usually suffered.
After much deliberation, I widdled my list down and trimmed the fat as it were. No longer will I be tempted to use weird knockoffs of Gotham or Helvetica clones. I consider myself much better off because of this — not just because it’s easier to manage a smaller list — but because the typefaces I kept are good typefaces. They’ve stood the test of time, and are the result of a tremendous amount of hard work and development by expert typographers. I know something about each one; who designed it, where it came from etc. In this way it’s a bit like my iTunes library; I probably have about 60,000 songs, but mainly listen to a few selected playlists. I have thousands of songs with a play count of “zero”. Why I keep them around I have no idea.
The book pictured above is 30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime by Imin Pao and Joshua Berger. It’s a good place to start if you are considering a font purge of your own. (Though I disagree in a few places; for example I would not include Trajan on my list). My final count is now about 50 typefaces; a much more manageable number I’d say. It’s not Massimo’s magic number — I don’t think I could survive on three alone — but scrolling through 50 sure beats scrolling through 39,447.
note: I, and and many designers I know, tend to use the terms “font” and “typeface” interchangeably. Technically this is incorrect as they are not the same thing. Both this and this article do a good job illustrating the difference. Old habits die hard for me; I didn’t actually know there was a difference until about a year ago, so it’s taken some time for me to change my language.
“We used a brand new generation of the Pace/Cameron system developed by Vince Pace and James Cameron,” says Kosinski. “I think we’re the first film to use full 35mm sensor cameras in a 3D rig.” – Joe Kosinski, Director of Tron
