Great moments in ITC Grouch: The Wonderbra Logo.

In case you missed it the first time around, Typographic Research, the class blog for my Parsons course of the same name, has now been added to the library under “links.” For a crash course on a range of typographic ideas, start here.

I am now the proud owner of a black tshirt featuring Muriel Cooper’s logo for MIT Press. Pick up your own here or here. Find out more about the logo here.

Oh, Wikipedia, you’ve outdone yourself yet again with this list of eponymous laws. Includes everything from the famous Moore’s Law to the lesser-known Goodhart’s Law, which states rather poetically: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

On a recent episode of Philosophy Bites, I heard Donna Dickenson refer to the longstanding Common Law practice that once something is removed from your body it becomes designated as “res nullius,” or “no one’s thing.” During the interview Dickenson mentioned the seminal Moore case, which challenges this idea. The case is summarized by Wikipedia as follows: “[In 1976] John Moore underwent treatment for hairy cell leukemia at the Medical Center of the University of California at Los Angeles under the supervision of Dr. Golde. Moore’s cancer was later developed into a cell line that was commercialized, and the court ruled that Moore had no right to profits from the commercialization of anything developed from his discarded body parts.”

Kevin pointed me to this collection of logos for national tourism bureaus for countries throughout the world, a relative of our state tourism bureaus, discussed in the Logo Doctors column “Road Trip.”

David Brooks’s recent NYT column “Lord of the Memes” is a bit extreme for my taste, but nevertheless it’s worth reflecting on. He writes, “Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture [one] enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider [one] uses to store and transmit it. […] [P]restige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever.” (Feeling uncomfortably meta right now as I write about writing about writing about culture….)

An oldie-but-goodie today, from Lorraine Wild’s 1996 Emigre essay “That was then and this is now: but what is next?” (aka “The Macramé of Resistance”). This list, in my view, is as inspiring now as it was then: “[T]here are other things that must be added to the education of designers to enable them to participate as something other than visual packagers […]: writing as a means of conceptual and expressive development; techniques of verbal expression, rhetoric, narrative and story-telling (the engineering underneath verbal communication); the grammar of film, particularly the syntax of editing, cross-cutting and sequencing in time to create narrative; sound; the grammar and psychology of games, which function as narrative structures as surely as story-telling or film; techniques of visual rhetoric, syntax and semantics, using examples from the high art to popular culture, including advertising; the awareness and critique of communicative systems as artificial constructs; understanding the social, cultural and functional possibilities within the realms of real and simulated space, the public and the private; collaboration; “knowing what you don’t know,” looking at models of other team-produced design (advertising, film making, architecture) that involve negotiation and accommodation, complex technical processes, and the negotiation of consensus; […] a history that expands to include a social and cultural development of media; and perhaps in contradiction to the last few points, a more serious consideration of fantasy, surrealism, game playing, pranks, simulation, bricolage and other forms of marginal subversion to map out the spaces in between, the entrepreneurial possibilities as a source of stimulation and creativity in approaching new media with a free hand.”

Artist Fritz Haeg was recently interviewed on his “Edible Estates” project for Studio 360, and I found his ideas on provocation in art very interesting. He said, “I’m ultimately just really interested in this contrast between taking something that’s really primitive and old-fashioned and almost kind of ‘grandma,’ like a vegetable garden, and making it provocative. Because I don’t think it’s interesting anymore to be provocative with violence and sex and all of those things that are very easy to turn off. We don’t respond to them any more because we see them so much, but I think there’s more subversive ways to be provocative. Today it seems like it’s with knitting and gardening and things like that. They go against our highly mediated and commercialized society.” As digital things become the norm in our culture, I wonder how this trend situates the analog things Haeg is interested in, the kitting, the vegetable gardens, etc, along a more subversive and provocative axis of activity.

Brian pointed me to a great project in LA called The Public School. The website is kind of a mix between a wiki, a blog, and a registrar’s office. Anyone can propose a class, people sign up for it, and if there’s enough interest, the class is offered. I loved their formula for assessing the cost of each class: “(Hourly Teachers Fee x (Classroom Hours + Preparation Hours)) + Materials + (Administration + Overhead).” If you’re living nearby, it might not be too late to sign up for Luck, taught by Xárene Eskandar, which starts on 13 August at 7pm. The course description reads as follows: “The true nature of luck and how to make your own. A self-help course for artists and others. Jean Cocteau: ‘Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?’”

In honor of the Olympics getting started, he’s a phenomenal archive of Otl Aicher’s work for the 1972 Munich Olympics (via Thinking for a Living).

David Byrne & Brian Eno’s new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today has a great Sagmeister-designed website that launched recently offering a free download of the single “Strange Overtones.” I’ve got it playing now, and I’m loving it (thx Kevin).