Question for you though…would either of these booklets be better for you or our clients as an ebook or a traditional perfect bind paperback?

I also love the idea of booklets that would highlight the “default” fonts that are on Windows and/or Macs. It would be such a wonderful thing to promote to my clients. Maybe then they’ll stop sending me documents that make my eyes bleed.

I’d like to thank you for this list. It’s a great resource for any level of designer. It covers many great points.

I’m sorry that you have to keep explaining to folks that it is not meant to be read verbatim to the client. Par for the course, I guess.

Awesome job!

#1) Why do you think you need a website?
Expect a few awkward moments of silence here. Hopefully their answer will NOT be “because everyone else is doing it”… and ideally it will be a lead into #2 (variation on your #67).

#2) When people visit your site what do you want THEM to do?
Join a mailing list? Buy your product? Schedule an appointment?

Having done design work before the days of the www (yeah, I’m that old) I’d argue that #2 applies to all marketing/advertising material (online or off). It’s at the heart of copywriting and ultimately it’s THE most important question of all.

Keep up the good work!

This book is a brilliant idea! I can’t wait to read it! Is there an ETA on when it would be available? (Any chance you’d post a little preview….that happened to address my current Overlock problem?)

I have exported the graphics again with the “T” set to a “t”, so that the second line is all lower case.

Thanks for all the effort you’ve put into this book. Love it!

I agree with you, partially, that games disconnect us from “the interpretive” suture as you put it. It’s no different than putting art on say, a coffee mug. The act of using the mug disconnects us from the Monet on screenprinted on the side. If we put the mug down and reconnect the “suture” as you put it, and reconsider the Monet, we are no longer using the mug, but it is still a mug: a mug with art on it. Now there might be a cross vector between my coffee and reproduction of a Braque cubist piece of a table in a cafe, but that doesn’t make my mug into a piece of art.

If we consider the brush strokes of a painting outside of the painting itself, we are admiring craftsmanship, an “art” in itself that can be quantified in any number of painting traditions. That would be the equivalent of admiring the stitches of the cotton canvas the painting is bonded too.

Playing a good game of chess on a beautifully hand-crafted chess set may be memorable: indeed it could be striking and visceral. That does not make the experience art. The experience is still a game. The game itself may consist of components borrowed from all manner of art traditions past and present, but at no point does the amalgamation of any of these things transform a game into Fine Art. Games contain art, but are not Fine Art. Games may even contain Fine Art, but nevertheless remain games. Not that games can’t challenge us in their best moments: they do. But that experience is not one of Fine Art, it is the art of gaming that reveals interesting things about us and our world.

The thing that is tough to balance is whether the new experience contains both a cognitive and physical reaction from the participant. Games have a tendency to disconnect us from the interpretive suture that we might get as we gaze and try to unravel the semiological workings of movies or a painting. If we are not actively participating in a mental discourse, then I think video games are not art. But do we not also take time to admire the brushstrokes and texture of a painting outside of any meaning it might hold? Do we not have to go through the mundane task of paying for a movie ticket and finding empty seats before the artistic interpretations can begin. Within any game, or any other medium for that matter, there can be moments of art and moments of living in the reality of the medium.

Even after playing a game though, the experience lives on in our minds. Hmmm…I am inclined to agree that video games definitely house art and, in their best moments, challenge us as all art does.

I’ve had that idea run by me a few times, but it’s not clear what kind of market their would be for a book like that. Maybe it wouldn’t be too much effort though. It would be more “booklet” than “book”. I’ll mull that over…

I got an idea for your bookmaker.

Why don’t you make a book using only the standard fonts that come with Windows 7/Microsoft Office? Yes, I use a PC.

I can imagine many people do not want to spend time searching for fonts or paying for fonts. In stead they use the standard available fonts.

You could do the same for a Mac.

The mention of board games is for comparison against the completion rate of great films. The point is that, yes, many many people don’t finish sessions of Monopoly or Risk because it’s simply a game. You wouldn’t get 1.5 hours into Citizen Kane and not finish it, generally speaking. And you certainly wouldn’t watch 1.5 hours of it on a routine basis and never get to the end. Anecdotally speaking, lots of sessions of Monopoly are abandoned and not properly finished. This is part and parcel with all kinds of games. Sometimes you have your fill of a game whether or not it’s finished, and this does not detract in any way from the pleasure or meaning derived from playing it.

Second, board games, specifically chess, came up repeatedly on Ebert’s thread. “Chess as art”, including discussion about Yoko Ono’s famous all-white chess set (which renders it unplayable) were discussed at length from many different angles from the “art” of gameplay to the art of handcrafted chess pieces.

The films you mention, which I’m not familiar with, sound more like drawn out concepts, rather than uniquely unfolding and progression of a storyline with a specific journey through standard literary devices, like plot. Nobody could tolerate an 8 hour Citizen Kane. There is a difference between a story and a concept. I touch on this at places in the comments, but conceptual art is in a different category of art than the traditional skill-based forms of art.

“If you’re questioning whether or not something is art, it’s probably art.”

Perhaps, but we can also put said art on a sliding scale, a continuum, with “Art” on one end and “not art” on the other. If discussing something automatically qualifies it as art, if that is where the conversation has gotten to culturally, I’m fine with that. The cat is out of the bag, so we can move on past that discussion and start the next one. The next conversation is about the value of concepts on a sliding scale, complete with a full dose of relativity. That’s where it gets interesting. That is also precisely the point where the hucksters, shysters, pretenders, and talentless “artists” make their grand entry.

When the doorway to the discussion is gated by objective standards of beauty, 99% of prospective entrants are rejected. The “anything is art if I say it is” crowd is really a mob of mediocrity that can’t differentiate between the Sistene Chapel and first-year art student final projects.

Of course I understand Monet, but the Impressionists were working from a classical understanding of academic drawing and traditional painting methods. Their innovation is in direct relation to their understanding of what they were “breaking” from. They truly invented a new and quantifiable, as well as teachable, method of seeing and painting. It was a real innovation. They were not “vastly different” from tradition, they were a legitimate leap from and forking of tradition. You might also consider that their great leap of evolution also came to an end. Their own branch forked out into countless splinters, with each successive splinter further distanced from the principles the Impressionists leapt from, until we arrive today at pure “concept as art” with no relation whatsoever to traditional, quantifiable skills of any sort. To make it in modern art today, you need a radical lifestyle and an idea. This makes you marketable – end of story.

The old way of thinking, as you say, never completely fell away. Today, classical ateliers are popping up all over the place, and time-honored, quantifiable, and teachable skills are on the surge. What is falling away is the absurd relativity of “anything is art”. It’s just proving itself not to be true. There is no room for another Picasso or Duchamp. It’s been done. For now, the way forward is to shun concept and embrace our legacy of great art and beauty and “leap forward” from there, once again. There isn’t anything else to leap from, which is the reason we are 1) post-post-modern and 2) mining the past to find the future.

Games will remain games, video games will remain games, and video games will never be fine art. They may contain more art than ever, going forward, no doubt. But games they will remain.

I won’t short you, either, as you did make some mention of fine art. This particular sentence jumped out at me the most: 
“Yes, you may have to run out of the museum to pay the parking meter and thus not finish taking in your Renoir.”
I won’t argue whether or not skimming a painting is “finishing” it, as much as I wouldn’t argue with someone if they said they beat a video game, but skipped all the side quests. How you choose to consume your media is yours, and there is almost never a definitive, all-encompassing correct way to do so.
However, if you leave a showcase, exhibition, etc, in the middle, you have not ‘completed that art’. Curation is an art form. If you were to walk into a gallery or museum or art school and ask whether or not curation is, in itself, art, likely the answer would not change. Very often the same schools, programs, or campus divisions that teach painting, or any other fine art medium, also teach curation. In movie terms, it is as if you are implying that a still frame and a full length movie are the same thing.

Finally, if you look at art history in the 20th century, I find that an interesting theme arises. If you’re questioning whether or not something is art, it’s probably art. If you demand something is not art, it unquestionably is art. The fact that a popular critic insists that video games aren’t art has practically doomed this medium to the fate of fine art. 
You mentioned Monet, but do you know his cultural significance? He founded an art movement called Impressionism. It was named by way of Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” by art critics. Critics used the name to mock and imply that the impressionists’ paintings couldn’t possibly be considered finished, labored works of art. They were doing something too vastly different from the historical portraits and landscapes of the old school. But, in time, it gained  public favor, and the old way of thinking fell away. 

And as the argument rages on, there are children who are consuming movies, television, video games, and fine arts. Without precedent, without distinction.

http://www.pomgraphicdesign.carbonmade.com
http://www.krop.com/pomgraphicart

Thank you!

Pom Graphic Design

Adreia

Go on, please!

Cheers,

Mark C Johnson

ps: (+) do you need multilingual support? how much language do you need?

I’m on a Mac and since the last Firefox update it doesn’t work anymore.

The command prompt says :
“No matching processes belonging to you were found”

I’m using the version 7.0.1 of Firefox.

Do you know what the new workaround for this is ?

Thanks a lot,

Cheers,

Would I look at a list? Yes.

Would I buy the book? Probably not.

Many people would benefit from a research on free fonts. To see which free fonts are most widely used, most recommended (etc.) – and putting it all together in a list, just like you did before, it would be awesome!

If you have published your work, can you please send a copy of the article to me?

Great appreciate it,
Ruby

As a starting point to typeface pairings, see [1, 2]. A good pairing would be a serif in a more calligraphic style than Helvetica. Helvetica is a modern sans-serif typeface with fewer width variation than a humanist typeface, like serif Garamond. My pe…

Thank you.

Comparing trashy games with fine art from other genres isn’t comparing like with like – perhaps the games that could compete haven’t been made yet (I wouldn’t know, I’m not a gamer) but that’s not to say they can never exist.

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