Splat!

It’s been nearly 24-hours since I relaunched this weblog, and the feed­back has been encour­ag­ing. Thanks to every­one who emailed or left a comment.

I talked last night about my desire to use a typo­graph­i­cal grid for this design, but I also knew that this had the poten­tial to look quite anti­sep­tic and ster­ile. I thought of the com­ment that David Carson makes in the Hel­vetica film, as he points to the word “caffeinated” that has been printed out in Hel­vetica Black and hung on the wall next to other iden­ti­cal look­ing words: “This doesn’t say ‘caf­feinated’!” To avoid the trap, I needed to work in a design ele­ment that would make things a little more interesting.

A while back, I started play­ing with the drip, spray, and splat­ter images pro­vided by ka05 in his splat­pack. There are some great tuto­ri­als and exam­ples on Design Melt­down, too. You’d never know that the splat­ters you see on this site are actu­ally derived from photos of real-​life sprays. They’ve been reduced in com­plex­ity and detail, and lay­ered on top of one another, to arrive at the splats that you see.

Speak­ing of the Hel­vetica film, those kids at Exper­i­men­tal Jetset have the anti­dote to crit­i­cisms lev­eled at Hel­vetica by Carson and other Post-​Modernists who flung Hel­vetica in the trash, in favor of more expres­sive type. They’re doing fresh, inter­est­ing work with Hel­vetica, and I was shocked to see that they even used splat­ters and drips on their We are The World work:

Now, my design was com­plete before seeing the film at the IFC Center last week – and I wasn’t aware of the group’s work prior to seeing the film. Still, pretty cool stuff.

Here’s a clip from the film, in which Danny van den Dungen explains why mod­ernism still matters:

Amen.