*** From the Archives ***

This article is from November 4, 2004, and is no longer current.

Creative Fuel: Voting and Shopping

As I write this, election season should be officially over (at least I hope so) — and not soon enough for my tastes. I stopped watching cable news and called a moratorium on reading major dailies on paper or on screen. It was during the last week of campaigning that I decided who got my vote for President, and I intended to make my way early to the polls on voting day.
Determined to avoid the temptation of dipping back into the 24/7 news stream before the polls closed on the East Coast November 2nd, I sought diversions online and in bookstores. I even started my holiday shopping early — I haven’t gotten much done as I’ll explain further down the page. Not that I haven’t been trying to boost the economy by passing my credit cards around, it’s just that what I’ve been buying hasn’t made it into the gift wrap yet — and probably won’t.
If you’re tired of the election tumult but not ready to pull the plug on all things political just yet, try one of the online diversions I discovered this week. The AIGA, a professional organization for communication design, asked its members to design and contribute posters with the design theme of “Get Out the Vote.”
If you’re looking for creative fuel to help you recover from what seems like the longest election season in the history of American democracy, you’ll find it in the gallery of dozens of democratically oriented images. Since the posters focus on voting and not on a particular candidate, you can print out a few and show them to friends and family without igniting political discussion firestorms.
The AIGA posters kept me mentally engaged for a while, but even after I printed out a few posters I found myself with the urge to click a few news story links. Clearly more serious diversionary measures were called for, so I climbed in the car to visit a few of the large bookstores in the area. My intention was to find gifts for a few colleagues and friends. Good intentions, indeed.
Time to Shelve It
You can probably guess what happened. Carefully avoiding the section on politics, I wandered the stacks aimlessly and finally found myself in front of the graphic arts section. Although my last graphic arts book is a few years old, I did what I always do and checked to see if any of my books were in stock. No luck, so I guess it’s time I got busy writing another one.
Having suffered through that small blow to my ego, I was able to focus on the books they did have in stock. I piled my arms full of interesting looking titles and staggered over to the closest, cleanest table in the store’s café. Two lattes and a cookie later, I had two stacks of books on the table — the tallest stack was constructed of the books I was leaving behind because they hadn’t made the cut. They either didn’t tell me enough to make them worth the purchase for my own interests or were so deadly dull I knew the recipients wouldn’t crack the spines.
I was, as I am always, looking for books that were well written, interesting, and dealt with some aspect of the world of graphic arts. I had found two I thought some friends would enjoy and they made up the short stack. Brushing the cookie crumbs from my lap, I tucked the duo under an arm and headed for the check out area. Looking back on it now, I should have had the clerk gift wrap the books for me; it might have forestalled what happened later, but I doubt it.
Can’t Judge a Book by its Cover
My intentions were good — I said that earlier, didn’t I? Yet, when I got the books home it wasn’t long before I decided to read the back of the books again, then it was the inside book flaps. “Surely,” I thought, “my friends would want me to make sure the books won’t be a waste of their time.” I didn’t stop with the book jackets, of course. I ended up dipping into the books a few times and finally I had creased the pages so much that now I have to go shopping again. This time I might want to think about a food gift or maybe even slippers — ordered online and delivered directly to them. I figure I’m more likely to avoid co-opting the gifts if I never see them.
If you’re wondering which two books are the latest additions to my professional library (and possibly my friends’ shelves in the future), I’ll tell you. One is an extremely readable, extensively researched illustrated book on the history of typography. “Type: The Secret History of Letters” by typographer, designer and teacher Simon Loxley (I.B Taurus) is a fun read for anyone who likes the shapes of letters. It would also make a solid reference book for any game of Trivia Pursuit: the Graphic Arts Edition (No, there isn’t one, but if you’re interested in one let me know. If Frank Romano would help, I might be able to get one ready in time for next year’s holiday season).
The other book also takes history as its guiding theme — this time, the history of color. “Color: a Natural History of the Palette” (Ballantine) by Victoria Finlay, author and former arts editor, sketches out the details of how humans first created and used the colors of the rainbow (and then some). Like “Type,” this book is an engaging and fact-filled look at one of the foundational graphic arts building blocks. There’s nothing in “Color” that a graphic artist needs to know to get the job done, but a little history never hurts, especially when it’s presented in such a compelling manner.
Now, if you’ll excuse me — I’ve got some more shopping to do.
Read more by Molly Joss.
 

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