On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Artists: have any of you heard of such a thing?

So I subscribe to this mailing list called the Weekly Typographic, organized by the League of Movable Type. This week's instalment led me to an essay on highway signage as put together in the United States (and adapted to some extent in Canada as well):

https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com/the-style-guide-for-americas-highways-mutcd/?mc_cid=6948264b0b&mc_eid=b51f2e7655

Yes, friends and acquaintances, there is a style guide for these things, and it runs currently to over 900 pages in hardcopy format.

All those road trips my parents took me on over the years of grade school and high school...they had an effect on my choice of hobbies. License plates, highway signs...this is a part of why I got involved with Spacing Media, of course, as well as developing interests in graphic design along with comic books and science fiction in TV and film. I think I've discussed this before. Many of you reading this remember that. It seems a good idea to cover that ground anew for some of the people just starting to visit regularly.

Design Twitter put me onto this article about some of the perils of UX design while I wait for something else tonight to start. Seeing as it's something I'm recreationally dabbling in alongside mapmaking, comic book art, and so much else...with a vague, ill-formed hope of turning one or more of these hobbies into (part of) a viable income fit to live on...I need to pay attention.

https://uxdesign.cc/feel-like-quitting-ux-youre-not-alone-2986af25a622

Does anyone know how one might get specific single colours in their current set of coloured pencils?

On the arrests at Coutts, AB:

https://www.antihate.ca/weapons_seizure_possible_ties_militia_network_prompts_some_to_leave_coutts_blockade

On the Ottawa arts community's response to the Ottawa Siege:

https://apt613.ca/ottawa-local-arts-organizations-united-statement-on-freedom-convoy/

She's got some thoughts fit for sharing widely here:

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1417860766661693443?s=20

So this got announced today:

https://apt613.ca/animation-festival-confirms-2021-will-be-online/

I suppose I'm not surprised. Less disappointed than I might've been in years past mainly because attending this particular festival has been a "nice to have if I can afford it" thing for me. When I went to Algonquin Animation, being able to attend as a volunteer was a perk of being a student in the programme, and to some extent a career-building tool as well, or so I'd hoped. For others in my class, that worked out reasonably well.

I wish that I'd better kept in touch with the rest of my graduating class, though, but diverting into other lines of work in order to pay off the student loan helped steer me away from such activities. So keeping in touch with classmates became a luxury first. The only person I keep in touch with these days from those times is Gerry Paquette, who ran the programme in those early years. Gerry's in game design these days, but still working at Algonquin.

I hope to partake of some part of whatever this year's festival offers. I am unsure of why I want that, though. More on that another time, perhaps.

More on other topics later today...

If you're interested in designing fonts for fictional languages - and I think there's a few artists here thinking about such projects, and others of you know someone who does have that hobby/career goal - this web page might be of some interest:

https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/how-do-you-design-a-font-for-a-fictional-language/

A profile of the artist is carried by CBC News:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/old-fashioned-sign-painting-pandemic-1.5664984

Their business has its online home here:

https://www.pascalearpin.com/

A work in progress, clearly.