On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

1. This is from September 2016, but I note this for curiosity's sake. I didn't know our Mint did coins for other countries, nor did I know they were in the transit token game, and that where Toronto's moving away from them, Winnipeg's moving towards them.

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/winnipegs-transit-system-revived-old-timey-token/

2. Hoping the documentary this discusses - made by the same people who did Helvetica - gets into the main cinema chains, not just the repertory movie houses.

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/surprising-history-canadas-iconic-designs/

I revisited warof1996.com earlier tonight. It said there that 108 cities were laid waste by those city-killer ships in the first movie. Here's what I scribbled down from that rotating globe/timeline:

( The list is under the cut )

I suspect that we have an incomplete list, due as much to my lack of attention as that of the designers of the site. Perhaps more mine than theirs.

Watched that movie at Landmark Orléans 10 last night. It was a good show all around. The production team stuck pretty close to the spirit and broad strokes of the novel, allowing for "show, don't tell" doctrine to work out properly. The hard science was used as written. Performances were pretty darned good.

Oh, and I want to buy schematics for the Hermes, the Ares habs, rovers, MAVs, etc.. Please?

Filmmaker Errol Morris discusses typography, trustworthiness and what the Baskerville font family has to do with both of those.

The Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty discusses the threat posed by austerity doctrines in the UK.

CTV News notes the capacity for modern cars to be brought into service of the Surveillance Society.

Stumbled across this via omniglot.com earlier tonight:

http://www.volnaiskra.com/volblog/designing-an-alien-alphabet

Interesting stuff. Figuring I'll be taking another look-see later in the weekend.

Under books, Cool Beer Labels by Belson and Speeg. I'm not a beer drinker, but I do pay attention to stuff about design.

Public consultations by the City of Ottawa re: future transit infrastructure plans. Useful for those of us watching the LRT expansion process.

Stupidity in DRM: Kitty litter boxes. Yeah, really. If you thought DRM in toner cartridges for printers and for coffee machines was a pain...?

From Daily Kos: the backstory of the SR-71. X-Men fandom will have a particular affection for this design, since for several decades one of its offshoots was the signature aircraft of that superhero team.

More on other stuff later...

It's cold outside, and the wind's adding its own "voice" to the chill. There's snow winding its way through the Ottawa-Gatineau skies, but barely enough to even notice. Not enough to add to what's on the yards and streets and fields of the cities. The clouds are dominant, but here and there, they thin out enough to remind one what's on the other side of the atmosphere from us at this time of day.

I'm fiddling with Adobe Illustrator, trying to see if I can design something vaguely resembling a police officer's badge right now. On the iTunes "radio" is CBC Radio One for Victoria. The Ottawa feed is rerunning stuff from Q, stuff that I'm not even interested in right now. The reruns on The Current - including an interview with designer Bruce Mau and a self-described cyborg out of Toronto who's got himself rigged to "hear" colour since he can't properly see it - were more interesting by far.

Design.

There's something I want to do more of this year. I'd like to earn more of my honest wages from it. Desire, though, is not resolve. Nor is hope.

And these last couple of years in particular, I've had the growing sense that if I do too much to draw attention to myself on that score, I'll be asking for unwanted and undeserved Trouble.

In answer of the anticipated question: no, I don't know what would constitute "doing too much...on that score". If I did, I could do something useful to remedy that sense of dread.

But I've got a sense that - for today - I don't have to worry about that. No evidence, just intuition. So I'll play with Adobe CS4 for today.

More later on...