Weirdness at the Scholarship Book Sale (part 2)

After perusing the modern graphic treatments of some of the books at the sale, I found a few more notable designs. Here they are.

I remember a time when I thought printing halftones in a color other than black was cool.

Catch the psychedelic color scheme on this one. Nice overprint of the orange over the purple. Solid.

Why wait to start the book on the inside when you can get to business right on the cover?

Heavens no!

Gosh I love these stylized 1960s illustrations. My mom had cookbooks with these kinds of visuals.

Weirdness at the Scholarship Booksale

I stopped by the Student Scholarship book sale over in Campbell Hall lobby the other day, just to see if there was anything cool. I got a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” and an annual of the American Haiku Society, all for $1. I was happy. Then I saw these religious books with the most amazing faux-Tschicholdesque dust jackets.

Lots of rules and sans serif type. Somebody was getting jiggy with layout and limited color. Then I saw a few more dillys. Wonder who donated these. What follows is the best of.

Typographic Topiaries

I love working with type, both digital and manual. I enjoy running it in, formatting it, kerning it, tracking it and generally shifting it around. Sure, it’s a way to make a living, but even if it weren’t, I’d still want to mess around with letterforms and chunks of text. I’d still want to marvel at the thicks and thins, the swashes, and pieces of foreign punctuation. I’m not ashamed to admit that smelling a rose and seeing some really lovely oldstyle figures are parallel experiences for me.

In running around town recently, some really big type has caught my eye. And it’s made out of… leaves. If size is your thing, you can have your solvent printer banners, your backlit lexan, your painted parking lots. But huge expanses of typographically engineered shrubbery, situated on slightly elevated patches of landscape… well, this stuff rocks really bad!

On my way to Wrightsville to get tomatoes, I saw this lovely sans serif planting at Cooper Tools. Wow, I wonder what point size that is? It’s nicely spaced, scrupulously groomed and a masterwork of pruning. And it really looks like their logo, which is pretty damned impressive. Try kerning this baby with your Black & Decker Dual Action Hedge Trimmers!

Diehl Toyota decided to go the print metaphor route, and place their typographic topiary on a pristine white rock background, and the letters are elevated slightly above a masonry retaining wall baseline. And what’s really impressive is that they even used their proprietary lettering (lower case i) in this planting. Talk about consistency in identity! I really like the way Mother Nature’s drop shadow changes trajectory as you pass. Makes me feel guilty about driving a Honda.

Suddenly remembering that Target had a living version of their logo on the approach to their store, I tore over there to get a good digital shot of it. It had been articulated in a red-leafed shrub, on a bed of attractive brown stones. But to my dismay, there must have been a shake up at Target, and this idyllic identity has gone to pot. It’s hard enough now to find an employee who doesn’t “call off” every other day, much less one who will cheerfully empty the trash bins and walk to the end of the parking lot and fine tune the beziers in the logo with a trimmer. Too bad.

Bush says he owes everything he is to Jesus, but when’s the last time you saw Jesus made out of bush? Pretty interesting. In West York there’s a church that has this planting at the edge of their parking lot. It gives interesting insight into the formation of letterforms by using groups of tiny shrubs, getting them all together in the same place, tightly controlling them with rigid constraints, lopping them off if they don’t comply, and requiring that they contribute a standard percentage of green. I could be mistaken, but I think this lights up around the holidays.

This post appeared in the original version of E.M. Summer 2007 m.m.r.

My Top Pick of Grooming Products

Hello, I’m Mel, and I’m an ablutionizer.

I’ll admit it. I am a real sucker for toiletries of all kinds. I not only adore soaps, lotions, and various preparations, but also the way they smell and way they are packaged. The purchase of a bottle of body wash has been known to jolt me out of boredom, as much as the ensuing use of it has calmed my frazzled nerves. The product itself is rarely anything really special, it’s more the ritual that accompanies the acquisition and use that matters. I know it’s pathetic, but as long as companies continue to scoop stuff out of the same old vat, give it a new scent and color, I will be there with debit card in hand.

There are, however, some products that actually transcended fetish status because they really work and I could not, would not, want to do without them. Following is my Top Pick List of grooming products. Prices are approximate.

One’n'Only Shiny Silver
Ultra Shine Spray
$5 at Sally Beauty Supply

One of my great fears is that one day they may stop making this spray. Those of us with gray/silver hair get short shrift when it comes to good products, because anyone who lets their hair go gray has given up and doesn’t care about looks, right? Wrong! This spray, applied to unconditioned, towel-dried hair gives great tangle control and a wonderful, verging- on-metallic silvery sheen that only gets better as the hair dries. The only downside is that you need to be really careful not to broadcast the spray too widely as it makes the bathroom floor really slippery.

There’s a wonderful book on the subject called “Going Gray-What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity and Everything Else That Really Matters” by Anne Kreamer.

http://goinggrayblog.com/

John Freida Frizz-Ease
Clearly Defined Style Holding Gel
$4.50 drugstores/big boxes

Again, the color issue is at play. Gray/white hair shows buildup of products because it has little or no pigment, so stripping it of residue and use of products that are very clear is really important. This gel is light, strong, clear and doesn’t smell like cheap incense. It really holds a sleek look without sporting, what my husband has always called, the helmet head. Years ago I used a product called Tenax, that made my hair so hard, you could knock on it with your knuckles and it made a sound!

Softsoap For Men
Active Moisturizing Body Wash
$3.50 drugstores/big boxes

Maybe this is the reason I get so much spam at work about penis enlargement. They know I’m using a man’s soap. Actually, the clean, invigorating smell is not the only good thing here, it’s truly a moisturizing wash. You don’t feel tight and rough after bathing, and in the harsh conditions of winter, that’s really saying something. Not sure what the secret is here, but I tried the girly-smelling ones they make, and they just did not perform the same. Don’t send a girl to do a man’s job.

Olay Body
Quench Body Lotion
$7 drugstores/big boxes

Ever since trying Oil of Olay years ago, I have generally been disappointed with all of Olay’s products. They work okay, but they have strange textures and smell funny. That’s a deal breaker for me. But Quench is truly different. It goes on non-greasy, and really, really lasts. You can feel the benefits of it the next day, which I think is truly notable in a product. One thing I wish they’d do is stop changing the various incarnations of Quench,  jumping around between chamomile, aloe, cocoa butter, firming, brightening, sunless tanner… I  get one I like then it’s given way to another skin fad. And they all smell different, some very pleasant, but others with a faint bouquet of Play Doh. Just do  the smell test before committing.

Pond’s Dry Skin Cream
$4 drugstores/big boxes

There is a dizzying array of cheaper (under $40) face creams on the market. I’ve tried a few here and there, largely based on reviews from Allure magazine, and have never come away with one that deserves to be on my list. So then I spend a few months using hand cream on my face until I try again. This time, I decided to go with a plain, old face cream that touted no firming, wrinkle-reducing, or brightening… just good old-fashioned moisture. I was pleasantly surprised with how well this product worked for me. It has a satiny, yet not slippery feel, absorbs well, and has a very clean, old-school cosmetic smell… soapy and clean. If it was good enough for most of our moms, it’s probably OK for us too.

Hawaiian Tropic Lime Coolada
After Sun Moisturizer
Don’t remember the price – cannot find it this year : (

I am actually embarrassed to admit that I like a product with such a ridiculous name. Hey, would you wear a perfume named Comic Sans? But I bought this stuff last year, during the last sad days of pool life, to preserve my pathetic tan, and grew to love the feel and smell of it. It not only reminds me of the wonderful warmth of the sun at the local pool, but moisturizes like a beast! It’s light green, which is kind of festive, and has hints of suntan lotion underneath the citrusy, coconutty notes. Great on elbows and heels at bedtime for sweet dreams of swimming.

A Cheddar Armageddon

I exercised some very poor judgement on Christmas Eve. I decided to nuke a jar of Ragu cheese sauce for some steamed broccoli and about a minute in, experienced a kind of cheddar armageddon. Cheeses, it was everywhere! Sadly, it caused the rapture of my daughter’s favorite dessert, a steamed pear pudding, which you make in the microwave right before consumption, to be scrubbed. Speaking of scrubbing, guess what I spent a good chunk of  Christmas morning doing.

A New Year (Almost), A New Start

Isn’t it amazing that no matter how far we get in this life, we still believe in the concept of a new start? I’ve cleaned up enough messes (designs, meals, relationships) to know that sometimes the best thing you can do is to salvage what’s good, mix it with some new stuff, put it in a better place and move on. That’s what I’ve done here.

I’ll  be reprising some of the entries from the old incarnation of E.M. and some other experiments I was working on, and adding new things. This isn’t so much a new year’s resolution as it is an acknowledgement that unlimited wonder lies in the minutae of everyday living.