029: Knitting typography, rooftop parties, and bad art
Plus a reader survey! Tell me what you think!
Graphic design, visual delights, and things worth noticing, delivered twice a month.
hey!!!! hope you’re having a gr8 summer. I am currently visiting friends in Chicago.
Last month, I got to go to my first Substack Bestsellers party and met a lot of cool and smart writers. Getting invited to a ~writer event~ on a Brooklyn rooftop garden was surreal and I left feeling grateful. I also came out of it with a bunch of people’s numbers and a recreational basketball league. New York City!!!!
Check out
, , , , , and .
Some housekeeping:
I put together a quick reader survey and would love to hear your thoughts. It takes less than 5 minutes and your answers will help me make Staring at the Ceiling even better. It will also make me eternally grateful. Just click the button below to dive in.
Prompt 005:
Create a movie title card based on yourself. It could be inspired by your name, your newsletter, a favorite song or movie—anything that feels like you.
Set a timer for 20 minutes.
I created one for this newsletter and was enjoying myself so I made a few more. :)
🔤 Soft Type by Sarah Cadigan-Fried
Soft Type is a collection of typefaces designed for knitting color-work, with “charted” and “uncharted” versions for each font. The typeface follows the same principles as pixel type and includes different sizing so you can choose the right scale to fit your project size. Very helpful, very cool.
🛠️ Shortcuts dot design by Michel van Heest
Shortcuts for everything. Illustrator, Figma, AfterEffects, Miro, Wordpress, Google Chrome, Notion, Slack. Can you even believe it?
🗄️ Typographic Posters dot com slash archive by André Felipe
An expansive and thoughtful collection of 11k typographic posters from 40+ countries. This is a new favorite for inspiration.
🛠️ A guide to working with clients by HAWRAF (RIP)1
Anyone who works with clients (in a creative industry or not) should read this guide. It’s honest and practical and includes so much helpful information everyone should think about before and while taking on clients. It includes tips on pricing, cost of working, cost of living, screening clients, and scripts for what you should say in each scenario.
“Working with clients is hard, but—like any healthy relationship—it starts with a strong sense of self worth and confidence. Understand your value. That knowledge is power, so calculate it, know it, and communicate it.”
📖 Hands on research for artists, designers & educators by Miriam Rasch, Jojanneke Gijsen, Harma Staal
Design research is something I’ll admit I’m not deeply trained in, but I’m eager to learn more, especially now that I’m working more closely with web designers at my job.
Developed by the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, this is a comprehensive guide for getting started in researching for projects and includes practical help, tools, and case studies. I also found it broad enough that it can be applied to lots of disciplines beyond art and design. A great text to have for reference!
Some more things worth noticing:
🗞️ This review of Adrien Brody’s art via ArtNews
There’s already enough haters on the internet but sometimes you need to be real and dissect Adrien Brody’s pixelated Marylin Monroe2 collage art.
“If you look closely, you’ll notice that many of Brody’s prints are pixelated and low-quality. They appear to have been shoddily printed from the internet, not appropriated from his surroundings. Thematically, Brody’s works aren’t much better. The pictures of cartoon characters are about as subtle as a sledgehammer, making no attempt to add any nuance to his commentary on the American zest for carnage. One glib painting features a gleeful Scrooge McDuck toting an automatic weapon beside two speared people and a skull. For some reason, Brody has included a printed biography for Josef Ptacek, a Czech model, amid a painted brick wall with the word ‘NYC’ on it.”
🛒 The Khaite River mules at TheRealReal in Soho
I went to TheRealReal irl with my mom in June and seriously contemplated getting these. They were beautiful and comfy and in perfect condition. But I am responsible and didn’t get them because I am on wedding budget mode.
🗞️ On Chat-GPT weakening our brains by
A thoughtful take on the recent MIT study showing that heavy reliance on ChatGPT may lead to a decline in cognitive performance. With generative AI tools still in their infancy, I think it’s important to approach them prudently and use them thoughtfully, if at all. Using AI for everything feels unwise, but so does being anti-AI (even saying anti-AI sounds feels like being anti-internet or anti-book).3 And if you have written off AI altogether, respect to you, etc.
I especially liked the author’s metaphor comparing our relationship to technology and content to our diets and physical activity. Writing and thinking are cognitive muscles, and like any muscle, they weaken when over-relied on or outsourced too often.
“But a big part of the reason to write is because it is difficult. Writing well is a proxy for thinking well. Using AI to write for you is like going to the gym, but instead of lifting the weights yourself, you bring an apparatus to do the work. You may lift plenty of weight this way, but you yourself aren’t getting stronger. Over time, your muscles will atrophy. Perhaps you become great at configuring and programming the apparatus, but that is a very different skill than a squat or deadlift.”
🛒 Ant eater egg holder by Mano de Tierra
I think I need to add this to my wedding registry?
🌀 30 minutes with a stranger by The Pudding
A social experiment where strangers talk for half an hour. A sweet case for building social trust in a time when it has been eroded.
🎶 Barracuda by John Cale
I heard this song on the season 1 finale of Poker Face and haven’t stopped listening to it since. This album is A+.
Stay cool out there ☀️ Don’t forget to take the survey!
See you next time. You can expect this newsletter in your inbox on the first and third Monday of the month.
If you’d like to support the newsletter, you can buy me a coffee.
When HAWRAF (a design technology studio) went out of business, they published their process documents in this Google Drive. Docs include a business plan, discovery questionnaire, capabilities deck, etc.
I believe artists and creators reveal a lot through their references. Maybe artists are only as good as what they’re drawing from. Adrien Brody’s references are The Simpsons and Scrooge McDuck…Let’s turn off the TV and pick up a book perhaps…
This is such a big topic, I won’t do too much hand wringing about all the negative effects of AI on art and climate and the government and the ethics of it all. It simply would make this newsletter too long.
Gotta get the squad together for practice
@ the khaite heels, those can be wedding reception shoes lowkeyyy