Spent quite some time this week sorting brass lines in type cases and books in the library of the GAH printmaking studio. Making time for the mind to do its own background processing. Quite the week, huh.

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Get your dragons here*. I’m partial to this particular style of book illustrations. The motifs in the border, the double outlines around the ears, the highlights around neck, hooves and over all stylized representation. Even more decorative motifs on this silver engraved panel.

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More medieval goodies: the Vatican is digitizing its library: https://digi.vatlib.it/. Good resources for the calligraphic explorations I’m currently working on. Started re-reading Maerlants Wereld.

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About those silver engravings, this is where the intaglio/etching technique has it’s roots. At some point someone found out that if you rub an engraved plate like that with ink, then remove it again from the top surface, this leaves ink only in the grooves of the engraving. If you then put a piece of paper over it and press really hard, the image on the plate gets transferred to the paper.

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A beautiful web essay on easy to create newsletters and hard to build websites. Ease of use for creation, ease of discovery for consumption and straightforward payment options are all available for email, less so for websites. “Instead, I see the web as this public good that’s been hijacked by companies trying to sell us mostly heartless junk.” But it could still be done and would still be worthwhile. I.e. here’s a service that turns a folder with files into a blog: https://blot.im/. RSS could still be the browser’s built-in notification system for new content. Payments still need work.

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Why Everyone Should Write puts it so well.

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Tools for a livable future. Ways of learning/doing.

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#weeknotes 2021-01

Started following @typographica on the twitter this week. Started looking at some of the serif fonts reviewed there. Brabo looks very nice. Equity has been my workhorse serif so far. Brabo would make a good addition, a bit roomier and with more flair. Pensum is nice too, but I can’t get past that lowercase e.

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Somehow really glad about the happy ending of the Queens Gambit, which we watched with the whole family.

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More beautiful ink drawings of animals, like that bear previously. Qi Baishi apparently thought highest of his seal carving.

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Still listening to “Awakening from the meaning crisis” lectures by John Vervaeke. Periodic reminder to use huffduffer to turn youtube videos into your own curated podcast.

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“Writing” was last year’s theme. “Image” will be back in focus this year. So I’ll be listening to Drawing as a Human Practice: an interview with D.B. Dowd. Already ordered his book as well. And this one and will revisit this one, too. Oh and: “Sequentials is a hub for scholarship conveyed through comics.”

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Almost finished the Flow book. Know thyself - “Self knowledge is the process throug which one may organise conflicting options.” If you’re going to have new years resolutions, steal from the best. Have a good one.

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#weeknotes 2021-01

(to revisit and compare next year)

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Putting things in their place, cleaning up and shutting down for a couple of days.

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Finally allowed myself the time and attention to design and print another bird for the series. After an initial design I tried out twelve small variations to arrive back at mostly what I had in the first place. More refinements during creation of the color separations. All part of the process. It’s the European Stonechat.

This makes 30 birds, or 600 prints, done. Only 20/400 more to go.

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“my girlfriend talks in her sleep. i’ve noted them down for weeks, and turned her dreams into rupi kaur poems.”

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Having fun with crappy black and white polaroid shots with T’s instax camera.

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Kaatayra’s Miséria de Sabordia is a gigantic, beautiful, engrossing and touching beast of a song.

It’s the season of the best-of lists for this year. Angrymetalguy.com is where I go most often.

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Next time will be next year! See you there.

#weeknotes 2020-52

On writing week notes

Published edition twelve of #weeknotes to the bildung blog today, 20 December 2020: https://write.as/bildung/tag:weeknotes

It’s a weekend activity, usually on Sundays. My own daily notes, links saved to pocket and any other posts I wrote during the week are used for input.

• a section on music has emerged as the standard last item
• title of the post derived from some fragment of one of the links
• I don’t force myself to add context to any of the links, but will let it happen where it comes
• The image was a photograph in the earlier editions. Switched to a drawing or print after a couple of times
• A typographic convention emerged, using “–” as seperators
• I don’t have an actual reminder in a calendar or task list for writing these, already a habit by now?

In the beginning I had already written some smaller posts during the week. The week notes were a week to recap them then. Now, with fewer posts in between, the week notes are more placeholders for potential future posts. As always, whether those will get written remains to be seen.

Setting up a sandbox to play in

Such a beautiful drawing of a bear. Look at how the foilage in the background as well. So loose and exact at the same time. Pair with @A_single_bear.

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“This used to be our playground”. A beatiful call for more experiment and play on personal sites. Interesting points in the accompanying twitter thread as well.

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I actually was already doing some prep work to get blank html/css canvases in place within the Hugo static site generator I use for royscholten.nl. The post above was a good call to action to move things along: how to allow for full/raw html and include custom CSS for a single post.

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Next up a first actual experiment in which we explore CSS columns to create a medieval looking page layout, quickly running into the issue that having an image span more than one column while reflowing the text across columns in the remaining space is not yet possible. Pity, but still good fun to work on this.

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Generatief Leren: Wat Werkt en Voor Wie? (dutch)

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“Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software” at switching.software, via Laura Kalbag

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Sounds: Ad People by Melted Bodies is crazy noisy good and nsfw, probably.

Still working through all the very interesting sounds listed here: “41 albums and compilations comprising anything from psychedelic rock to free jazz, improvised music, ethnic, ambient, electronic hybrids of all sorts, both new and reissues.” Check out Moğollar, Praed Orchestra! and João Lobo.

Also, Krust – The Edge of everything. “…his love for ultra-extended intros and long silences is firmly intact.”

– #weeknotes 2020-51

Great article on the web as personal design playground: https://colly.com/articles/this-used-to-be-our-playground

One slow moving project of mine is about posting some longer-form, art-directed posts to royscholten.nl, starting with 3 “dossier” pages for each of the main areas currently listed there.

Two technical pieces I had to get in place to be able to do that:

1. Load custom css for a specific post.
2. Allow plain html in the body of a post

Load custom css for a specific post

For this I had to connect some dots across multiple pedantic comments on stackoverflow. The apparently more common usecase is to automatically include a css file that is specific to a certain type of post. I want to include a css file with a single post.

I did not bookmark or document where I found this. I think I remember making Hugo choke on not correctly commenting the url I did want to add as documentation, so I left it out.

Anyway, in the front matter of that specific post you create a customcss parameter that has the URL to the CSS file you want to include:

customcss: "/css/specific-styles-for-just-that-post.css"

And in /layouts/partials/head/extra.html add this line:

{{ with .Params.customcss }}<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ . }}" />{{ end }}

This takes care of adding the link to the stylesheet to the generated HTML of that specific post.

Allow plain html in the body of a post

Much easier. Thank you Ana Ulin for explaining and documenting how to do that.

via https://twitter.com/eaton/status/1338601760714354689, eaton points us to https://jjosephmiller.medium.com/the-rhetoric-of-content-types-c9e6994d2b01

“Separating collections of attributes from rhetorical function is every bit as important.”

Reminds me of something eaton mentioned earlier: for a given site/platform/service, there’s not one content model, but multiple in parallel.

Content model for storage

At the very least there’s the model on the level of the database: the technical content model and the finer grained data model behind that. This content model is mostly concerned with how the content is stored

Content model for communication

On top of that the content model for a specific channel, let’s say, “the site”. The content type building blocks in the database model by themselves are not flexible, rich enough to compose the necessary screens with. The content model of the site is often more expressed throug it’s design system, with page/layout types like “landing page”, “list page”, “item page”, “sub home” and the like.

These are all composit pages. Even the single item page is not built from the content item alone. Header, footer of course, but also additional navigation, and “related content” bits and bobs get added to the core content provided by the content type.

One difference between item page and the other composits is that on the single item screen, all the additional items are “pulled in” to the content item. The foundation of the page is indeed the item itself. (the URL of the page is the URL of the content item)

For the other composit pages like a typical landing page it helps to think of those as an empty canvas (header, footer will likely still be on there, I’m talking about the space between those two). For these empty canvasses, there is no one specific content item that is the boss of the page that provides base content and context. Content: there’s no single item that defines the basic set of available items to show. Context: there’s no main metadata to derive the additional “related” items from.

So given the building blocks as defined in the database content model, we run into the need to repackage the content in a content type into smaller subsets of related fields. (Drupal: view modes)

We need canvasses and flexible content chunks that can be added to those.

Content, design, system

The above still approaches the Communication Content Model from a display/design angle. Expressed in terms derived from design system language. But the communicative function of this “title+body+image+link” content component is not necessarily the same as the communication job of this other “title+body+image+link” content component. They may have an identical structure in constituting parts, but what they communicate and how may be very different.

Congrats to Sue Borchardt for becoming the first cynefin artist in residence. She asks this question which I think is an important one:

“If a space for creative experimentation existed right now in your workplace, how might today be different for you?”

This hits exactly on the reason we started tacit.studio.

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I’ve been reposting the work-so-far of my 50 birds project to my instagram account. Scheduling with Hootsuite works well. I just lined up the last ones for this week. Hope to finish at least one more this year to hit 30 completed prints, each in an edition of 20, so that’s 600 prints done. Only 400 left to go!

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On why hand drawn diagrams, as part of this thread. There will even be a conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams in 2021*.

I miss working and thinking and drawing through things with my team on my big whiteboard.

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Austin Kleon has a good post on (variations on) morning pages. Earlier this year I stopped a 100+ days streak of writing three pages long hand each morning. Going to get back to that.

"Morning Pages is another tactic for getting out of your own way"

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I write my morning pages with Eno’s “Neroli” on. Another ambient-ish album that got back into rotation is Wandelaar by Haron

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#weeknotes 2020-50

You can really see the architectural concept coming together.