Wait… Who said beauty was in the eye of the beholder? Clearly, that person was blind. But that is not the point of what I am about to write. At least, not entirely. 

Three things that stood out to me

Signage of Brooklyn
I see letterforms everywhere I go and have inner dialogues with myself, but this time Alexander Tochilovsky did the talking as we walked through Fort Greene. From Privilege signs to neon signs and lettering to the 19th century architecture, we were decoding the city as if we were in another time period: the past. The entire experience was amazing, and the cherry on top of the cake was to discover all these buildings named after women. It was funny to imagine who they were. Roberta was probably from Italy. She put lipstick on her cheeks. Every day, she wrote a poem and enjoyed the beautiful sunsets of the Manhattan Skyline. She laughed a lot behind her dark hair. She smoked a lot. She was witty. Roberta. Witty and decadent.

Heji Shin at the Whitney Biennial
Heji Shin’s Baby photographs frankly depict the act of birth, focusing on infants’ heads as they are brought to this world, all purple and wrinkled. These pictures are breathtaking and stunning for their humanity, rawness, truth and relevance.

Baby by Heji Shin

Curiosity Cloud
In the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, I fell in love with an installation designed by Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler. As I moved through the installation, it activated the fascinating hand-fabricated replica of insects to flutter within their bulbs. This immersive, magical and a bit frenetic dialogue with nature was intensely beautiful.

Curiosity Cloud

1 thing that made sense to me

And the Pursuit of Happiness
As I was learning about American politics illustrated by Maira Kalman, she wrote words that deeply resonated with me: “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. This is what governs us.” I had the chance to have a chat with CJ Dunn on the fear of releasing a typeface before it can be flawless. The conclusion of our chat was that we go through this (endless) cycle of hope and despair as we develop this highly detailed and obsessive piece of work but ultimately, we need to remind ourselves of our objective. Does it serve its purpose? If yes, let it be and just do more work. No need to look for secret recipes. Great words. Quite frankly, so fucking hard to apply for creatives. Any secret recipes out there?


○ 1 Question

Can typography be more inclusive?
Early this week, I went to a type lecture titled the Secret Life of Fonts at the Cooper Union. Matthew Rechs was sharing his excitement about 60,000 the iPads that could soon integrate fonts for their users to play with. The conversation was around all the romantic details that only type nerds could grasp, but I wondered if type could be part of a bigger conversation. More inclusive—not just at the service of beauty, but beauty and storytelling. Beauty and civic dialogue. Beauty and… What good does it do if only 2 iPads understand the magic in a pool of 60,000?

Cooper Union