The library delivered to me the book Do Good Design, one of those rare titles that require actual markup. The author is David Berman, who I guess I should have known about already, but the feeling is mutual. I understand the purpose of the book: It exists to promote the concept of professional ethics in the field of graphic design. Something else it promotes is the specific set of ethics rules published by the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, which have been adapted by Icograda and Norway.

I have been a tireless proponent of Ontario’s graphic-designer registry, the only one on the continent, since before it existed. I sat in on some of the planning kaffeeklatschen at Paul Arthur’s house. Somebody told me I could get grandfathered into the system, which was a bit crazy given that I am not a designer. (It didn’t happen. I didn’t try and I’m not going to try.)

Nonetheless, I ask every graphic designer I meet in this town “Are you a registered graphic designer?” and of course they never are. I then subject them to a minute of so of hard-sell propaganda for the cause, which in one case resulted in a frankly ridiculous blog post claiming I thought the designer was no good just because he wasn’t certified. (I didn’t say that or even suggest it. But he really was no good and would probably flunk the tests.)

Hence I heartily endorse the soft theme of the book – the advancement of the cause of certification. But I think Berman overstates the case and kind of blows it. [continue with: ‘Do Good Design’ →]

Seventh in the Time’s Up, TTC series

I have a whole collection of elevator photos. They are worthy of several posts. (Did you know Floor 3 is two storeys underground?) Today I just want to tell you how to get into or out of Dundas if you’re crippled.

On a lark, I decided to follow a strictly-barrier-free path from inside the Eaton Centre to the subway train. There are automatic doors in all the right places, but there is no way to find the actual elevator unless you already know where it is. (It’s part of the parking garage. From train level, if you’re on the northbound side, you can get a feel for where it is. But it’s unmarked.) I do already know where it is, so I schlepped all the way over there. It involved using various Green P automatic doors and, at one point, jumping a curb.

Then I got to my destination.

As ever, which sign do you believe? The typeset one or the handwritten one? No contest: Like a mafioso’s goon, TTC backs up its scrawled signage with chains and a padlock.

What’s the kicker? While I was doing all this, I was listening to Ouch, the montly BBC disability talk show. Super-poignant all around, TTC.

Yes

• Todd Caldwell & Shaun Moore, co-owner of precious objets boutique Made.

• “Martin Cohen, VP of sales and marketing at Obus Forme, and Joe Ferrara, a landscape architect”:

  

  “We’re still trying to finalize a location for a stainless steel fire pole,” says Ferrara. And yes, they plan to use it to travel down from the second floor.

No

Just gratingly metrosexualist: Jake Sheehan & Pat Quinn, a ginger.

Why are all six of these guys so easy to dislike on sight?

Here, from his account “on the Facebook,” is Josh Levy baring his two best features, fangs and abs.

The latter have allegedly “caused a minor traffic accident.”

Levy’s latest piece offers the uninviting academic headline “Exploring the homoerotic undertones of mixed martial arts,” but writers don’t always, or even often, write their own heds. Ever since Levy got religion and started going to the gym, he’s become Toronto’s de facto chronicler of what that other intellectual calls sporno.

You will recall Levy from Locker Room, the former series that PrideVision reran into the ground back when we were fooled into subscribing to PrideVision. He was behind the scenes. He’s made a good living shooting fun commercials and videos, and, according to his various updates “on the Facebook,” is in L.A. writing a script. If only he could get invited to one of Bryan Singer’s pool parties.

Levy is now quite interested in sports and physical activity. He needs straight guys to help him tell his tales. Last time it was Mike Takacs, a strapping heterosexualist comedian. This time it’s the leader of the Intergalactic Rock Star pack, Robin Black. (This former hairdresser – perhaps he still is a hairdresser – æsthetically disapproves of body hair, so the depilated torso shown in the accompanying photo is at least expected.)

I find it trite to read yet another claim that these wrong-side-of-tracks fighters are “hot.” I suppose they are, but we’ve heard that before about, say, amateur wrestlers. (And Levy conforms to the alt-weekly narrative of cage fighting, inviting along “a sweet, intelligent artist in the tradition of the poet–warrior.” Those guys are marginally more common in the sport than gays are.) Where Levy loses credibility is his claim that the actual practice of mixed martial arts is “hot.” Amateur wrestlers doing amateur wrestling aren’t “hot” either. It’s a well-trod path and Levy was lazy to wander down it yet again. Next he’ll be telling us straight guys like to watch girls making out.

What remains unexamined is why such a confident go-getter is still hankering after hot bullies like some kind of closeted small-town teenager.

Regardless, he’s pulling the whole thing off with manly panache, but what I want to tell him is this: You didn’t have to sit there Googling old Times articles if you want to find an actual homosexualist “mixed martial artist.” You could have just read a blog entry from your “Facebook friend” and ask him who he was talking about.

Josh Levy’s “friends” suck

(UPDATE, 2009.07.27) Levy’s Facebook “friends,” most of whom are there because they hope he’ll fuck them someday, have proven themselves to be illiterate creeps. As such they are well adapted to the future of our diverse gay communities. With friends like these, Josh?

Marissa Mayer of Google, who claims her data- and research-backed design decisions are right 80% of the time, is an invited speaker at Make/Think, one stream of the AIGA’s biannual design conference. What’s she going to talk about?

The Design of Google

With billions of searches per day, Google.com brings real meaning to designing at scale. Just as important are the human touches – such as Google Doodles – which serve Google’s fundamental design mission, to delight its users. As its products reach people from 150 countries speaking more than 100 languages, Google’s design team has had to develop a unique philosophy for user-centred design. Marissa Mayer, who guides the user experience on Google.com and several other properties, will explore how both empiricism and personality are essential to good design.

First, do you think Google actually has “design” or “human touches”? But in case you’re new to this whole issue, allow me to recap:

• Google’s lead designer, Doug Bowman, resigned in frustration at being continually thwarted by what I view as a culture of high-function autistics who demand data for every design decision. The head of Google’s “design team” quit.
• Google Doodles was a contest that induced students to submit kooky fun designs, all the rights to which Google would own forever. (Google then turned around and asked grownup artists to do the same thing for Google Chrome and for iGoogle.)

Shorter Marissa Mayer: We’d prefer to vacuum up the legal rights to contributors’ artworks than listen to informed advice from the designer we hired.

This is AIGA’s fault

Design conferences like these are an exercise in hero worship. In the same program in which Mayer will speak are established designers like Stefan Bucher and Carin Goldberg, plus a few newbies thrown in as ringers. There is an implied endorsement of the speaker, though I wouldn’t say there is an equivalent implied endorsement of the speaker’s ultimate onstage remarks.

What’s being endorsed is everything that made the speaker famous enough to get invited to a design conference in the first place. What Mayer is actually famous for is impeding Web design under cover of quantifying it. As such, I view it as a minor scandal that AIGA would ask a known enemy of actual graphic design onto its dais.

I also note an undercurrent of what Americans call affirmative action. The computer, the search engine, the typeface, the layout, the CSS do not know you’re a girl, but conference organizing committees sure as hell do. In a perpetuation of the myth that women are disadvantaged in graphic design (they aren’t), Mayer’s bio explicitly lists her as Google’s “first female engineer,” an implied qualification to speak about a field that isn’t engineering.

Who’d have expected that mild-mannered designer dad Doug Bowman would have this much impact? Marissa Mayer goes on TV, and now infiltrates the enemy on the enemy’s watch, in a publicity offensive to distract people from the truth: Google is engaged in a campaign to discredit the field of graphic design by quantifying it out of existence.

You are wrong about Brüno. Is it not cultural terrorism at its finest? I think so, and so did everybody else in the theatre at Scarborough Town Centre (well more than 90% Chinese, Black, or Indic). A mere four people walked out during the talking-cock scene.

But: I saw it with audio description and you didn’t. How do you describe Brüno?

• He shows his pubic hair!

• He’s wearing a pink bodysuit with a plush penis and testicles.

• It pumps a dildo in and out of Brüno’s backside.

• Its clear nozzle sucks in Brüno’s jiggling testicles.

• Dozens of colourful garments stick to the suit.

• At Sweet Cheeks Anal Bleaching, Brüno speaks with a female stylist.

• A nude man is covered in sushi!

• Brüno tilts his head, checking out Lutz’s backside. [Surely Lutz is a poor man’s Stellan Starsgård?]

• Brüno dances in tiny red briefs. Lloyd averts his eyes.

• Onscreen, Brüno wears a skin-tight leopard-skin shirt and matching briefs.

• A straight line of pubic hair runs from his navel to his penis. [There’s a suspected use of the word “dick” in the next sentence, but people were howling so loudly and the scratchy, piece-of-shit headset audio was so quiet I missed it. So let’s just start a rumour!]

• He lets his pants fall, revealing purple spandex briefs.

• Brüno pretends to hold Milli’s penis […] then mimes fondling Milli’s penis.

• He simulates oral sex, bobbing up and down vigorously.

• Brüno nods his head up and down as he wiggles Milli’s invisible member.

• On a streetcorner, he wears a fashionably modified Orthodox outfit.

• He claps and waves his hands effeminately. The predominantly African-American audience watches him.

• Brüno sits down with his adopted baby, who wears a mini-shirt labelled GAYBY.

• In another Jacuzzi, one man is naked and upside down with his crotch in another man’s face.

• He wears a toilet-brush mouth gag. They’re tied up in leather bondage gear.

• Gerbils scamper in a drawer.

• A TV remote protrudes from Brüno’s butt.

• Now at a God Hates Fags anti-gay group rally. [We read onscreen titles.]

• Now in Alabama, Brüno faces Pastor Jody Trautwein, gay converter.

• Brüno flails a huge black dildo.

• Brüno wears a strap-on dildo. Danny boots it. Now Brüno attacks with all three dildos.

• Brüno minces effeminately as others jog past.

• Brüno gives a Nazi salute.

• Brüno offers his limp hand to three hunters, and one shakes it.

• “Get in your fucking tent and leave me alone!” [We read subtitles, even same-language subtitles – quite redundantly in a few cases here.] “Get the fuck out of here!”

• Now Brüno again sits reverse-cowgirl on his lap, smiling dreamily.

• He shifts uncomfortably as two men and a woman give another woman oral sex. A box covers her.

• Now the balding man humps a woman from behind. Jack smiles uncomfortably. A black box covers his genitals.

• He stares at her melon-sized breasts. [Kid behind me: “It’s a guy! He’s a guy!”]

• Ge strips them off, revealing smaller briefs.

• Brüno lifts it [the veil] over his head, revealing his masculine features.

Who is our narratrix? A quite-often-mortified-sounding Gaille Heidemann, last heard many years ago on Stuck on You.

Michael Geist reported Saturday that copyright “consultations” are set to begin this summer.

But Howard Knopf reported the same day that there’s one set of consultations for plebes and other for invited VIPs. And, as at any black-tie event, your invitation isn’t transferable.

Didn’t the foremost academic critic of copyright policy in Canada (also a noted newspaper columnist) receive a personalized, nontransferable invitation to the VIP consultation? Isn’t Geist failing to disclose his elite status in consultations on a topic that, he has consistently insisted, is of general importance to the Canadian citizenry?

Well, I don’t know. But Geist can contact me via E-mail to clear up the whole thing, which clarification I will then go right ahead and publish.

Superexclusive response!

That was fast: “No. I didn’t get an invitation. My post was based on someone forwarding me the doc.”

Geist then goes on to dispute Knopf’s claim that there are distinct VIP and prole consultations, a dispute I dispute. It seems plain to me.

The Spring 2009 Eye, borrowed from the library at zero cost (cover price: $33), is ostensibly a Type Special. They do this every year, and it makes just as little sense every year. Surely type is an eternal component of graphic design?

“Type special”

The issue’s type articles have the feel of catching up grandpa. As with design “criticism” in general, type discussions have moved almost wholesale to the Web. There are no happier days than when I receive a type sample in the mail, which I can pore over during coffee, but that is mere icing; I get my cake every single day from Typophile and other sites, not all of them in English. (You should not hesitate to subscribe to design blogs you cannot actually read; pictures are worth well more than a thousand words.)

Eye’s type articles give the impression of standing with grandpa on Christmas Eve, mulled cider in hand, giving him a quick rundown of what everyone’s been up to since the Stone Roses called it quits. [continue with: ‘Eye’ 71 →]