The cringingly mistitled charticle “The Gay Plot: Out of the Celluloid Closet” appeared on the back page of Out, September 2008. In it, Ilya Marritz exclaims “independent gay films can totally crack $100,000 at the box office” – as though that were some kind of triumph.

In fact, Marritz’s reporting shows that “gay” films barely make any money at all. Including seriously questionable outliers like Blades of Glory and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Buck Larry, the total box-office haul for “gay” moves from 2000–2007 is $970 million. Excluding those outliers, the real number is $732 million. If I am to believe Wikipedia, The Matrix Reloaded earned that much by itself.

Over $10 million

• Monster ($34M)
• Rent ($29M)
• Capote ($28M)
• The Producers ($19M)
• Far from Heaven ($15M)
• Kinsey (≈$10M)

You might disagree about Rent, but weren’t most of these pretty good movies all told?

Over a million

• The Deep End ($8M)
• The Night Listener ($7M)
• Running with Scissors ($7M)
• Before Night Falls ($4M)
• Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (a measly $4M)
• Hedwig (a measly $3M) and Shortbus (just under $2M)
• Chuck & Buck (≈$1M)

Aren’t these the true independent pictures – good script, good actors, just not a whole lot of money to spend?

Under half a million

• The Dying Gaul ($343,000 – this despite quasi-explicit homosexualism enacted by Campbell Scott)

Under $200,000

• Bear Cub (fatties won’t read subtitles? Spanish-speakers don’t want to watch fatties? what?)
• The Business of Fancydancing (fop till you drop!)
• Circuit
• Dahmer (who the fuck wants to watch a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer?)
• Eating Out
• Friends and Family
• The Girl
• Girls Will Be Girls
• Hellbent (surprisingly good)
• 101 Rejkavík
• The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
• Testosterone

Have you even heard of most of the movies in that last list? Of those you did hear of, do you now think you even should have?

…and in the research labs that are his natural habitat.

Bill Hill is the Scotsman who works for Microsoft Typography or Advanced Reading Technologies (or some such – his bio is out of date). It’s a distinction without a difference – they may be in different buildings and have different bosses, but in practice both departments work together. He’s done a lot of good work you could look up yourself. While I’ve talked at length to colleagues (and former employees) of his, and I E-mail those people regularly with tips and questions and whatnot, and I even did a bit of work for them via Ascender, I’ve never actually met the Other Bill.

Nonetheless: Bill’s on this big kick for Webfonts. (It’s now one word, I guess. It refers to the CSS3 @font-face rule.) I don’t think there is a demand for such a thing from Web designers. That has been borne out by Ralf Herrmann’s survey, in which two-thirds of respondents weren’t interested or were going to wait till “all major browsers support it.” (This is equivalent to my claim that designers may want it once they have it but do not want it now.)

Microsoft and Adobe are supporting Webfonts. They are ginning up reviving a W3C working group to push these things through. (Good luck finding a link to it. It’s in another set of bookmarks here somewhere; I can’t be bothered spending any more than the 10 minutes I’ve already spent trying to find it. The people who write the specs for the Web run its worst site.)

W3C committees do their rich corporate members’ bidding. Microsoft and Adobe (and Opera and others) want Webfonts. True to W3C history (Cf. WCAG; HTML5), the Webfonts working group will provide a simulacrum of transparency and process as it forces through exactly what its backers want. The upside is it won’t have Hixie denying to “so-called… experts[’]” faces that it is actually happening.

However: Bill has really been screwing up his presentations to “the Web community” on Webfonts. He’s mixed up half a dozen different issues on his blindingly unreadable blog:

• Webfonts
• Unicode and escape characters
• Web authoring
• Web standards
• His own inability to use Unicode or escape characters in standards-compliant Web authoring at an expert level from a standing start

To this list, I must add Bill’s insistence that Web sites look like magazine layouts, based on some research or other he brandishes as if it were relevant. This seems actively worse than creating a virtual-reality shopping mall in which your avatar has to walk the distance from store to store.

Bill isn’t a Web developer. Of course he knows Unicode, but he doesn’t know anything about Web development. Nor should he, nor do I want him to. Neither do I want him to win a Top Chef Quickfire Challenge using molecular gastronomy, or build a credenza, or install a gas furnace, or re-engineer the tiles on the space shuttle. I want him to focus on the areas of his expertise. He is hampering the promotion of Webfonts via his many missteps. Such hampering is causing ill will – for no discernible reason, since he’s going to get what he wants anyway.

I am particularly appalled at the continued evidence, this many years in, of the complete unsuitability of Microsoft tools to the task of standards-compliant Web authoring. Of course Web development is a lot to learn from scratch, but nobody asked Bill to learn it. (Why isn’t there anybody at Microsoft with the skills to help him?)

By contrast, I have been doing this for a while and I have efficient systems set up here in my Macintosh-supremacist compound. Using bog-standard tools like BBEdit and Interarchy, I can spit out valid HTML (with competent Unicode usage) in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, Bill’s employer, Microsoft, saddles him with Notepad. No less than the head of the Microsoft browser project told him to use it.

Now, since many readers will doubt my heart is in the right place here, let me suggest that what Microsoft and Adobe need to do to persuade Web designers that they need Webfonts is to hire Web designers to prove it. Only Web designers who are also qualified developers are suitable. In other words, if Microsoft and Adobe have any sense at all they’ll hire Happy Cog, Malarkey, Simplebits, or equivalent to design and produce Webfont demo pages, all using perfect markup and without ever transposing print design onto the Web. (Håkon’s sample pages for A List Apart are, like Bill’s, a textbook example of what not to do.)

We want Bill to carry out research into typography and reading. Leave the driving to us.

Yes, that is what John L. Walters, the editor of the grandest graphic-design magazine, Eye, actually says:

Few novels have made use of graphic design for background or context, let alone made their central character a designer. And while you could probably dredge up a number of obscure works featuring heroes (or antiheroes) who earn their living making posters or Web sites (though “Web designer” is often a codeword for “unwashed loser”), I[’d] bet very few of them actually weave a graphic design brief into the plotline.

What’s the context? A review of Chip Kidd’s The Learners. (The editor himself handles the A-list work.)

Does it seem like a slur delivered out of context? Of course – but that’s how fervently the antediluvian John L. Walters hates you, the present, and the future. He’ll stick that in wherever he gets a spare line – and when you run a magazine, you’ve got all the spare lines you need.

Just a quick recap for denialists

I am essentially the only person making the claim that traditional graphic-design criticism is no longer needed and, in retrospect, possibly never was. It took the Web – which permits anyone to express an opinion and also permits designers to create what photographers and painters have always been able to create, personal work – to make the uselessness of Poynoric or Hellerian design criticism obvious.

The seeds of futility were sown long ago – at least as far back as 1988, when young designer Neville Brody received the first of but two books of turgid critical analysis. But now the degree of futility is obvious, even if you think only I can see it.

Graphic design, as a utilitarian and workaday medium, is unamenable to turgid analysis. Fundamentally, design either works or it doesn’t. It isn’t diamonds, it’s cubic zirconia.

In the olden days, graphic design used to be done by fat old working-class jobbers. Derrida and Baudrillard never specced the Sears catalogue, a business card, or a tampon package. I resent having their theories, or something that aspires to them, wielded against designers as if they were remotely applicable.

I am essentially the only person making this case. Nonetheless, I am being and will continue to be proven right. Blog-hating Steven Heller now writes one. Even Eye has a blog, where my comments are immediately deleted. There may always be a call for beautifully printed design examples; there is clearly very little call for tortuously written design critiques. It’s just that this news hasn’t made its way from the brontosaurus’s tail to its avocado-sized brain.

Let me put it to you this way: With your free RSS reader and a range of free design blogs at hand, is each new issue of Eye really worth £17?

Eye 68

The ironic thing is that the current Eye (Summer 2008, Nº 68) explicitly thinks outside of its own box. It accepts there is a certain canon in graphic design, barely acknowledging that such a canon wouldn’t exist without turgid criticism rewritten with minor changes decade after decade. Where does that writing appear?

Walters, the editor of a magazine that established and is part of the canon, has the gall to state that “the Internet ensures that blurred versions of these histories and images will continue to be repeated and recycled.” Canons are about the past, not the future; I’ve been looking at the same Russian Constructivist layouts in books since I was a teenager.

(The great Rick Poynor argues that repetition, not worth, assures a place in the canon. He’s careful to isolate himself from that tawdry impulse by insisting the example he uses – Allen Hori’s “Typography as Discourse” poster – really is important. Well, it has to be – Rick Poynor said so.)

In stretching beyond the canon, Walters canvassed writers outside his usual stable of overexposed theoreticians. The results are strong – and could easily have been presented online. In fact, the segments in “Beyond the Canon” are blog postings – with, I guess, illustrations that aren’t quite as “blurred” as they otherwise would be.

(Actually, framegrabs from Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 – offered up by Michael Worthington as a non-obvious exemplar of the film-title œuvre – look so blurry they must have come from an old VHS tape.)

The collection is ironic and self-referential in a way an arrogant Walters doesn’t even understand.

• Steve Rigley’s piece on 17th-century chapbooks noted: “The printed quality… was often poor, partly due to the choice of paper but also to the length of the print run, which greatly exceeded that of the works of fine literature more familiar to design students.” Design students are exposed to a canon that has no bearing on real-world design. (Why aren’t American pundits attacking this “elite” – along with all the others they decry and also belong to?)

• Theory ruins design, Usual Suspect Nick Bell tells us in his piece about Ko Sliggers’s collage work: In the ’80s and ’90s, collage “was extremely popular and it was a time when hordes of graphic designers, myself included, were at pains to make design apparent in their work – resulting in much that was earnestly complex and overwrought.”

• An emissary from the future, Khoi Vinh (yes), visits the dead-tree press to review the dead-tree version of Stefan Bucher’s monster series.

  If nothing else, though, 100 Days of Monsters proves that the shortcomings of transcription do not diminish the original event. The book is not unattractive, and it is useful, at least, as document of a robust conversation, the likes of which we can continue to expect as digital media evolves…. Unfortunately , it really only serves as evidence that something really interesting happened somewhere else. Namely, the Web.

I have to quibble with Stuart McKee’s nomination of a multi-referential drag poster by Todd Trexler, which seems to be there as some kind of freestanding homosexualist equality campaign. (Graphic designers really aren’t gay, we’re reassured: This segment takes up a page and a half, but Heller gets three pages to praise Playboy.) It gives McKee the chance to use the word genderfuck (unhelpfully hyphenated and quoted), but it’s the weakest segment in the series.

Ironically, McKee’s piece is presented on the same page as a pæan to Open University, which, “while the rest of the industry still seems to be coming to terms with accessibility, [has offered it] as a core feature of OU materials since Day 1.”

I⁷knew Beijiong when it was Euros 55

For a magazine that insists up and down that you can’t have design criticism without editors, this issue could sure use some editing.

• Elizabeth Resnick simply misdescribes a poster by Jacqueline Casey; the photo in her article shows it isn’t anything like she says it is.

• As a bonus, the grande dame of the design press still cannot copy-edit itself. The improbable typo “I⁷knew” is right there on page 90. Apparently the capital of China is Beijiong. They still haven’t figured out that the euro has its own symbol, hence a book cannot be priced at “Euros 55,” which sounds like a program that lets Baby Boomers buy a timeshare in Ibiza.

My second book is essentially done, with some line-editing and outside editing remaining. Then of course there is the issue of design, which is clearly going to bite me in the ass.

Nonetheless, a placeholder page for Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English is posted, and I’m using Twitter to document what I’m doing.

E. Patton:

I am unable to go to work without carrying two large bags, one containing several outfits for the gym (often without socks, though), shoes, half-filled bottles of old prescriptions (in case of emergency), reusable canvas sacks for grocery shopping, and umbrellas, the other containing books (all of the books I used in my Arabic class, plus one or two that I am currently reading for fun – like Decisive Moments in History by Stefan Zweig, a book Faruq commanded me to read), two (now-broken) cameras, more prescription drugs, hand sanitizer, a bottle of sweetened iced tea, and sometimes also my laptop computer with some DVDs. This is just to go to work, not for a weekend vacation trip. Also, I live 10 minutes on foot from my job.

Me ten years ago, recounting my discovery of an handbag sitting there on the sidewalk.

Rather, the handbag, the quintessential Platonic ideal of a handbag, big and pink and vinyl, with black straps and accents and taupe satiny insides and enough pockets for Mrs. Peel to store her beauty case with compact and hairbrush, GPS receiver, cellphone, traveler’s mah-jongg ensemble, lorgnette, spare nylons, snakebite kit, chewable B complex, Yahoo!® Visa® card, Sélection du Reader’s Digest, honeydripper, citrus zester, lotion corporel White Musk®, rosary, Filofax®, Vatican postage stamps, additional FedEx waybill, portable abacus, skate key, potpourri sachet, zarf, IUD, trail mix, lemon Perrier®, SX-70, talc, needle-nose pliers, Montblanc with peacock-blue ink, calling cards, Les parapluies de Cherbourg DVD, and shuriken.

MORRISSEY! guest-DJed on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic this afternoon. I took notes on his bons mots.

• (Accents: People tend to sing in an American voice anyway, but) when your accent is strong and regional, I think it’s a problem here because people think you sound a bit loony.

• (Saw the Buzzcocks’ very first gig supporting the Sex Pistols in Manchester; saw the Sex Pistols’ first two gigs, in fact.) People now call them “the Buzzcocks,” but I don’t know why. It was always Buzzcocks… Quite intellectual in their way, but delivering very fast pop music, and that was quite new to me. I thought they had a very cranky intellectual edge which I really welcomed because I was tired of pop music being seen as rather vain and… rather foppish.

• (Sparks, “Moon over Kentucky”) Russell [Mael] would sing in an almost Parisian accent.

• I bought every pop single. I was mad for pop music… All the best moments of my life were buying those singles.

• (In the olden days, it was hard to listen to music, and if it was even possible, it was on “inferior equipment.” Is music too available now?) Once there’s no struggle and it’s thrown at you all the time, you feel less inclined to want it, really…. People are trying to will groups to be fantastic…. I’d rather talk in the negative about modern music.

• (“Didn’t care for” the New Romantics. Ultravox was) just too flashy for me….

• (New York Dolls stick with him most.) You don’t realize it will stay with you forever; you think you’ll outgrow everything. But with music and artists, you absolutely fall in love – you fall in love with that moment, with that period… It isn’t that easy to shuck off. You may put things aside for 10 years, 15 years… but when you go back and listen to them, you’re back in that frame of mind.

  (It’s a punk thing not to care), but the New York Dolls actually didn’t (and blew themselves up later).… (The shoes and costumes) had never been seen before, and it was confrontational. You… have to have an opinion; you see their album sleeves, something goes through your mind; you can’t just toss it aside. (They) changed so much. Changed so much.

• (With singers facing the audience) you see every emotion; this appeals to me… “This is the song, this is the voice, and this is the communication.” This appealed to me more than anything else.

• (Jobriath) died in the early ’80s of the unmentionable.

• (End-of show giveaway.) You can give away me. (HOST: You can sign yourself and we’ll split you between five listeners.) It’s happened before.

I may be the only person who dares criticize Eye (“The International Review of Graphic Design”). I don’t know why; there’s a lot to criticize.

The Spring 2008 issue fails to publish my letter about Steven Heller:

To address Steven Heller’s latest self-serving chauvinism (masquerading, yet again, as a provocative question from a deep thinker), it should be obvious why right-wing graphic designers barely exist. Debating a choice of typeface gets in the way of paring down government to its only role, to protect private-property rights (by force if necessary). A discussion of colour and paper-stock choices, (a)symmetry, or legibility gets in the way of necessary efforts to prevent homosexuals and lesbians from marrying and the even more urgent need to shut down abortuaries worldwide (by force if necessary).

In short, there are few nonliberal graphic designers because design is intrinsically liberal. It’s equivocal, discursive, and twee – three things right-wing assholes (British variant: right-wing arseholes) manifestly are not. They are sure of everything and they express it with manly certainty. We’ve got five ways of solving every problem, none of them provably best. All this was discussed a dozen years ago in the wake of Liz McQuiston’s Graphic Agitation; Heller could look it up.

Of more pressing concern is Heller’s latest gesture of contempt for blogs. Heller started out hating design blogs, which, he says, lack credibility (Print, May/June 2004). Then he decided “there are too many blogs. Too many opinions, observations, commentaries, drivel-ings” (Mediabistro, 2007.01.29). He later admitted he “was afraid of blogs… I did fear the fact that blogs would kind of usurp what I was doing” (Be a Design Cast Nº 50, 2008.01.16).

Nonetheless, in his column he forged ahead and quoted four blog commenters without attribution. This is the same Heller who would later rail against bloggers’ reliance on userIDs or nicknames rather than their full Christian or legal names (Design Observer, 2007.12.27). Bloggers live so far beyond the realm of polite society that the world’s most prolific design writer simply effaces their names.

It’s not just that Heller, who now writes a blog himself, is a hypocrite. It’s that he is the most obvious symbol yet of the obsolescence of “classic” design criticism. As an academic irrelevancy with fatal structural flaws, it cannot die out fast enough for those of us who live online. Heller and his editors will be the last to know, of course.

Nor did the Summer 2008 issue publish it. Nor, clearly, will any issue.

• The Spring volume gives us a long article by John D. Berry. Last year, Berry didn’t bother to practise his introduction of my speech at ATypI, mangling it so badly I had to introduce myself. (I show up prepared.) Anyway, the piece here is about type in architecture. A storied topic, and he mentions the greats of the field. But, to draw a comparison, he’s only talking about display type – Seattle Public Library and suchlike – rather than body copy. It’s all about type as a decorative element in architecture rather than a functional one.

  He kind of gives the game away while trying to deny it: “To a typographer walking through a building… the signage can sometimes appear to be just an afterthought by an architect concerned only with the grand gesture.” But all the illustrations in the article are of gestures so grand they tower over the human form (even over a workman on a catwalk).

  (You may be wondering: Are Paula Scher’s two interchangeable huge-type projects in there? Why did you even bother to ask?)

  You might be surprised to read an endorsement of the use of Verdana for signage. Somehow the extra-wide spacing, giant S, full-width 1, and barred I, J, and j make it “neutral enough, and balanced enough, to work at very large sizes, too.” (It would barely work on a pill bottle.) You want Adobe Garamond for your signage? It’s “peculiar,” but if you must use it, break out the ligatures. But “Times New Roman? Don’t even think about it.”

• An unpleasant review of typefaces (by five critics) shows that critics need to learn to say a bit more when reviewing typefaces (“This is soft and full of wonder”; “One such foundry is Underware, and Bello makes the most of OpenType Technology”). Furthering the tradition of illegible layouts in design magazines, Eye typesets black Helvetica on tomato-red pages. As only half the pages in the spread are thus, there was a fair standard of comparison right before my eyes and I read only half the article. I won’t suffer for somebody else’s art.

• A superb service piece by Andrew Haslam, “Physical Display,” explains through photos and cutlines exactly how signage is manufactured using four methods – cut metal, engraved wood and stone, and expanded and routered plastic.

• Rick Poynor has, at long last, completed his long march toward the Peter Principle, lampooning himself utterly in a two-page review of Chip Kidd’s author photo: “Kidd’s pose, leaning forward on his knees, compresses his trunk, pushing his arm towards us and making his head as big as possible relative to the space occupied by the rest of his body.”

• The endpapers are the traditional home of confusion, contradiction, and blaring lack of self-awareness of same.

  • Letter from Chris Holtslag: “I love your magazine, but I tried finding stuff on your Web site and I found it very hard indeed. AND HOW CAN I TURN OFF THE ANNOYING SOUNDS[?]” “Er… you can’t. Sorry. The Web site does need some work, so we’ll look into the practicalities of this in addition to many other changes,” John Walters responds.

    Those “other changes” involved buying back the magazine – a matter which now endorses antimatter and includes a blog. (Did you know they already had “a Blogspot”?) I have told Happy Cog twice that Eye needs them, but Eye will be incapable of appreciating that. They’ll hire a theoretician who uses divs, “font tags,” and spans (and Flash).

  • And we have the kind of typographical error classically caused by using an Adobe application (with its errant, nonstandard, off-centre cursor hotpoint) at too low a magnification: “By virtue of his geograpAhical location.” (“Where did I drop the cursor?”)

  • Did you know there’s an encryption error on the cover of Substance? Martin Soames: “[T]he New Alphabet distinguishes between n and m – and u and w – by adding an underscore to the latter character. Writing on Typophile.com about the Joy Division commission…” Oh, dear: Eye is forced to use the Web as original source material.

  • Is Heller in there whining about blogs again? (Like the one he now writes, which lacks RSS but carries a warning in the guise of a title – Daily Heller?) This time, not quite: His psychological depths are more turbulent than usual.

    Heller is unaware, for example, that he argues for the irrelevance of broad-ranging design histories when he writes that “what might be called ‘marginal histories’ are less likely to receive any more serious attention than the occasional article in a graphic-design magazine,” for the unstated reason that such an article won’t be on the Web and will be all but impossible to find.

    “There are many unknown aspects of graphic design worthy of historical notice that get little or no attention because publishers do not see a quantifiable ‘market,’ ” writes the author or coauthor of dozens of histories of marginal design topics. “So it becomes the job of committed scholars and researchers (and fans) to buck the ‘market trend’ and produce works for which the greatest reward is getting the word out.”

    What would those be? Web sites. But Web sites don’t get reviewed in Eye, except as Flash design exercises – unlike the book that is Heller’s ostensible subject (Peter Seitz: Designing a Life, coedited by another design snob, Blauvelt).

    “Who writes the canon?” Heller writes, failing to add “Usually, I do.”