The backlighting straddles the border between two greens, 1980s-condo/bridesmaid-taffeta sea-foam and minty-fresh.

“Literary Review: Pro-celebrity cookbooks,” Private Eye, 2006.12.22–2007.01.04:

The proliferation of large-format cookery books [sic] may have something to do with our native love of elaborately-prepared victuals, but that is certainly not how they are designed to be used…. Tom Aikens’ Cooking… is a case in point…. His recipes may well be interesting and original; some of them may even be feasible in the average domestic kitchen. But the point is academic since the pale-grey sansserif text is almost impossible to read. You obviously aren’t meant to actually use it, silly.

The International Compliant Style crosses over? (Cf. “Gr[e]y text revisited.”)

Ƭȟëřè åṝé ƫŵõ ķïńđš óƒ ƥèöṗḹȅ: (ã) Ṁÿ ľȭṽȩ ȃňḓ İ; (ḇ) Ṑȶḧḛṟ.

The letterspaced Century caps are an oldschool embellishment to this tanker o’ obesity.

Sometime in the mists of the ’90s, I wrote an article for Publish on large-format printing. I became something of an expert, and I really wanted to see bus wraps used for some kind of artistique purpose, particularly if applied to a postmodernist vehicle like an Orion II. It never happened. Babs Kruger’s bus wrap (1997; later co-opted) was a disaster: Never send a polemical feminist artist to do a typographer’s job.

Nonetheless:

In order, I would use the current lexicon to describe these colours as violetred3, yellow3, lightslateblue, and sandybrown.

After an interregnum of two full years, I finally went to a movie: Children of Men.

Children of*RWC/DVS*

I had previously spent gruelling years going to every MoPixed movie that played in Toronto (save for two) and writing detailed reviews that were almost completely ignored. Every third visit to the cinema chain found another equipment breakdown, another arsehole staffmember calling me rude for reporting the broken equipment, and, later, a functionary and a vice-president actually calling me up to complain about what a cunt I was, in so many words.

And I had no choice but to file a privacy complaint concerning the chain’s demand that we hand over ID just to borrow caption reflectors and description headsets that had no cash value that couldn’t be used outside a dozen of its own theatres. And every movie had a captioning or description error.

These years destroyed whatever pleasure I had ever had in going to the movies. I don’t even really like watching discs at home, though I do it. Every time I’ve run across a movie I wanted to see, I thought of WGBH ignoring me or, separately, actively trying to harm me; getting yelled at by the functionary and executive and lectured by floor staff; and schlepping way the fuck out to these goddamned movie houses to watch some piece of shit. But mostly I thought of all the people who made me miserable. I flashed on their faces. (The chain has since been sold; did my tormentors get golden parachutes?)

I went stag tonight and, after much thought, decided it was worth a try. But no fucking way was I going downtown. I went to Scarborough instead (not hard to get to via subway), where I’d never had an argument and where the equipment almost never broke down. I was really quite uneasy. I resolutely didn’t bring a notebook; taking notes at a movie makes it impossible to enjoy. I decided not to go for captioning, because that’s kind of coin of the realm by now, whereas the description writers at WGBH simply cannot be beat. (Shop around. Compare. Prove me wrong.)

I asked for a headset and, after being initially offered a reflector, the lady behind the desk just handed one over like none of that privacy unpleasantness had ever happened. I tried duct-taping the too-bright red LED (another deterrent) and it worked.

Four minutes into the movie and, first of all, I was amazed how much better things look on the big screen (not a myth, I had forgotten) and I was just very moved by the lovingly-crafted descriptions, read, almost as usual, by Miles Neff. It’s like those news segments where the person overcomes a tragic disability and gets to dance again, or whatever. Except here it is overcoming other people’s getting in my way of enjoying accessibility.

WGBH once told me I couldn’t talk to its staff because this was their life’s work (false, given the staff I knew personally). This is my goddamned life’s work. No matter what else one may think, I am an honest, teetotaling vegan who works for disabled people. I have reason to be proud, as I have to remind even myself sometimes.

I dropped off the headset no problem, and went to the can, and it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t just walk out of there. I had the guy summon the lady behind the desk, forcing me to get very committed to my plan while I waited. With some hesitation, I told her this was the first movie I’d seen in two years. I’d been to all the other locations and something always happened. I told her I’d never had an argument here, and maybe now I have a safe place to watch movies again. I thanked her and managed not to cry and shook her hand and went on home.

Peter Saville (q.v.), interviewed at Wodcast:

My early work… was work that was pretty much an expression of my own point of view. And I found myself in this exceptional circumstance of… Factory Records, which provided me a kind of autonomous platform from which to express my point of view about the kind of small world I saw around me as a person in their 20s in Britain in the ’80s. And of course communication design is not about expressing your own point of view. Communication design is for others and to others….

The graphic aspect of it is just a necessary part of the process of communicating it. Most graphic designers, when given free space, so often default to sort of rather dumb things like alphabets rather than actually having anything to say. I studied graphics because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time – from a young person’s point of view – and I think that graphic design is interesting to young people. It’s entry-level visual arts. I mean, there’s a sort of a simplicity and a directness to it that sort of appeals to our limited awareness when we’re in our teens and early 20s. […] I find it quite worrying meeting people in their mid-life who are still fascinated by, you know, typefaces and layout. Actually, the content of the work is actually the interesting part. The graphic part of it is just the means by which that content’s delivered.

So, in the early years, I had this platform to express my own opinions, and then sort of pretty much spent the ’90s struggling with finding a sense of place within a professional environment which is about other people’s problems, not yours.

All of the foregoing is delivered in a surprisingly offputting, jaded, borderline hectoring tone of “I learned all this the hard way and don’t you think for a minute it isn’t true.”