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The impossibility of silence by Ian Lynam. Writing for designers, artists, and photographers. Introduces useful concepts to consider without getting prescriptive. Guidelines, not rules. Made a few things click for me. Good stuff.

_ Promising results of three short monoprinting sessions over the last week. See header image. First pass in black ink combining two cut-out capital letters and assorted patterns. Second pass consisted of printing a solid square of yellow ink over each page. Another even shorter single printing session together with M. produced even more exhilirating results. But that's all still in the exploratory phase.

_ You all did see No. 10 Family office right?

_ MIT Press offers open access to Design Issues. Via brilliantcrank.

_ Inks and paints of the Middle East.

_ Finally succumbed and purchased license to use Brabo, the eloquent type I mentioned here before.

_ Sounds: Misnomer by Four Tet. I Hadn't Known (I Only Heard) / So Now... by Matthew Herbert. Gnosis by Spectral Lore.

_ #weeknotes 2021-15

— A post by Roy Scholten

Moving from pocket to a converted, yearly paid pinboard subscription because Maciej asked nicely.

_ 36days of type so far and a compilation of the first four. And this one, which just kept growing as I drew it.

_ Looking forward to dive into The Impossibility of Silence.

_ A small update to https://grafiek.royscholten.nl/, a large header image. It captures some of the essence of the Calligraphic Space theme I'm working with.

_ I can't retrace how I found it, so I'll just thank the universe (or the youtube algorithm), because Tchaikovsky's Hymn of the Cherubim really is of transcendent beauty.

_ #weeknotes 2021-14

— A post by Roy Scholten

again: publishing as artistic practice

Another plug for Scratching the surface, a podcast about design criticism and practice. It's shaping up to an impressive catalogue of interviews about design, criticism, architecture, writing, publishing, education with people who work across those different but connected domains. I put one one for when I go for my walk.

_ The grammar of ornament, beautiful. Need to check, but I think Johanna Drucker references this in her book Graphesis.

_ I'm setting up a printing forme that will fit eight A5-ish blocks into a 46x64 cm sheet of paper. I turned a first series of prints like this into small booklets, zines. Looking forward to produce a new series of works this way. This time I want to connect this with my Calligraphic Space themed pieces.

_ Speaking of Calligraphic Space, 36 days of type has kicked off. Main channel is Instagram. I'm posting processed scans of hand-drawn versals copied from this manuscript.

_ A database of sans serifs sold in 19th-century Germany by Dr. Dan Reynolds.

_ Music via stereogum's Black Market for March, featuring Esoctrilihum and Mare Cognitum and Spectral Lore and Forhist (by BaN's Vindsval) and Bríi (by Kaatayra's Caio Lemos). Lots of good stuff coming out.

_ #weeknotes 2021-13

— A post by Roy Scholten

_ Plum Blossoms and Bamboo, by Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783-1856). Via@JapanTraCul

_ “Pysanka is the Ukrainian art of decorating eggs“

_ Complaining about open source projects is good. Thought provoking thread by @DRMacIver

_ “Solvitur ambulando.” – it is solved by walking. via @cox_tom

_ 36 days of type starts april 5.

_ #weeknotes 2021-12

— A post by Roy Scholten

Moved some older posts from here to there:

• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/werken-aan-de-serie-kalligrafische-ruimte
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/nadere-verkenningen-van-de-kalligrafische-ruimte
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/kalligrafische-ruimte-i
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/3d-graffiti-in-end-to-end-burners
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/asemic-writing
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/a-strand-to-follow
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/vorm-en-inhoud-van-de-verluchte-kapitaal
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/drop-caps-css-illustration-links
• https://write.as/calligraphic-space/drop-caps-css-illustration-etc

— A post by Roy Scholten

A smallest history of the drop cap and more.

_ Paged.js is a free and open source JavaScript library that paginates content in the browser to create PDF output from any HTML content. This means you can design works for print (eg. books) using HTML and CSS.

_ A Drupal core proposal for an editor specific toolbox menu. More diagramps here.

_ “I want to make sure that I’m an artist that not only lives through her music but the art is in life. The reason I can do all of these things is because they all are in the same world.” – Dawn Richard

_ Meshgradient.com

_ Street artists: Highway star (Deep Purple cover)

_ #weeknotes 2021-11

— A post by Roy Scholten

_ Honour your obsessions, says Rob Walker in the art of noticing

_ How to get excited about Drupal again. Addendum: collaborating with wicked smart and super nice people.

_ Moving to Linux.

_ “Visions of the end”, a virtual exhibition exploring medieval & Renaissance artworks inspired by the Apocalypse, or Revelation, of John of Patmos. Via.

_ Revival of an unknown woodtype

_ Tsundoku: acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

_ #weeknotes #2021-09

— A post by Roy Scholten

Mid last year I bought a second hand Lenovo T470 and installed Linux Mint on it. I wanted to see how far I could bring it to handle my main work tasks. Almost there it looks like!

Graphics, layouts etc: I tried these under macos before, where they are super sluggish most of the time. Under a more native(?) environment, these apps are significantly more snappy and solid: – “photoshop”: glimpse – “illustrator”: inkscape – “indesign”: scribus

For wireframes: – draw.io / diagrams.net voor lo-fi wireframes and diagrams – when necessary, figma in the browser, but I don't often work on that level of design-fidelity anymore.

Notes, writing: – Visual Studio Code for code editing, random notes. BBEdit is turning out the hardest to replace. such a rock solid program. As with Atom, Sublime Text, it's al; very configurable but eh, not quite right or comfortable. Yet, I suppose. – Obsidian for notes, writing – Joplin for tasks & projects

Mindmaps: Xmind

Cloud things: Nextcloud via thegood.cloud in NL: file storage, calendar, notes sync for Joplin.

Email: Thunderbird, was already using it under macos.

Browser: Firefox, my default under macos as well.

Local web development: Getting a local lamp stack up and running turned out to be the most cumbersome. On Mac there is MAMPpro that provides an extensive GUI for managing PHP, MySQL, Apache. Creating virtual hosts etc. For Linux, there's only the much simpler XAMPP for getting a LAMPP stack up and running. It comes with phpmyadmin for the database bits, which is fine, but setting up virtual hosts requires good old editing of apache config files. Bleh, but ok.

Annoyances: – typing special characters, no idea how to do it other than copy-pasting from the Character map app. I mean, I know there are ways, but all are unwieldy. – Save dialog: start typing, I expect to enter a file name but it appears to start a search.

Better than expected: – the USB-C port works great, driving my large LG monitor – no problems driving an external monitor through DVI and an old VGA-via-USBC adapter beamer at the same time – overall speed and snappyness

— A post by Roy Scholten

Have yet to find the English term, but in Dutch those decorative lines flowing from initials and versals are called Cadellen. The dutch wikipedia page on book illumination is quite good.

See Modified Lynda Barry daily journal format.

_ Zettelkasten sightings: – Borchardt's Zettelkasten – Oliver Burkeman

I'm testdriving Joplin for the more structured “projects and tasks” part of note taking. Can sync through Nextcloud. Nextcloud seems to be offered more often as a specific syncing option besides the usual dropboxes and iclouds etc.

_ 'Framing is “a way of selecting, organising, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality”'. Pair with “Software architecture is in crisis, and the way to fix it is a hefty dose of anarchy”.

_ An important checklist: # The 7 Questions For Any Technological Idea.

_ Can't get over how brilliant diagrams.net is. It lets you export a diagram as a URL! Like so.

_ #weeknotes 2021-09

— A post by Roy Scholten

Erfgoed: van het verleden, in het heden, voor de toekomst is het traditionele kader. Maar voor wie, wanneer en hoe in welke toekomst wordt zelden concreet gemaakt. Terwijl je door middel van erfgoedprocessen juist vorm geeft aan mogelijke toekomst(en): “assembling, building and designing future worlds”.

In Heritage Futures, Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices analyseren en beschrijven de auteurs erfgoedconservatie als een set creatieve, dialogische, meer-dan-alleen-menselijke betrekkingen tussen personen, objecten, plaatsen en praktijken. Door erfgoed vooral te beschouwen als een set aan processen worden de toekomst-vormende aspecten van erfgoed beter zichtbaar. De gegeneraliseerde processen zijn:

1. Categoriseren – identificatie, naamgeving, documenteren
2. Cureren – verzamelen, selecteren, toekennen, waarderen, etc.
3. Conserveren – verzorging, conservering, opslag, archiveren, beheren
4. Communiceren – gebruiken, interpreteren, tentoonstellen, verspreiden, waarden uitdrukken

Mogelijke/alternatieve toekomsten vormgeven door middel van erfgoedpraktijken is per definitie speculatief en emergent. Het creatieve potentieel van deze benadering wordt aan de hand van vier thema's in kaart gebracht:

1. Diversiteit – in biologisch, cultureel en linguistisch opzicht.
2. Overvloed – “coping with overflow”
3. Onzekerheid – hoe kan het ongewisse van een toekomst als creatieve/innoverende factor werken?
4. Transformatie – Als proces ipv object centraal staat, (hoe) kunnen processen van vergankelijkheid onderdeel worden gemaakt van de erfgoedpraktijk?

— A post by Roy Scholten