ASK ME ANYTHING. TELL ME SOMETHING.

From Aisle One:

“Grids can impede creativity.

Definitely the most ridiculous of the bunch, this myth suggests that a grid will cause a designer to be less creative. A grid should never define a design, it should work with it. To suggest that a grid can hinder creativity is the same as suggesting that a music tempo can as well. A grid is a building block that can never, and should never, impede creativity.

The legendary designer, Josef Müller-Brockmann, explained it well:

‘The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.’

Another outrageous claim is that grids are confining. When used properly, a grid will never limit or confine a design, it will grow and adapt to your liking. If someone tells you a grid gives you no freedom, that person doesn’t fully understand the purpose of a grid or how it should be used. Grids are flexible and allow for an infinite number of possibilities.

Graphic designer and writer Ellen Lupton explains:

‘To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting.’”

“Language is limiting.” Excellent analogy. Because language is, importantly, a limit on our communication; as much as it enables us to communicate, language is a constraint, allowing us to communicate through, among other things, the ruling out of the nonsensical. Good article.

From Adbusters:

“Bringing an end to this descent toward hell is the burden of the activist. But we cannot halt the decline without taking heed of Hawthorne’s story. The dilemma we face is thus: If we burn the world without a change of heart, it will resurrect; if we change our hearts without leveling the world, it will persist. Untangling this difficulty begins with acknowledging the complicated relationship between our interior reality (the mental environment) and our external reality (the physical environment). Mental pollution is not just an annoyance; it is a tool in our oppression. The interjection of advertising and other info-toxins into our mindscape neutralizes our attempts to construct an alternate future because from a poisoned mind spring only poisoned deeds. Only a new form of activism that works on both the mental and physical registers – an activism of the mental environment that defeats the enemies of our mindscape by confronting them in our landscape – will succeed in turning us away from catastrophe.”

I have a real contempt for Adbusters. Anyone who uses “mindscape” is failing (not to mention the philosophical fail of drawing such a glaring distinction between mind and world).

From the local scholar Justin Smith, on Metal vs Mammals:

“Before I arrive at my real point, let me stress that it is the last of my intentions to seek to condemn heavy metal. As I understand it, this genre emerges out of the auspicious combination of late ’60s psychedelic blues with the multifarious strains of creatively anachronistic neopaganism that became visible in the following decade, but that all, likely, have their roots in 19th-century romanticism, in Waterhouse’s fairies, in Wagner’s recycling of the Niebelungenlied, and so on. A distinguished genealogy, to be sure.”