enemies and lovers
Yesterday tcepsa, gipsieee and I sat on a hillock in a sunny park and traded thoughts on my two favorite warring quotations on work:
"The perfect is the enemy of the good", and "Good enough isn't."
The one from Voltaire, the other from dymaxion's dad, and other places.
The discussion is impossible to summarize, because between three people we had at least six notions of different motivations for work that might influence the level of effort one ought to devote to it. It seems reasonable to me that one's vocation carry a different standard than their relaxing avocations, though the definitions slip sideways in the wonderfully subtle case where the "rightness" of the product of one's work is entirely subjective.
I could go on like that for a while, but instead I will complain that I am going bugfuck crazy on my current graphic homework, which is to make the rest of the alphabet for the rusted wireframe lettering I posted on Facebook t'other week. (Decided not to do the red satin, since it's not really legible further back than one foot.)
Not being a complete Apple fangirl, I'm not convinced that the blank white background offers the best possible figure/ground relationship to all things, and I take seriously the Bierut essay from DO a bit back. The whole reason I liked the red satin concept was the idea of temporarily borrowing a figure out of the ground, literally pulling by threads. The wire figures float in anonymous white space, chunks of un-graphic detritus existing only in opposition to their ground, and I've tried contrasting them on various thematic and less thematic substances -- blue silk, pools of cream, more of that cursed sculptural mesh, skin, concrete -- but they never become a more-than-surface component of anything.
So that's the best visual I have on hand, but now it's Monday night and I don't like it.
I would say I should've thought of this when I had the idea. But, no, I DID think of this, and decided at the time that it was a good image. Grrrrr.
ETA: thought of a really good complementary image with which to improve it. Unlike the thirty-odd ideas I hacked up and discarded this week, I actually LIKE IT. Mucking about with straws and pans of dish soap was not a lost cause last night. Of course, the image settled in my mind as I emerged from the subway, printed and trimmed homework in hand...
I have another week to do it in, at only a loss of some time and some photo paper.
I'd say "that's how useless-brain rolls," but that is not, in fact, how I would like to roll. Perhaps next I'll learn how to do all the iterating BEFORE the job is due.
"The perfect is the enemy of the good", and "Good enough isn't."
The one from Voltaire, the other from dymaxion's dad, and other places.
The discussion is impossible to summarize, because between three people we had at least six notions of different motivations for work that might influence the level of effort one ought to devote to it. It seems reasonable to me that one's vocation carry a different standard than their relaxing avocations, though the definitions slip sideways in the wonderfully subtle case where the "rightness" of the product of one's work is entirely subjective.
I could go on like that for a while, but instead I will complain that I am going bugfuck crazy on my current graphic homework, which is to make the rest of the alphabet for the rusted wireframe lettering I posted on Facebook t'other week. (Decided not to do the red satin, since it's not really legible further back than one foot.)
Not being a complete Apple fangirl, I'm not convinced that the blank white background offers the best possible figure/ground relationship to all things, and I take seriously the Bierut essay from DO a bit back. The whole reason I liked the red satin concept was the idea of temporarily borrowing a figure out of the ground, literally pulling by threads. The wire figures float in anonymous white space, chunks of un-graphic detritus existing only in opposition to their ground, and I've tried contrasting them on various thematic and less thematic substances -- blue silk, pools of cream, more of that cursed sculptural mesh, skin, concrete -- but they never become a more-than-surface component of anything.
So that's the best visual I have on hand, but now it's Monday night and I don't like it.
I would say I should've thought of this when I had the idea. But, no, I DID think of this, and decided at the time that it was a good image. Grrrrr.
ETA: thought of a really good complementary image with which to improve it. Unlike the thirty-odd ideas I hacked up and discarded this week, I actually LIKE IT. Mucking about with straws and pans of dish soap was not a lost cause last night. Of course, the image settled in my mind as I emerged from the subway, printed and trimmed homework in hand...
I have another week to do it in, at only a loss of some time and some photo paper.
I'd say "that's how useless-brain rolls," but that is not, in fact, how I would like to roll. Perhaps next I'll learn how to do all the iterating BEFORE the job is due.