but there’s just a certain hollowness to digital that i can’t seem to get away from. i do understand that things printed on paper, or carved out of wood or built out of stone don’t last forever either. it all breaks down. but for all it’s usefulness, digital is inferior to physical when it comes to making a personal, emotional connection with someone.

digital lacks the tactile. for example, would you consider looking at pictures of these letterpress calendars a better experience or actually having one, holding it, feeling the impressions with your fingers a better experience? i think i know the answer. it’s why cordes printing even bothers to letterpress them in the first place rather than just emailing a digital rendering of the art to their customers. the impression is a lot deeper and longer lasting (pun intended).

digital is important. it is extremely useful, and it definitely does help facilitate human connection. but, in my opinion, it simply cannot invoke desire as can a beautiful piece of clothing, or facade, or couch, or chair, or yes, letterpress.

perhaps there was a certain aesthetic quality to the fingerprint, but that wasn’t the beauty that she saw in it. what was beautiful to her was what the fingerprint was communicating. the story that there was a real person who had actual contact with the piece, who had poured something of themselves into the work. that fingerprint was the residue of a human connection. and it was beautiful.

this is not to say however, that more expensive is better. for example, our company prints our business cards on the backs of cereal boxes. the stock is quite thick so as to have a nice tactile quality. furthermore, this helps us send the message that we want to conserve. that we are at least in some way trying to be conscious about the impact that our materials have on the environment.

and cheaper on the front end doesn’t necessarily translate to long-term savings. in brooklyn, it seems to be popular right now to “restore” the facade of a building with what appears to me to be styrofoam and some sort of mudding spread on top of it. you can poke a hole in it with a fork. how long will that last compared to brick or stone, or even glass or metal? and beyond all of that, it just looks contrived rather than authentic, in my opinion.

as we undertake design projects, the impact of the materials we choose on the beauty of the project must be a major consideration.

on the other hand, it is not the object that is the idea, or that is the source of the beauty, in other words. rather it is the mind that conceived of the thing that holds the seeds of beauty. a beautiful logo or type treatment is not the source of the beauty we see in it, but rather a conduit to manifest to the viewers the beauty that is conceived in the mind of the designer who created it.

i’ll turn here again to c.s. lewis;

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself…”

but there is a fantastic stretch of beautiful (mostly) dedicated bike lane between williamsburg and dumbo. so i bought a bike. and it is a beater, but the price was definitely right.

on friday i rode said bike to dumbo to do a couple of registration things at green desk. it felt like pure freedom. speed of commute without the cumbersomeness of a car nor the price tag of a subway card.

i then rode it to trader joe’s for groceries on sunday. and again on monday toward dumbo. i say toward because i didn’t make it. gradually, peddling got harder, and harder. so i dismounted to confirm what i feared. a flat tire. on the uptick, i was only about 1/4 of a mile from my destination. and on the up-uptick, there is a great bike shop maybe 3 blocks from green desk called recycle a bicycle. bike owners, go there. the fixed me up with what i needed with far less than i expected to pay.

i got two new tires, a new tube (for the flat one), and a new rim for the front (it was slightly bent from the get go). the new smoothness of the ride surprised me, honestly. and it was then that i felt it.

beautiful redemption.

as we continue to explore this idea of beauty, our desire is to write essays. essays that expound upon the ways listed above, and essays that explore general thoughts on beauty and it’s very nature. the previous post on the salt shaker is an essay of this sort. and we have two more in the queue; on redemption and on materialism.

we hope you enjoy.

“The sweetest thing of all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
-C.S. Lewis

consider this salt shaker and sugar bowl (i think sugar packets go it it. maybe?). anyway, they’re not really an essential business or design item. but i wanted to make sure they made the trip from williamsburg to DUMBO because i think they’re beautiful. i love the particular hue of the blue plastic, i love the punched-out pattern in the metal, the roughness of the metal. so many things about this are attractive to me precisely because they cannot be reproduced on a screen (yeah, yer looking at the picture, but you can’t pick them up unless you come here).

in some small way, they enrich my life with their presence. and i wanted to make sure that they continued to do so.

to try to bring this bit of oddness to a point, the idea is that beauty manifests in different ways. visually, audibly, tactiley (not a word but you get it), and there is a link. observing the beauty and the manifestation of it in your favorite music will have bearing on the visual design you create (and vice versa for any musicians reading along). i like that music and visual arts share terminology; rhythm, tone, texture (i like to apply “texture” as description for certain musical elements). how might musical rhythm be interpreted visually? or tone? things like “warmth” or “grit” that we could find in both music and design? even just considering the feeling a particular work of music gives you in a general sense…