AlphaDesigner Blogue

I hope I won’t have to explain that this collection shouldn’t be taken literary. It wasn’t planned and I rarely make self portraits, as for the controversy that some people may see - it isn’t consciously intended.

After about 30 years of sleeping with a gun beside my bed, I finally decided to pay attention to it. And because I don’t enjoy shooting (or hunting), the safest thing to do was to take some photos with it. It’s a very beautiful shotgun. Very old school. Once upon a time, people made them beautiful and lethal, now they concentrate only on the latter. Which is a shame.

Long time ago I saw an image of a man licking his rifle and I thought it was pretty iconic. No need to mention it wasn’t as delicately staged and finely tuned as my interpretation here but that didn’t make it less thought provoking. Men have a lot of passions. The most popular one is the passion for cars, guns come second, at least in this century. What unites both of them is the almost sexual relationship between the owner and the gadget. So I tried to turn the shotgun into a lover and illustrate different emotions.

We humans are the only animals that are aware of their power to kill. In ancient times when men really had to face their prey, the animals were glorified. All religions and myths have their roots in animal worship. In those times, men didn’t kill the animal, it was the beast that mercifully offered itself to them. And the relationship was strikingly intimate. You had to make your weapon, perform a ritual, ask the supreme beast for a license to kill and only then you went to hunt. After you had your dinner, you had to bury the bones in the ground or perform another ritual that was meant to restore the life which has been offered to you voluntarily.

Of course civilization erased all this and even managed to reverse the notion of the hunt. Through a series of revolutionary concepts men became the masters of the world but I guess something of this intimate relationship still remains. Nowadays animals are too far away from us when they meet their dead because shotguns are not spears after all, so the sensual fixation has shifted from the beast to the simple act of killing and the weapon itself.

Several days ago, a couple of friends and I began to make a list of interesting (read strange) search requests, taken from our own online statistics. Needless to say, we were amazed at the results. I don’t want to fill this post with weird examples, but I can’t resist to mention some:

women on toilet for 2 years
take your dog to vote
design of love
moist climates dry
non flash player based porn

It really makes you wonder who on Earth could type such things in a search engine box. And why? And what was expected to appear in this search results?

Of course, ridiculous or strange search requests aren’t something new. Neither are irrelevant search results even when you type a precisely structured request. The problem is that when you look at your statistics, you realize that the number of people who land on your pages just accidentally is steadily increasing. And about 50 percent of them get there due to inconsistent search requests.

And here comes the real concern. This messy irrelevant statistic is putting the effectiveness of search engines and all the hype around the technologies related to them into question. Sure, computers and Internet made things easier when it comes to handling and classifying information. But we rarely acknowledge that they also increased the number of information that needs to be classified, stored, and accessed.

If this statement sounds too abstract, there’s another way to illustrate the problem. Just look at what CCDs and digital imaging did to photography. In the pre-digital age, taking photos was a serious thing to do. We had to pay for film, we had only one shot per frame and finally, we had to take the roll and develop it in a lab. Most family albums consisted of no more than 200 photos, from the wedding, to the funeral. Today, my personal collection of photos is closing 10,000 and I don’t even have a record of all those that got deleted - either during the database optimization or directly after the import from the memory cards. Most of my Flickr contacts have above 1,000 photos published as well. And all this happened in the past 3 years.

What shall we do with all this information, which we (sometimes only by habit) consider vitally important? It’s logical to assume the bubble will burst, one way or another. Either that or we will drown in a sea of information without being able to process it in order to take any advantage. Or maybe drowning is not a good metaphor. Information, by definition, is something that needs a brain, in order to exist. If there’s no brain, it all goes to hell. The sad additional nuance is that brains have their limits as well.

Fontstruct is, to my knowledge, the first font building application that is aimed at the home user and has the simplicity to prove it. What is even more exciting, it is a web application and just like the online version of Photoshop, it is Flash based.

You go there, register, play, save and eventually share the result with the rest of the world. I was instinctively skeptical about the quality of the user generated catalog but it took me less than 5 minutes of browsing to become convinced that the result is, well, close to awesome.

Of course you don’t have the flexibility of a really professional font building tool but actually that makes sense because the restrictions aren’t meant as obstacles to creativity but as a safety net to prevent all sorts of mistakes an unexperienced font creator could (most definitely) make.

via Creativestem.