My happy little messy letterfilled corner of the world.

Every time I look back at this blog, two things hit me: (1) Whoa, it’s already been <number of weeks> since I’ve blogged huh where the hell has the time gone!? And (2) hm since then I’ve done and learned so much that I should write a book not a blog post. I won’t write a book.

It’s definitely getting busy here, and there is so much learning. Off the main stage of type, what feels like a big breakthrough right now is that I’m slowly getting my head around a more object-oriented approach to programming. I’ve been scripting for years (and happily), but between my self-taught JavaScript, ActionScript and PHP, I was stuck writing inefficient and poorly reusable spaghetti code. Years ago I used to say I code like I ski – it doesn’t look pretty, but I’m happy if it works, is approximately fast enough, and everything is still in one piece afterwards. Well, I’m learning to ride a jetski now. Our Python classes with Just van Rossum have been catalyzing a change of thinking into what feels like higher-level abstraction. I published my first little RoboFont extension last week (it makes test words), and have officially tasted blood. :) It feels like peeking over a ridge on a mountain hike and seeing a whole landscape unfold… With a scriptable type editor and this, the possibilities seem vast, and I’m beginning to feel the process as something fluid and malleable rather than something fixed, predefined and “correct” to follow. This is exciting. Code empowers, people. Thinking empowers.

These days, most of my time goes into the Revival project with Paul van der Laan; this is pretty complex and difficult (and probably my favorite project right now). Also here, I feel that I learn a lot not just about drawing letters, but also thinking about how to approach the whole thing, what to draw, and how to set up my process – in a project like this, it’s easy to get lost in details, in a deluge of data, and hard to keep on track. – The latter is sort of generally true because we’re doing a lot (not that I’m complaining), between having started my final stonecarving piece, sketching out a family of six broad-nib-based text fonts, drawing Greek… and with Erik van Blokland we’ve been TypeCooking – something I’ve done before, but now it counts, and it’s faster, and so much fun.

The longer I’m here, the less I regret not doing this earlier. When I applied to TypeMedia, I felt a little odd for doing so at the age of 34; it just happened that way, I studied late, came to type design late, then worked, etc.; back then I sort of wished I’d gotten into the groove more quickly. But why? I’m not really sure, and now that I’m here, it’s just all exactly good. This is not to say that doing this at a younger age (as most do – most of my classmates are between 25 and 30) is a bad idea. But everyone is obviously different, and personally I appreciate having a bit of experience under my belt that I can draw from, a bit more knowledge perhaps of myself too. And really, it’s not like I’m learning any less for starting off with more experience in some fields (and for the record, I have none in others).

Mostly I’m just very grateful to be here, to have gotten to a point where I could up and leave – and come delve into this letter wonderland we’re in, with this great little group of lettercrazed people from all over. And if the humor ever gets too immature for my ripe old age, I just try to tune out. ;)

Pakjesavond at Type & Media. Did I mention I really like this group?

For one thing, I’ve been enjoying diving into Python for real. We’re working with DrawBot, an intuitive environment, discovering ways of building letters parametrically. This is, as James wrote, insanely fun. It’s sometimes also insanely hard. I’m currently trying to wrap my head around how curves work. I looked up how to mathematically deal with béziers and now I’m sorry I did (it’s a little daunting). I’ll start by reviewing the basics I review every time I have to script visual stuff … trigonometry breaks my brain every damn time. I don’t know why my brain has a selective incapacity for angles, I just can’t remember which function is which. Every time I have to apply a sine or a cosine or an arcsomething, things go … hell, I’d be happy if they went pear-shaped, right now this “o” looks like a melted Pacman.

When this grows up it will be a beautiful “o”.

But it’s challenging in a fun way, and I know I can solve this if I set my mind to it. Writing is harder for me (as in calligraphy, which they don’t call what we do here) – it requires humility and dexterity, not two of my greatest strengths, and practice, which I lack. I started typing an (unpublished, whiny) post two weeks ago, after our first broad-nib writing lesson in which I had entirely failed at making straight lines, never mind balanced curves.

I was hoping to be a bit more graceful about this but the truth so far has been, I suck at writing and calligraphy and it makes me angry at myself. And of course I’m in the lion’s den here at TypeMedia – and on purpose too –, so I was bound to hit this obstacle very soon. But admitting that I handle the tools clumsily, producing crooked results, is hard for someone who’s between Swiss and OCD in terms of wanting things regular and aligned, and expects a lot from herself. 

Since then I’ve learned that (a) it’s a little silly to get upset about being bad at something I haven’t practised before, and (b) the thing is to accept the “I don’t know shit” barrier, and then start working with the tools (from zero, if needs be) instead of against them (kind of like what Josh wrote this week as well). It’s hard to admit to being bad at things, not knowing how to do them; to check my ego at the door. But it’s necessary. Once I realized that I don’t have anything to prove, it was okay. Because the point is the path, the learning curve, and on that I have embarked. And I’m learning a lot and you know what? Learning, discovering new things, feels way better than the fearful “safety” of thinking I already know.