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Combining Type With Helvetica. Our first guest is Indra Kupferschmid,

Combining Type With Helvetica.

Our first guest is Indra Kupferschmid, a German typographer and writer who lives in Bonn and teaches in Saarbrücken at the French border. As co-author of “Helvetica forever”, Indra is often asked what typeface to combine with the world’s most famous font. As Indra puts it, “Helvetica is often described as the tasteless white rice among typefaces: satisfies easily, cheap and fast. But the good thing is, you can take the design into different directions with the sauce and side dishes (the typefaces you pair with Helvetica).”

You’re your own boss now

Connor O’Brien takes a look at your day as a freelance writer.

Alright, now you’re out of bed. You’ll work two hours later to make up for the wasted time. Or maybe you’ll just work a little harder during the day. Yeah, that’s it. Don’t work longer, work smarter. You read that somewhere.

Or your day as pretty-much freelance anything. It’s all about motivation and self-control, which can easily go flying out the window.

Bill Murray interview

Dan Fierman snags a rare interiew with Bill Murray.

I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job.

Interface Overload

Derek Punsalan examines the interface choices available in a selection of washing machines, or as he puts it, not going into orbit, just looking for clean clothes. We’re a long way removed from the relative simplicity of the old machines, although one of their added features involved losing an arm. Innovation isn’t just about incremental improvements and greater safety, it means more features, more buttons and more blinky lights.

Interface Overload

The article reminded me of an exam question in a human-computer interaction course that I took years ago. We were asked to describe the best user interfaces that we had encountered. I chose to describe the space-heater in my room, it was great. The machine had one button, one switch and a few LEDs. You pressed the button to turn it on. The LEDs indicated the current temperature, and you pressed the button again to cycle through them. The switch on the base allowed the heater to rotate. After moving to an exceedingly hot top-floor apartment, I no longer needed the heater. So, I lent it to a friend’s housemate, who decided to dry clothes on the wee thing. It blew up. Although she was lacking in the brain department, the girl still has all of her limbs.

I’m still a fan of minimal hardware interfaces, with Apple handhelds being the obvious example. Another one of my favourites are the basic CrockPot models — one switch with three settings (off, high, low). Although, they’ve tried to muck things up with all manner of digital crap. But that’s progress.