All posts by David Harris
a wonderful strife
in vino
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rolling
Week 1: Stamping letters and numbers
I started playing with rubber stamps last year as a way to experiment with simple placement of letters and numbers on a blank page. It’s not exactly fine typography, but helps me understand a little more about how placement of characters has its effect. Apart from that, it is also quite fun!
Primarily, the cards are a way to experiment without overthinking, as each is done very rapidly. Each draws on some gut feeling for how the page might work. In my experiments so far, those done fastest and with the least thought have turned out to be the most effective in hindsight.
I use individual rubber stamps and a small stamp pad, stamping each letter one by one. That gives a very haphazard look to the letters and stops them being nicely aligned, but brings out the individuality of the letters, something I am looking to do here. I am stamping on cheap 3″x5″ plain index cards and working fast just to see how they come out. I’ll scan them all and post them one each day on a separate blog. Your responses to them are very welcome!
radio star
Stamped Index Cards
One of my three creative hours projects is using rubber stamps to play with letter and number placement on 3″x5″ index cards… Each day I’ll put a scan of another card here on the blog. Some are likely to be significantly less interesting than others, I fear, but some might even work out OK.
The three creative hours project
What can I create in three hours per week?
Much of my professional work is inherently creative, but it is creative within bounds imposed by external needs. I often find myself dreaming up other projects, whether in science communication, writing, design, or art, and filling notebooks with plans, squiggles, designs, and wishes for projects that I would like do on my own terms. If only I had the time.
As 2009 begins, I realise that I do, of course, have the time. If I genuinely didn’t, then I am messing up my work/life balance quite seriously and something needs to change. (I probably was messing it up these past two years, to be honest.)
So to make sure that some of those ideas move from one of my overflowing notebooks into reality, I am aiming to dedicate three hours per week to working on some creative project that I want to work on for myself, with no outcome necessary beyond the actual creation of something concrete. For me, ideas are easy, but execution is often pushed off until later. This project means I have to make myself not just come up with ideas but start to execute some of the plans. It is about turning ideas into reality, three hours at a time.
Three hours per week makes 150 hours per year, which is the equivalent of between three and four fulltime work weeks (if only I worked sensible hours). I am curious to see what I can get done in that amount of time. I have chosen three hours as it is something I can spend a weeknight doing, or a half day on a weekend, depending on what I need to get the project done. (Perhaps daylight for photography, or rentable time on an ever-so-sexy Vandercook letter press, for example.) In three hours, I know I can make real progress if I don’t have other distractions. I just need to carve it out and make it my own time.
Here comes 2009, with plenty of ideas ready to take further, three creative hours at a time.