Toronto
I found myself in Toronto this past weekend for a seminar put on by Shawn Pucknell and the FITC (Flash in the Can). The speaker was the somewhat infamous David Carson, so naturally I was intrigued and very much desired to go – hence I did.
The start of the seminar was a rocky one, as David was detained, late, bored – who knows. But he did not appear for the first day, which left a very :: weary :: Mr. Pucknell to break us the news, and send us on our merry way – hoping that he would show for Sunday. As Shawn was very gracious in the past, with me missing several of the workshops I had paid for, I left returning the favor. Actually, I didn’t really care in the least. I had never been to Toronto, and the city seemed very interesting. So off I went, plodding along the streets, camera in hand; clicking away.
The city is pretty damn big, and I must say quite clean, well organized; and well… a bit strange. Litsa and I found it a bit hard getting around, and getting our bearings to figure out where everything is/was. Once we did – it was great. I must have walked 4 or 5 miles on Saturday. It’s been a long time since I have wandered that diligently around any city, never mind one as large as Toronto.
After much wandering, I went back to the room, and sat on my arse for an hour or two before Litsa was done with the spa, and then we were off to a glorious dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Freakin’ YUM! Since it was sort-of our anniversary trip/dinner, we ate it up in style, and it was worth every Canadian penny.
Back to David Carson
So on Sunday, the session went off without a hitch, and I must say that I found the whole thing quite worth-while and rejuvenating. I mean, I work.live in a creative vacuum, so it’s not like I get a ton of hands-on, face-to-face exposure with this level of creativity and inspiration on any sort of regular or imaginary basis. I soaked it up like a sponge. A lot of what David talked about was his own work, and how he comes to the culmination of a project. It’s funny, how when you really start to think about this kind of thing it seems like a big fat DUH! after someone tells you that’s what they do – but you never really think of it that way – or give it much credence.
Some of the aspects of Davids work I find most intriguing is his typographical flow. Not so much the placement, or the fonts used. But the flow of the type as it sits and creates a direction and movement within the design. How it directs visual traffic, how your stops, or bounces from one point to another. There are quite few things that I wouldn’t have thought to do before seeing it done, and that it works. For instance, letting lines of text flow over one another, obscuring the other letters, and creating shapes out of small bits of text.
It’s all still fairly difficult to come out and explain coherently, I am really still trying to figure it all out, and see how it will affect me and my work….
Even still, I was energized the entire trip home last night, and still am for that matter. I have a lot of work to do for our new site coming up, and i am chomping at the bit trying to figure out ways to liven things up and create a less web-sitey fell to the whole project – introducing more intelligent typography and design elements into the whole site structure.