Internet Culture – Page 2 – Pixel & Pilcrow

More Like Instaddiction

Homemade gingerbread cupcakes with orange cream cheese frosting and candied ginger. In the morning light. — A picture I took of my homemade gingerbread cupcakes with orange cream cheese frosting and candied ginger (love the way the morning light caught the ginger)

Last summer I downloaded the Instagram app for my iphone, futzed around with it for an afternoon, and decided it wasn’t really that interesting. Plus, I found a different photo app called Camera+, featured on the wonderful typography website www.fontsinuse.com for its use of the beautiful typeface Bree (read their Camera+ post). It seemed pretty cool.

But the other day my boyfriend was griping about how Camera+ and Facebook both make you log into their site to view any pictures, and he put up a fairly good argument for the Instagram app instead. So I decided to try it out again, give it a second chance to impress me.

Aaaand I might be minorly addicted, already. What I either hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t been developed well enough the first time I checked it out, was Instagram’s twitter-like interface for sharing photographs and viewing a group of selected friends’ images. I quickly discovered that quite a few of my art school classmates are on there, taking awesome photographs and sharing them with all. And their photographs were doing what good photographs do—making me look twice at the world around me, making me see the beauty in a basketball court that I wouldn’t have seen the first time I looked. They made me start to look at my world through the photographer’s mental lens again, make me really look at the visual appearance of everything.

Noticing the danger of my Instagram feed become all food, I took this picture of Andrew working one evening, and played around with the filters.

Even the filters, which are part of what people love about Instagram, seem to help me develop my aesthetic sense. How does the muted blue-tinged filter make a photo feel as opposed the exact same photograph with the high-contrast filter? How are my classmates manipulating their photographs to add visual impact? Can I get good at identifying the best filter for a photograph in Instagram, in an effort to have more mastery over visual manipulation in general?

Using Instagram again reminded me almost immediately of the feel of my first semester at AAU when one of our assignments was, in addition to regular homework, to bring in 7 new images every week. The point was to get us to start looking, to start identifying good images and learning how to obtain them and make them ourselves. At the time it felt like kind of a pain in the neck to have to do every week, but it really started me looking for good images. And a graphic designer is nothing without good images.

So, in a way I feel like using Instagram is really just an extension of art school. Can I take a picture, make an image, that is beautiful and more importantly, worth sharing? We’ll see.

(Follow me on Instagram! My account name is “rewright”)

Fun with Letters – Daily Drop Caps

or those who are not yet familiar with the website, www.dailydropcap.com, a website by designer and illustrator Jessica Hische, is quite fun to explore. The project is simple enough. Starting in September of 2009, Jessica designed a new drop cap every day, creating a total of twelve alphabets, as well as an extra by guest designers. The results are delightful. Nothing matches or creates a set, but the variety is part of the charm. It’s also a great place to browse to get ideas for different type styles, and you can tell as time went on that she was forced to get more and more creative for her different letters—they start off looking like more traditional, ornate, scripty drop caps, and slowly get more and more creative, branching out to more illustrative and unusual concepts.

ome of her style tags include: Badass, Botanical, Circus, Contained, Dimensional, Girly, Graphic, Guest Alphabet, Highly Illustrative, Holiday, Monoline, Retro, Script, Seasonal, Silly, Swashy, Tattoo, Uncategorized, Victorian, Wood Type-esque. Have fun exploring! And enjoy another great aspect of her project: all of these drop caps have been created so that the public can use them for free on their own (non-commercial) websites. Pretty awesome.
essica Hische has been coming to my attention more and more lately. I’ve been checking in semi-regularly to her new site, typesf.org, where she keeps a calendar of typography events in San Francisco (she recently moved from Brooklyn to the beautiful Bay Area—I’m going to be keeping my eye out for her at design events!). She also is the creator of the fantastic and informative poster “Should I Work For Free?”. The original online version (“Since I am a crazy person and we are all nerds, this chart is entirely css and html”) can be found here, or you can order a beautiful letterpress version from her website. I’ve enjoyed exploring her regular website (as well as dailydropcaps.com), and just seeing what sort of projects she’s worked on. Seeing what other designers are doing in our field is always inspiring.