sex drugs and intellectual freedom

Every Friday, Ben brings you SD&IF’s weekend space filler With Us / Against Us. Prepare to be torn down, then gloriously uplifted!

Against Us

Drug dealers are also all music pirates. I’m sure the RIAA has “correlation=causation” tattooed on employee eyelids during indoctrination, so you plain ol’ music pirates may soon be pinched as reefer fiends. Personally, I won’t be able to get through my pirated copy of E=MC² (sure to be featured in a future edition of A Case for Censorship!) without a heaping helping of delicious crack. Daddy needs his medicine!

NASCAR penalizes 10 teams after Daytona! This is an outrage! Rise up with me, people! Altered rear spoiler? That spoiler was altered when I found it! This is completely irregul…oh, nevermind.

OK, what about this? Vicki Iseman’s employer pulled her bio from their site after the New York Times suggested she may have been improperly linked with John McCain (ha!). I don’t think they get the internet. What I find most concerning is this: why couldn’t the Times come up with a more salacious picture for such a potentially ruinous, gossipy story? That would have put it over the late-nighter, tabloidy top! I demand a foxed-up photo illustration of the two of them together, pronto!

I know you all could really give a crap about type decisions and other design nerdery, but this is my column, so strap in and shut it. Among the many, many things that most politicians seem to ignore (almost gleefully, I think) is the anguished cry that millions of forever put-upon graphics designers stifle when they see a campaign logo that looks like it’s hawking a dental cream. Actually, the general population probably ignores that as well. But perhaps it’s not a stretch that at least someone believes in the transformative power of a certain font’s idealist pedigree.

With Us

Set Your Style is a “blogazine” (I’ll forgive the awkward combination—they’re Italian) that whittles the internet into an impressive slice flavored just with the design, art, music and fashion that you need to know about. Only the coolest culture here, folks. As deliciously obscure icing, if your computer is so equipped, the site is intended to be set in the gorgeous and multifaceted Myriad Pro.

Minnesota bar owners are luring smokers back in from the cold by holding “theater nights” that exploit a loophole in the state’s smoking ban. Because smoking is allowed during artistic performances, owners simply claim that the entire bar is putting on an all-night play. MPR reported that one bar called their exhibition Before the Ban—the avant-garde-ness of which almost makes me overlook how completely specious this tactic actually is. I picture a giant dimly-lit room full of people in black turtlenecks silently smoking and sipping Stellas, though I’m 100-percent sure that this is not what actually occurred. I think if we can get a John Cage karaoke night going, we’ll be set.

Lined & Unlined is just Rob Giampietro’s “filing cabinet on the internet,” but what a filing cabinet! From the various published-elsewhere writings of Rob and design partner Kevin Smith (not that one), to reading recommendations, to random thoughts that’ll get you thinking, L&UL fills a long-ignored need for intelligent design-influenced commentary.