Coffee Font

Conversation at mid-morning…

Ralph: Check out the sign on the window.

Bill: Yeah, looks alright, I guess.

Ralph: But do you see how the letters resemble coffee beans? Pretty clever, right?

Bill: Hmm, seems like a bit of overthinking, don't you think?

Ralph: It's like a modern-day Chinese pictograph, telling a story with its design.

Bill: Well, to me, it's just eye candy.

Ralph: Different strokes for different folks. But you know, companies shell out big bucks for cool font designers.

Bill: True. I mean, imagine if they used Comic Sans. Huh. Epic job loss.

Ralph: And Helvetica would be too sterile for a cozy coffee shop.

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Voice-over

Matching a name to a font involves consideration of the person or entity’s personality, symbolic associations, expression of an abstract concept, visual allegory, perhaps a cultural or a narrative connection. You can go with instinct but having criteria in mind help.

Life as Cricket

99 not out…

Mother: That’s him. 1940.

Imran: He was head prefect.

Mother: All the boys crossed their arms in photos back then. So young, so fit. We thought we could live forever.

Imran: I feel he’s still here.

Mother: But he’s not. I don’t see him sitting in the chair. 

Imran: Today he would have been 100. Missed by only six months. A good innings though.
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Voice-over

Life as a cricket match? A birthday party for a man who wasn’t there, just missed hitting a century, but who nonetheless displayed great technique, timing and teamwork. Other cricket metaphors apply in this case: he kept his end up and scored a good batting average.

Beginning from the end: house design and lesson design

Parallel approaches…

Teacher: Need a template to plan the lessons.

Architect: Sure. A sort of floorplan in architectural terms.

Teacher: Like planning a house?

Architect: When you design a house, the first thing you locate are the windows. You walk on a site and visualize the views.

Teacher: See what you mean. So an online lesson should have a vision which then leads to its goal-setting.

Architect: Yes, first visualize the outcome then specify the steps.

Teacher: Got it. the upfront mantra in neon should be “performance objective”. What skillset will this lesson deliver? What is the student expected to DO after sitting through a Zoom session?

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Voice-over

House design works backwards from walking on a site and imagining the views which then determines the floorplan and walls. Instructional design is working backwards from imagining the demonstrable performances of students at the end of a lesson which helps write the lesson objectives.

Paper Tiger

Recalling adolescent activism…

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Anton: A friend I found recently on social media I had known wrote a poem. Back in the mid-60s, at university.

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Paul: About you?

Mai Long, 1958:
Chinese poster

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Anton: He referred to me as a tiger. But “a paper tiger”.

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Paul: Like you weren’t a real tiger?

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Anton: But he finished it with “Then we saw this paper tiger had atomic teeth.” At the time I thought it was a most original metaphor for my wannabe activism.

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Paul: And then you found out that it was a Mao metaphor.

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Anton: Yes. It hadn’t been such an original poem after all. Perhaps he meant that my activism wasn’t so original either.

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Voice-over

Mao’s reference to paper tiger in 1956 was to reactionaries, American imperialism, the atomic bomb. Called them paper tigers meaning they weren’t as dangerous as they looked. But the bomb, well that could be dangerous. Hence the Khrushchevian reference to atomic teeth.

Propaganda poster by Mai Long from 1958. Man wearing a tiger’s mask and holding an American flag. Chinese farmers, soldiers and workers ridiculing him.

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Anthropomorphism

On cross-species communication…

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Don Quentin: Why do you call the cat Boris?

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Pete Gonzales: He looks like a Boris.

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Don Quentin: And you talk to him as if he were human. It’s not as though he understands human language.

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Pete Gonzales: Sometimes we communicate using his language.

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Don Quentin: You meow?

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Pete Gonzales: And sometimes I blink at him. Then he blinks back.

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Don Quentin: So, it’s a bilingual relationship?

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Pete Gonzales: Well, at times it seems we’re talking past each other.

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Don Quentin: Like the Chinese expression about a chicken talking to a duck.

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Voice-over

In writing, anthropomorphism helps us relate to animals, they come to life. The stories become more nuanced in meaning. Human language added complexity to the plots of Animal Farm, Cats and The Lion King. Imagine if those stories had been told through grunts, meows and blinks.

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The Panda in the Kanga Pouch and other metaphors

An animal analogy...

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Trev: Here’s a good metaphor. A panda in a kangaroo pouch. Even rhymes.

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from The Economist, Jan 19th 2019

Basil: Where’s that from?

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Trev: The Economist on January 19th. Clever. The kanga is Australia. The panda is China.

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Basil: What’s the panda doing in the pouch?

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Trev: China is popping up building roads and ports in Pacific islands. Near Australia.

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Basil: Chinese geopolitical strategy in a lot of regions.

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Trev: But what got our goat was that the Chinese wanted to build a military base in Vanuatu.

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Basil: Ouch. Close to home.

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Trev: Right in what we Aussies regard as our “patch”. Even if it is water.

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Voice-over

Clear where the artist got the “pouch” idea from. A fair swag of other metaphors in the article too, like “dropping the ball” playing “whack-a-mole.”

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