Iskra Design

I may be retired from lettering design, but I still love the quiet, and for me, austere practice of designing a quotation. I come from the school of typography that thinks that the designer should get out of the way and let the message speak without affect. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy calligraphic exuberance, but when it comes to really reading the words, it is usually some simplified font well spaced that does the job. I am very limited here by the fonts on Instagram. My vast library of typefaces is no longer usable on my computer, thank you endless updates, TrueType and planned obsolescence🥲.

I will put a link in comments to the article that this quote comes from. Naomi Klein is beyond brilliant and is writing new and important perspectives on the techno oligarchy seeking to control our current world.

Jeff Bezos sent William Shatner up into outer space thinking that the Star Trek mission leader would come back a confirmed ambassador for leaving the planet. Shatner’s heartfelt witness and wisdom should be read by every world leader and every grown child raised on video games in a basement. Go outside! Dig in the dirt and walk among trees! Wade barefoot in a river, greet sunrise from a tiny boat smaller than a yacht. Praise and protect this Eden, here, now.

Letterforms hold up the world. The Steel Bridge, Portland.

Inspiration. From an unmet mentor who left too soon.

August hasn’t all been about lying around eating grapes and reading books here. I just launched a new portfolio of industrial photography based on the Nucor steel plant in Delridge. Most of this will be shared over at my page here in Instagram. My work will be included in Art and Steel, with remarkable paintings from the Seattle Plein Air Group opening at Youngstown Cultural Center in September, (details coming soon! See link in bio for portfolio.

OK, I’m officially back to reading and now I can’t stop. Sorry, that’s all you get for the weekend: BOOKS!!! I am now madly in love with this author. Also just a note about a novel that would be adjacent to this, best novel read in the last 10 years is Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Eagan. It also involves women going underwater and repairing ships.

I joined a book group this week after stopping by Phinney books and discovering an entire shelf full of books that held my attention, and emptied my bank account. . . They had all been recommended by particular book group, in Ballard! And unlike 99.9% of all other BookGroup’s in Seattle, they are still accepting new people. I need an entire village to get me to read books instead of my phone. There’s no contest with this book: I am absolutely mesmerized. Summer routine: work work work in the studio and my break is a quick walk to the cafe for reading and coffee instead of doom scrolling. The world as I knew it returns the minute I start moving my eyes across a piece of paper with typesetting, bound on one edge as one person’s vision in what they call a “novel.” What are you reading this summer?

“Guardian,” photography and paint, limited edition archival pigment print.

This is the season that we are in. An ember jumps the blue lake to alight in forest on the other side and turn it from green to red and those of us still “safely“ on the west side of the mountain range look on in helpless grief as 700 homes are reduced to maps of gray and black ash in the edge zones of Spokane and the wind keeps rising, hungry for more.

I walk through the house at sunrise in the uncanny orange light that will keep many of us housebound for days with a choice of how to hold apocalypse when it is still at bay but coming close. Because I cannot bear to feel hopeless or helpless, my mind turns to the tasks of citizenship and stewardship of the city in which I live: How are we to view trees when they are now redefined as kindling? Should we follow the march of our YIMBY techno leaders who envision a city comprised entirely of concrete and a few steel planters? This is what the new “One Seattle” zoning allows, with 90% impermeable surface allowed on every lot, and 100% in the new “Centers” coming soon with the feverishly named “Taller Denser Faster” plan championed by our now-famous mayor.

Perhaps the “Abundance” movement, of which this plan is an ideological piece, — this unholy alliance of high-tech, and neoliberal “environmentalism” in which a data center is actually a park because it is where you park your data—will keep us safe from fire.

Oh wait, 31 data centers have caught fire this year. 🧯
(Continued⬇️)

I attended a remarkable civic meeting last night about design review in Seattle. It was sponsored by Allied Arts, the storied organization that helped to save the Pike Place Market. When I had my design office downtown I was on the board, and I was dismayed to see it go quiet and nearly extinct during pandemic. I love to see new energy bringing together a coalition of people all over the city who care about sense of place and neighborhood and sustainability. Because that is what is under assault right now in the unnecessary war between those who want affordable housing and those who want to keep Seattle some resemblance of the city they recognize.

A prime target in the polarizing conversations online are Seattle’s “suburban-style neighborhoods“ which are pictured as pristine rolling lawn enclaves laced with pesticides and filled with complacent wealthy NIMBYS. What I see is very different. I walk everywhere. I talk to my neighbors when they are in their yards. I see lawns supporting vast populations of clover and bees and going dormant in the summer and requiring no water. I see front yards used as installations for art and politics and wild, personal expression.

A house just-sold around the corner from me uses reclaimed doors of all colors as its fence. It housed three young men as an affordable rental. The doors and the renters will all be removed for a cluster of HardiePlank unimaginative structures that looked exactly like every other structure being built, selling upwards of $800,000.

The lilies grow on the other side of the low picket fence that separates me from my immediate neighbors: retired, not-wealthy school counselors struggling to pay astronomical property taxes. The scent of these lilies perfumes the air in both of our yards and fills me with gratitude for my neighbor’s love of flowers. Sense of place, character, creativity, connection, these are values that have no dollars attached to them. My friends, how do you effectively organize to lobby for something with “no value?”

Walking around, first this, then that. At Elliott Bay Books, reading the room, everything arranged by the god of random purpose.