pragmati.st

Interesting interview with graphic designer Michael Bierut about the overall excellence and startling consistency of Obama’s visual branding.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they’re all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I’ve done graphics for events—and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, “Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial.” It just doesn’t seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it’s all reflected there too—all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.

(via NotCot)

Me and Ian attended RubyEast today. It was a good conference, obviously much smaller than RailsConf, but a nice break from working on the startup and a good chance to meet other rubyists. I’ll write up a longer recap later in the weekend but for now I just want to post one quote I found interesting.

Before his presentation Obie Fernandez was asked about the financial incentives for writing a book. He’s a good person to ask as The Rails Way is coming out soon and is pretty much preordained to be a hit by technical publishing standards. His answer:

“I will probably make a quarter of a million dollars a year for the next several years because I wrote the book. Not from the book, but because of it”

What a remarkably candid response.