When I was Programme Director at Trent Radio in the late 1980s, my favourite project (ironic given the setting) was the publication of The Radio Paper, a tabloid newspaper with the radio schedule, and articles about various and sundry. I was the editor, paste-up artist, and I drove it up to the printer in Tweed. I had total creative control, and I loved the newspaper format.

This is what ran “above the fold” in the first issue, September 1989. I love the typeface. And the white space. And the period.

My friends Ruth and Paul bought two working 16mm film projectors at an auction. And they let me borrow them. I rented The Union, a cooperative space that served as theatre, bar, and hangout, funding itself mostly from the illegal but overlooked sales of beer. And then I borrowed films from the National Film Board. I tried my darnedest to make films from the NFB archive like The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar seem new and sexy. And this was my handbill for a showing of Mon Oncle Antoine:

This was my first experience with a “full bleed” handbill — it was really just creative use of a paper cutter. But it is one of my favourite little pieces from those days.

Sometime during my tenure in Peterborough — the specific year is lost to history — I ran for election as a School Trustee for the Peterborough County Board of Education. While I was certainly interested in and passionate about education, I must admit that my primary motivation was the urging of my friend Simon, who assured me that there were only 7 nominations for 8 positions, and thus I would be acclaimed. Needless to say, a lot of nominations came in at the last minute, and I had to wage a campaign.

Pictured are both sides of a double-sided 8-1/2 by 11 inch handbill that I produced on a very early laser printer, then blew up with a photocopier, and printed on a Gestetner (a sort of bridge technology between printing press, spirit-master duplicator and photocopier). And that was my hastily-conceived “platform” there on the right.

I came 13th.

Tonight I went up to the attic and dug out the large Rubbermaid container that holds my “design archive” — the collected output of 8 years of an off-and-on career as a freelance graphic designer that ended with our move to Prince Edward Island in 1993. I’m going to scan some of the items from the Rubbermaid, and splash them here, if only so that if I lose the container, I’ll have some record.

I should preface the series with an admission of fraud: I am not, nor was I ever, really a graphic designer. I mean in the sense that (a) I received any training in the art, (b) accepted any feedback about what I did, or (c) can actually do anything other than sometimes clever manipulation of type.

On a lark I once took the Rubbermaid into the Ontario College of Art “portfolio day” where you could have your work critiqued in anticipation of applying to art college somewhere. The very kind adjudicator praised me for my “typographical sense,” but was left silent when I admitted that that’s all there was. I couldn’t draw a cat, or a horse. And moving outside of the safe confines of black and white wasn’t something I was comfortable with.

So maybe I was a “dual color type manipulator for hire” rather than a graphic designer.

In any case, here’s what I manipulated…

This was a logo for the 1992 season of what later became Peterborough New Dance. I came up both with the design and with the “confront choreophobia” tagline itself, which I remain quite fond of for its double and triple entendres. Here’s an example of how it was used in a 1992 program for marta marta danse:

I’ve decided to quit my day job and use the time I free up to read kottke.org full-time. Now that the blog is revivified, the flow has increased from a trickle to a veritable flood, and I’ve decided that I can’t really do justice to the content unless it has my full attention. If you’d like to support me as a micro-patron-patron, buy me things from Amazon.com that I can read between the posts.

Earlier in the week I wrote about Rob’s new course and my take on it. Many thoughtful people offered their comments (that was partially the point).

Here’s a recapitulation of my thoughts after reading those comments.

I’m not suggesting that weblogs + Internet + chat rooms = an education. I’m not suggesting that doctors can learn how to perform colonoscopies online and medical school.

I’m not suggesting that we drink virtual beer and have virtual sex with virtual coeds in lieu of doing those real coming of age things at university.

I’m not suggesting that there is no knowledge nor that there is nothing to learn.

I’m not even suggesting that everyone can learn anything they need on their own in a sort of self-reliant education libertarian paradise.

Nor do I mean to suggest that universities are such a bad thing.

But I do think that one thing that Internet + weblogs have allowed us to realize is that there are other ways of organizing our societal affairs, be it work, education, or otherwise.

I would never say that “we don’t need libraries because we have the Internet.” That’s not the point.

It’s not so much the utility of the web, as what the web allows to, inspires us to, demands us to think. So it’s not “web = e-library.” It’s “library = information” and “web = information” and “wow, that’s different; I wonder what that means.”

It’s how the web changes how we think about the world that interests me.

I think that some of the ways the Internet is organized (decentralized, ubiquitous, anarchic, open source) and some of the the ways weblogs are constructed (interconnected, distributed, personal, opinionated) have inspired me (and others, including Rob, I think) to realize that we can do other things — things that perhaps we’ve always done in a top-down, centralized, expensive, carefully controlled, closed source way — differently.

For example, the Zap Your PRAM conference. This conference had no outside funding, no advertising, required no meetings to organize. And yet we had people from three countries gather in one place, almost spontaneously, for an interesting weekend of discussion.

This is only “revolutionary” in the sense that the usual way one organizes a conference involves considerably more time, money, and effort. And therefore it’s usually only institutions and governments that have the resources to do so.

The lesson in the conference for me is not “hey, we used weblogs and the Internet to organize a conference: technology is great!” The lesson is that the Internet and weblogs allowed us to envision ourselves as powerful actors, the “kind of people who can organize conferences.” The rest was easy, but the rearrangement of the mental planets was a necessary precursor to everything that followed.

Another example.

Several years ago, the selfsame Rob invited me to participate in a project in Kinkora. The project, which started out originally to construct a building that would showcase different approaches to agriculture, development and ecology, had evolved away from a physical building, and into a series of “test case” projects that would serve a similar showcasing role. Rob asked me to come up with some ideas, and one of those that I presented I called “This Bag of Potatoes Has a Website.”

The idea was that every bag of potatoes leaving Prince Edward Island would have a unique website address attached to it, and at that address consumers would find the “provenance” of the potatoes: where they were grown, by whom, with what chemicals, and so on. The idea was that the “value add” in the industry, going forward, was going to be information; consumers were going to want to know where their food came from and how it was grown.

The idea had some traction at the time, and we pursued several stands of it, and got several farmers interested, but ultimately it withered on the vine.

Flash forward to the present, and the idea seems more relevant now than ever: the entire agriculture industry is seeing the need for “provenance tracking.” And in the world of BSE, every head of cattle does need its own website.

The lesson for me here is not “here’s this revolutionary use of technology.” The lesson is that someone like me, immersed in the decentralized, open source, web, can take some of the ideas that working on the web uncovers — simple, open, powerful approaches to solving complex problems — and translate them into a completely different domain where they take on a new life.

And further that someone like me, with no formal education, no experience in agriculture, no real credentials to speak of at all, can be virally inserted into a group of ecologists and farmers and bring something to the table.

Again, I don’t present these examples as “here’s how with weblogs we can change everything.” The key for me is how weblogs and the Internet and open source and Linux and hyperlinks and the like can inspire us all to reconceive of how we do things, how we arrange ourselves, how we work, and how we learn.

In light of all this, my original comments about Rob’s course were simply pointing out that it was ironic that someone like Rob, who I think generally shares my take, would choose to evangelize this inside an institution that has, in many ways, a vested interest in having these trains of thought not pursued.

That said, after reading the comments that were posted, especially Rob’s own comments, I’ve come to realize that it makes perfect sense for Rob to do what he’s doing.

Let’s say Rob used to live in the city, and suffered from the confining strictures of urban life. Then, by happenstance and effort, Rob found that there was another way of thinking about living, and left the city to go out on the open range to live the carefree, decentralized, open life of a cowboy.

My original critique would suggest that Rob should stay out on the range, and not return to the city to share what he’d learned. Obviously that was wrong. The key, of course, is figuring how to return to the city to share these lessons without having the very fact of being in the city make their value seem irrelevant.

And that’s where my thinking has landed at this moment. Additional comment welcome, of course. Ye haw!

The first time I ever heard about Yahoo! was on the phone from a guy in Newfoundland. I was working at the PEI Crafts Council at the time, and we had an early Internet project on the go; as a result, I spent a lot of time on the phone talking to Internet people and crafts people. On the phone to St. John’s with a guy with feet in both worlds, he used the phrase “I Yahooed for it…”. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I played along. When I got off the phone, I asked around, and this is close to what I found [thanks to Jason Kottke for the link].

Yahoo! turns 10 years old this week. It’s amazing to think that it was once such an important and central part of my Internet experience — the Google of its day. I don’t think I’ve visited the Yahoo! website for 5 years; it became drenched with for-pay annoyances, and with Google, it became obvious that search trumped cataloging.

As I type this, Catherine is explaining the premise of the television show M*A*S*H to our friend G., who has never seen an episode. It is very comical.