Bridgette Goes to College

              Ah, the elegant form of a…form.               Ok, there really is nothing elegant or “high art” about paperwork, but efficient and concise forms are necessary. How many times have you had to fill out a form and you take one look and are completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff on it? To be fair there are a lot of things that are unavoidable, and I don’t know if it’s more intimidating to be confronted with one over-crowded piece of paper or a stack of less-crowded papers.               I deal with a lot of paperwork at my job. I work at a theatre and we have forms for all kinds of things. Season ticket orders, auditions, class registration, waivers upon waivers…all to keep track of contact info for our patrons and volunteers and to make sure our volunteers won’t bully other cast members or sue us...

“Make me wonder, make me understand. Spark the light of doubt and a newborn mind. Bring the vast unthinkable down to earth,”               These are lyrics from a song by my favorite band, Nightwish. It’s called Sagan, after the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. I was going to make that blog post about designing forms today, but seeing as it’s Carl Sagan Day apparently, I thought it would be more fitting to talk about last week’s project. The project was to turn a song into a poster based on feelings. Not the title, not the lyrics, but the feeling of the song and how it makes me feel. I regularly belt this song in the car and prance around the house while it plays, either in my head or on my phone. I regularly do this with a number of Nightwish songs.               I was, at first, overwhelmed by the possibilities. There are so many songs that would have bee...

The tale continues! See part one if you’ve missed it: Bortbyting Part 1 I had a lot of fun writing and illustrating this story, and then piecing all of it together in InDesign. When I think about all the different kinds of careers and jobs I could have pertaining to Graphic Design, working with page layout and books still holds my interest more than anything else. Not even necessarily illustrating or designing covers, just putting the pieces together and arranging it so that it makes sense. At least it’s vaguely more interesting than designing forms, which I will get into at a later date. I feel like that seems too mundane for the vibes I give off (ah, yes, the person with the bright red and orange hair, who listens to metal, and has an ever-growing doll collection likes designing forms of all things), but maybe I’m just too interesting to be doing interesting things all of the time. “It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” J. R. R. Tolkien

“Bortbyting is the Swedish word for Changeling. This new tale takes the old stories of faeries, trolls and changeling babies and turns them on their head. Taking elements from Scandinavian folk tales and Bridge Rhodes’ own mythological inventions, Bortbyting is a quirky little story of the love between parents and children, and embracing the strangeness of your own identity.” This is the blurb from the back cover of a short book I wrote, and illustrated, way back in March, in the early days of The Pandemic, when lock down and social distancing was fun. I thought I would share it here. Many of the names and creatures are things that are featured in other writing I've been working on. The other writing has a working title of The Eleventh for now (I posted a cover design I did a while back), and I was able to finalize (ha!) a draft over the summer and begin work on its sequel, which I am now in the process of editing and cleaning up. I have some background characters that share name...

      I disappeared again.      I do that sometimes.      I hate feeling obligated to keep up with a platform that I a) don't know how to use anymore, and b) no one even follows me on. Even if they did I would still hate feeling obligated to bring them content at regular intervals when it would only be an obligation I made myself and there is no grade or money involved and I don't feel an overwhelming joy for the thing.      I hate feeling like I owe the internet something.      I love writing.      I should love blogging.      This is supposed to be my "Here is a cute and clever look at my personality for future employers" blog.      There is nothing fun about that. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I have to put a filter on it, and it feels inauthentic. I mean, it's not inauthentic. Everything I write here is written in the most Bridgette way possible. Except that...

     A couple of weeks ago I talked about the “vibes” of type and how different typefaces have completely different feels to them. The ones I covered were mainly display types, such as what would be used in titles, or headlines, or logos etc. Those are the ones you’re allowed to have fun with. Those are the ones I find myself “oohing” and “aahing” over as I scroll through lists of fonts for five hours.      So yes, finding the right font for your title is immeasurably important.      But what about the rest of the piece?      I’ve been laying out a short story in InDesign for the last week or so and for the main text or body of the story I decided to use Garamond. Garamond is probably one of the oldest typefaces on earth, and it’s reliable and non-distracting. Fun Fact: Harry Potter uses 12 pt Garamond.      Non-distracting is the goal. If you have large quantities of text, and you want people t...

     Leading is the space between the lines of text. It’s a term that comes from Ye Olde days of printing presses and the strip of lead that was placed between the series of metal letter stamps above and those below.      Kerning deals with the spaces between individual letters. This shouldn’t be confused with tracking (sometimes called plain old letter-spacing) which distributes the space between letters evenly and uniformly.      And as far as I’m aware the space between words is just called word-spacing. How original.      These things are very important because if the letter-spacing or word-spacing is not adjusted appropriately there can be some unfortunate results. These unfortunate results (fortunately) have resulted in some very amusing memes.      So if you’re not looking to become the next big meme, please pay attention to how close or far apart your letters and w...