Episode 115: Thick and Blunt

This week, Jessica and Michael discuss President Trump’s handwritten note, boldly scribbled in black Sharpie and captured with a long lens by Getty photographer Mark Wilson.

Jessica says,

He’s got good handwriting for a man, frankly. Not all men have good handwriting. He’s an impatient angry person a lot of the time. It’s pretty neat.

But what do you make of the fact that it is all uppercase letters except for the letter e? Where is Georges Perec when you need him?

Also mentioned this week:

• Brian Barrett, Wired, How the Photographer Got That Iconic Shot of Trump’s Notes
• Ben King, ‘Tiny Hand’ Will Be Your New Comic Sans (2016)
• James Hannaham, BuzzFeed News An Exclusive And Completely Factual Snapshot of Donald Trump’s Speech Notes, (2016)
• Greta Grotesk font (via Kottke.org)
• Nothing, from A Chorus Line, sung by Valerie Cortez (2006)
• Rain Noe, Core77, Bloomberg Is A Billionaire Because He Backed Good Design
• Jessica Helfand, Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press) and the book trailer
• Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World (Thames & Hudson)
• The Victor J. Papanek Foundation
• Vitra Design Museum, Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design,
• Alison J. Clarke, Metropolis, Design Provocateur: Revisiting the Prescient Ideas of Victor Papanek
• Heather Dewey-Hagborg
• Dewey-Hagborg’s DNA portraits in Being Human at the Wellcome Museum
• Socmus, the virtual museum of socialist-era graphic design in Bulgaria

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