PINK

About color being trademarked: technically any trademark that includes “plus the design” in its registered description has color protected within the mark as a whole. Just because someone has a registered mark, that does not necessarily mean the mark holder has a monopoly on everything to do with that mark—the mark holder has to take a back seat for any previous uses of a similar mark, which is why there is a Burger King restaurant in Mattoon, Illinois that is not part of the franchise chain and that reportedly makes much better burgers, or if the mark is also someone’s legal name, which is why McDonald’s restaurants get into trouble in Scotland when it tries to enforce its trademark on every McDonald who opens a restaurant.

A lot of time and money goes into developing a good trademark or service mark—that was the argument Owens-Corning used with registering the color “PINK.” In addition to the prior use and name exceptions, the mark registration is only good in the class(es) the mark is registered for, so Owens-Corning cannot stop Victoria’s Secret from using “PINK” as a mark—while arguably they both provide insulation (Styrofoam or silk), they marks are used in very different businesses where there is little likelihood of confusion. “Likelihood of confusion” is a one of the controlling factors behind granting trademark registration—if there is deemed to be a likelihood of confusion, registration will be denied. It is unlikely someone will go into a Victoria’s Secret store expecting to find foam house insulation.

Even then, once a mark is registered, the registration is not indefinite; the owner has to periodically renew the mark or it becomes available for someone else to use. There is also the danger the mark can become “generic”—enter into the vocabulary as a regular word. Thermos, aspirin, and kerosene were all once protected marks, but no more. Xerox Corporation has gone to great lengths to remind people that one does not make Xeroxes on a Xerox, but rather one makes photocopies on a Xerox photocopier machine (I particularly like the graveyard of genericized marks ad). Besides, trademarks and service marks are grammatically adjectives, not nouns or verbs (sorry—the legal department where I worked was in a constant battle with the marketing department because they wanted to save space and noun the mark and we insisted they use the ™ , sm (Word doesn’t have a symbol for sm) or ® as well as a noun for what ever the business was (restaurant, car wash, etc.).

Any way, I’ve digressed and so I’m going home.

Color of Green

I am so glad I found reference to The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture as it has made the color Power Point project to be rather fun. Since I can’t see to ever focus on the contemporary world (must be the “old soul”) focusing on the culture of a past world is right up my proverbial alley. It didn’t hurt that the color in question is my favorite, thereby solving the problem of how to present on “green” without dredging up the obvious, 20th-21st century environmental references. Best of all, Renaissance green has lots to do with love and textiles and the arts, my other passions. Wow! A new way at looking at “Greensleeves”! Discovery of naughty Renaissance ballads (let’s just say the refrain “Hey dilly do down day” has a new meaning)! Who would have thought that “green” was a verb as well as adjective in Middle English and the Scots of James VI/I? My only regret is that my book order got screwed up the first time and I didn’t get the book until AFTER I had lectured on Andrew Marvell. Incidentally, the cover of the book, sans jacket, is Nile green.

The only negative thing about this project was a sinus cold over seasonal allergies and an overlay of caffeine withdrawal from all the tea and honey I drank to preserve my health. If that wasn’t bad enough, having to stare at my vibrant green Power Point slide during class until I could figure out how to change the backgrounds back to white without changing all the backgrounds of all the slides (Note to self: next time, do everything in white and then add the colored backgrounds) in whatever crazy version of Word is on the classroom computers. Talk about “green-sickness”—the techno version.

As a side note, for the font exercise, I gave a copy of “Pink Hollyhocks” to the person who first gave me the poem, and she informed me that she not only liked my treatment of the poem, but she hung it in her office, and a former student of mine whom I sent the Waymen poem and the John of the Cross poem to enjoyed both of those.

Color and Personality

I always laugh with personality tests because the results are usually consistent—and fairly accurate (at least I think so; my sister might disagree). So it wasn’t too much of a surprise when I took the color and personality tests in class and got the results.

I am not sure what my “magenta” aura color means, but I did find a color code on another website which describes a “pink-bright and light” (magenta is a bright pink): loving, tender, sensitive, sensual, artistic, affection, purity, compassion; new or revived romantic relationship. Can indicate clairaudience.” I have good hearing, but I am not clairaudient. Apparently, a red aura means a healthy ego—which my friends have been telling me for years. (http://www.reiki-for-holistic-health.com/auracolormeanings.html). However at another website, the description of a “magenta” aura (a bit too long to reproduce here) was sort of accurate—magenta’s can be very creative and optimistic, but I like a bit more structure in my life than what this list suggests (“cutting-edge” “urban” “avant-garde” are not terms usually used to describe me). If I have a magenta aura, it’s a rather subdued one . (http://www.russellrowe.com/Magenta%20Aura%20Color.htm )

I finally found the missing pages to my ColorQuiz. “Inclined to choose luxurious things, which are gratifying to the senses. Turned off by things which are tacky and tasteless." Is spot-on and something that many other personality tests have said about me—I will take quality over quantity any day (and you aren’t likely to find any black-velvet paintings of Elvis in my possession either). I do like to play with kitsch in moderation though. This test also says I’m stressed out by current events, which also has some truth in it—I tend to fret about money and not having enough, especially as I get older, but I don’t see this as hampering me.

The interior design quiz is also VERY me. I had a negative reaction to the visual posted with my results (those orange pillows wouldn’t even make it past my front door) and the furniture in the photo was not me either. However, the text description is accurate—beige and various greens are the dominate wall colors (I have dark wood trim and hardwood floors so the neutrals keep the house from looking too dark). Again it says I’m driven by texture—I have very poor eyesight and a heightened sense of touch, but that luxuriousness aspect of me just loves the feel of silk velvet, wool, brocade, mink…(even the sound of these is very touchy-feeling). I also have plants (the violets and geraniums all have fuzzy leaves), both inside and outside.

The Color Code results also described me pretty well: loyal (my favorite dog breeds are spaniels, so go figure), again preferring quality over quantity, expect others to live up to my standards, dependable, etc. I will admit I can be self-righteous, moody and prone to worry. The results called my type a “sainted pit-bull” which I can see that, although I prefer being compared to a spaniel—they can be very protective too and bite when provoked, but aren’t as scary (and they have that longer silky fur too).

I found a couple of other color and personality sites—I found one that ties in color, personality, and Myers-Briggs—not too surprisingly, I am a “green” personality (this corresponds with Myers-Briggs “NF” personalities, which is what I am. According to “Color Q Profiles,” greens are creative (but need structure), like variety, can make the mundane into a great adventure. They are drawn to and work best with people like themselves (my personality opposites drive me nuts! They may be fascinating people, but I can only tolerate them in small doses). However, I note from some of the other tests I looked at that “blue” and “green” are often switched around for their attributes.

Self Portraits

In Released into Language, Wendy Bishop describes a writing activity involving postcards, landscapes, and description. I have used this activity shamelessly in my writing classes with much success—perhaps the success is that the students have fun with the somewhat out of the ordinary writing assignment and fun is often overlooked in writing assignments. When I presented Bishop’s assignment at an Illinois State Writing Project class a couple of years ago, one of the ways discussed to complicate the assignment was to use self-portraits of famous artists instead of post cards of landscapes. Since my Advanced Comp. students are a savvy bunch, I decided to up the ante and try the self-portraits instead of the landscapes.

While I inherited a stash of old postcards, I had to resort to Wikipedia for the self-portraits (it has its uses—and it publishes copyright status of images). I garnered a nice collection and several were similar in appearance soas to make it a little more difficult to identify the portraits (there are ones of Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds that look particularly similar).

The “vague word” exercise went over well, although a vast majority of students described “beautiful weather” as the sort we are having right now. An “awesome vacation” brought more variety with definite divisions forming between the Las Vegas/Disney World factions, the beach goers, and the campers (two students even discovered they vacation in the same little nook of Door County). Quite a few of them responded with “Oh gross!” to the photo of Frank’s baby bluebirds, which he insisted were “cute,” and this led into my “gross” story. While I cannot print the gross story here (something crucial is lost in the translation from an oral telling to one in text), suffice it to say that once the students realized what “gross” was referring to, there was a large burst of laughter, and I doubt they will ever use the word “gross” again.

The next step was to have them describe the person in the self-portraits I had given them, and print the description (having a printer in the rooms is very useful). Then I called for two volunteers. One read his description while the other drew the person being described on the white board. There was much laughter by both the volunteers and the class during this process (especially over the words “cleavage” and “corset” and the drawer’s reaction to them). In the end, I put the self-portrait of Angelica Kaufmann (the painting being described and reproduced by the volunteers) up on the screen. All things considered, it was a decent reproduction.

The students then turned to their own reproductions; they exchanged descriptions and hit the box of markers. Once done with their drawings, they looked up the original self-portraits in my STV250 folder, and then wrote a note to their classmates as to what details would have made the drawings more successful. Because one of the students already had his description exposed to the class, I substituted a description. The student who got my description chastised me for being vague and saying the person in the portrait was “pretty.” All the students were able to find the right self portrait in the master list, so the descriptions must have been sufficient, and they all seemed like they had a good time (and maybe, just maybe, they will add a bit more description to their essays).

Logotypes

When I read this section, my first thought was if there was much difference between a logotype (business oriented) and the fancy, stylized initials some artists use to sign their paintings or otherwise classify their paintings. I seem to recall the artistic initials being termed a “cartouche”—and some of them are surrounded by a border, such as the “PRB” for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—but that does not fit for artists such as James McNeill Whistler, whose used a “monogram” of his initials J and W formed into a butterfly (this was, in part, so it blended into his art better). I always found signing my name to art distracting, so I switched to a monogram or logotype of my own This solved the problem of my name being distracting, especially since my works tend to be miniatures (8 x 10 or smaller). Any way, I almost put Ralph Lauren’s logotype on my cultural map since I like his style of clothing, well, I like anything tweedy, and it is probably the only logotype I voluntarily and consciously display (I am looking around my office for other examples of logotypes and other than on the computer and phone, I am not finding much. “NCTE” on some of my books is something of a logotype (I just checked the Trademark office and it is a “dead” mark). Anyway, since I have a background in intellectual property (trademarks, service marks and copyright, but NOT patents—my brain would explode if I had to prosecute a patent) that unfortunately I never got to use as much as I would have liked to, I find logotypes rather fascinating. Incidentally, I also note that Ralph Lauren’s logotype uses a serif font.

The one really noticeable use of non-logotype fonts in my office is my Pieter Krøyer poster—the city in Norway where the exhibition was (Blaafarvevæket) is an font similar, if not identical, to Kunstler Script (darn--Blaafarvevæket in Kunstler Script on my draft and it did not transfer!) and the rest of the exhibit information is in a font like Palatino or Garamond.

Typefaces: Bembo

When getting ready for work this morning, I grabbed my copy of The Prettiest Love Letters in the World: Letters Between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo 1503 to 1519 (translated by Hugh Shankland). I have the book because I have long had an interest in Lucrezia Borgia—a fascinating woman, much maligned because of her father and brother—and I enjoy reading the letters and diaries of famous people. So, what does this have to do with a blog post that claims to be about typeface? Well, Bembo (the scholar, Cardinal, and half of the letter-writing team) happens to be the person the an early italic type was named after and the typeface that the letters are reproduced in (more or less—“Monotype Bembo” is what the book officially calls the font.. Okay, I confess I read those typeface blurbs in books that identify the typeface and paper, although the quality of paper is usually betrayed through the subtleties of its texture—I am such a nerd—although this tidbit of typographical trivia was also featured on the book’s back jacket. So, while I will leave the contents of the letters for the curious to discover on their own (save it to say they are very pretty letters, indeed), I will only say that Peitro Bembo was a classical scholar and friend of the printer Aldus Manutius, whose student trip up Mt. Etna, recounted in part in his De Aetna, was printed in 1495 in Francesco Griffo’s first Roman font, which in turn inspired the Bembo typefaces.

Incidentally, I noticed in Thinking with Type that two of my other favorite fonts, Garamond and Palatino, were linked with Bembo.

Diagrams

The first diagram in Graphic Design really caught my eye—both with the scrolls that reminded me of Spenserian script and the subtle (okay, that red heart is not very subtle) use of color. I would like to see a larger version so I could see the photographs more clearly. The musicality of it did not appear to me until class, as the identification of Marian Bantjes’s fondness for medieval and Celtic illumination and things baroque was enough for me to relate to it—I used a picture from the Lindesfarne Gospels as part of my Power Point lecture on Beowulf and I could see the resemblance. The networks on Page 201 reminded me of some of the geometric embroidery patterns I have done on evenweave fabric and perforated paper, the “tube” knockoff (I believe the London diagram gets points for originality, not Tokyo) caught my eye having travelled the London tube extensively one summer (I even have a coffee mug with the Tube map on it), but there is an even better representation in David Booth’s 1986 poster, The Tate Gallery by Tube, where the subway diagram is made up of rolls of paint squeezed out of the tubes (so great play of the word “tube”). Visually the insect phobia map interested me because I like (and appreciate) the detail in 19th century engraving (I never took engraving, but my classmates who did expressed much frustration when mistakes were made). Meanwhile, the diagram of “The Sordid Underbelly of One Girl’s Filthy Apartment” did not interest me that much visually (although I could tell common symbols used in setting out a floor plan for interior design were used); however, the text was hilarious—especially the references to dust bunnies, dead insects, and found change.

This is really Blog #2

Sorry--technical difficulties...

Now that I have the textbook, this should be a little easier. I initially made some notes regarding the still life by de la Porte on page 13; it seems the author spends more time reading the Peck painting that follows and gives that painting more voice than the de la Ponte’s painting. De la Ponte’s painting is dismissed as being symbolic of peasant life, but how do we know this is a peasant table? There are nectarines in a painted bowl—do peasants have easy access to nectarines? Is the painted bowl a local product or is it imported (the design looks Asian to me)? How does the author know the flowers are “wildflowers,” suggesting that they were plucked from nature rather than cultivated? The flowers look like stocks or delphiniums—those are garden flowers (in the Peck painting they look more like wild asters}. What was happening in the world when de la Porte painted his still life—sometimes the very stillness carries meaning. The 17th Century Dutch painters that de la Porte apparently admired, for instance, were painting at a time when the Netherlands was known as the “cockpit of Europe” because of all the fighting (the Thirty Years War, trade wars with England, etc.). For me, the de la Porte is much more intriguing than the Peck, with it silly little faces (it’s too “cute”; the lack of chiaroscuro softens the composition). Who left the coffee and cheese? What caused this person to leave cheese crumbs on the table? The other thing I wanted to comment on regarding the first reading had to do with the Nancy Burson photos on page 22—an interesting concept, but was she familiar with what Ingmar Bergman did about 20 years earlier when he merged Liv Ullmann’s face with Bibi Anderson’s in Persona?

This is Really Blog #3

What started out as an impromptu hike to one cemetery prairie to see prairie gentian in bloom ended up at a different cemetery prairie (by Paxton). Oh well, the cemetery Frank and I ended up at had better “architecture” for photography than the original destination. I’ve been fascinated by cemeteries since I was a very little girl and cemetery prairies, while tiny, usually have the best biodiversity of any prairie remnant in Illinois. The day was perfect for a prairie hike—it was cloudier and more overcast than the previous day (which was even more perfect—oh, the blue background we could have had for our photographs!), but the texture the clouds added to the sky was equally desirable and blue flowers (like gentian) photograph better on overcast days rather than in bright sunlight (bright sunlight works better for yellow flowers). My companion and I didn’t find any gentian, possibly due to the cooler summer (delayed? Didn’t bloom at all?), but I amused myself with the iron fence around some of the graves. It’s tricky trying to compose around cornfields and parked cars (don’t want those in the background) and yet get the architectural elements in the frame with a bit of stiff goldenrod for a splash of color. Of course the clouds didn’t cooperate; they were dissipating into a smoothness that also worked. My main focus was the ironwork fence around several graves, but I layered one of the posts, pock-marked with the rust of time, over a gravestone orb. Some great geometric shapes: the straight lines (and some not-so-straight lines) and angles over a smooth circle. By the time we left (the ragweed was getting to us) the sun was out and the clouds gone; as I type this, maybe I should have tried the shot with blue sky behind the architecture. Oh well, next time.