meish dot org: life, unfolding

Years ago, I had a webcam on this site, which was trained on me during various hours of the day – ah, such heady days of being young(ish), innocent(ish) and not minding sharing your bad hair days with the world.

Anyway, I recently re-discovered a little animation I made with a series of cam images taken while I was on the phone on hold to a call centre somewhere. Thought I’d post it here again.

The crappy resolution was the result (I assume) of trying to compress the file so that it downloaded quickly on 56.6kbps. Of course, these days it’d have been a bloat-tastic youtube clip, and bugger the download experience.

My, how times have changed.

*NB, it’s just possible that I might have been hamming it up for the camera. A bit.

I’ve been randomly finding and hoarding old tourism leaflets and maps etc used as bookmarks and at the bottom of boxes, for a while now.

Often, the most interesting examples are not the truly (properly?) designed objects such as album covers or book jackets, but the ones which have another function – advertising or promotion. Leaflets, adverts, event programmes and map covers seem to be especially revealing, for some reason.

It’s not a real collection or anything, but I find myself drawn to these things, amused and inspired by the design and font treatments they used throughout the 60s, 70s and early 80s. I feel like they should be captured somehow, rather than languishing as drawer-linings until they disintegrate, and so I find myself scanning or photographing them.

Some are shockingly garish, some are classy, some use fonts which have never been seen since: all are very much of their time. A slice of life.

Will the noughties have an equally identifiable design and font style, I wonder?

The first person to mention web 2.0 gradient fill backgrounds will get a withering glare, I expect.

A simple flow chart to help you deal with the weather in the UK during the months of May, June, July and August.

I wish such a thing existed.

“Sorry, all our operators are busy at present. You are currently held in a queue. Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold. Thank you….Sorry, all our operators are busy at present…”

If you’ve ever been on hold to your local council/bank/energy supplier you’ll know this feeling only too well.

100 acre woods of the nephelim?

Also, my mum wouldn’t let me paint my room black which, on reflection, I have to applaud her for.

And speaking of applause, I have to give some to the person who thought that Winnie the Goth was a good story concept. I always thought Eeyore would have made a much better goth, frankly – he’s got the pointless misery down pat, for starters…