I was sorting through my papers, my enitre life’s correspondence (only the incoming stuff; I don’t have copies of mst of the outgoing) and found this terrific limited edition card I got from Aaron Draplin somehow. I was a big fan, so I probably wrote off for it, ordered it maybe. I thought my fanhood would have dated, because it’s been a long time since Draplin did anything really new, that I’ve seen. Like it was a thing of the early 2000s, when I had hope and stuff, but I thought it might have gone stale in the meantime.
But I was pleased to discover my enthusiasm returning after I went to Draplin’s website, https://draplin.com. I really, really love it. I know I like something when I wish I had thought of it, and this site really pushes that button. It’s almost exactly what I wanted this site to be like! I hope you’ll pay him a visit. It’s just catalogs of his work, his leisure activity, his friends, his merch, his jobs (even the ones that sucked), every car or van he’s ever had, just amazing catalogs of stuff, all with a story. And it all has a great look. Draplin is steadfast in his love for Helvetica Bold, maybe to the point that nobody else can get away with using Helvetica Bold anymore. (There was a time when it seemed like everybody used it as part of the corporate identity, including my temployer Huge Design, who pretty much made it their personality. (Or was it Futura Bold? Maybe I can’t tell the difference. Please don’t listen to me.))
One of Draplin’s talents is he’s so good at arranging things on a page, even a “page” of extreme length, like on the internet, in a browser.
I’ve been trying to make my web site a collection of things that are interesting to me, including stories, graphics, drawings, music, things I made and some things I didn’t make. I thought my brilliant tag system would let me easily make pages or related material, without me having to do anything, like, you could just read it chronologically, or just click a tag to pick a topic of interest.
And at times I’ve thought, maybe I should give up all this modularity and just make single static pages about things I like.
So maybe I will. Then again, maybe I won’t.
This whole “Things I Like” post category on my site, which you’re looking at now, is supposed to enable you to learn about a single category of things: things I like. Maybe when I have enough good ones I’ll put them all on one page. For now, sorry, but you gotta click around. Maybe that’s a little bit fun, too.
Anyway, I’ll solve my non-problem someday. What’s more important to get across today is this design I liked years ago, but thought might have been too gimmicky, turns out to still be excellent in my eyes. I still like his hard-edged, modern look (that comes from the past, like most things that look “modern”), the stuff that looks so good on hats and patches, but I’ve really gained respect for Draplin as a great organizer of material. He’s a great visual designer, but his methods of just deciding what goes where have really gained and restored my respect.
I need to write something about another mentor of “the documented life”, Nicholas Felton, or Feltron, but that’s for another day. I need to see if I still have those annual reports he did, or if I succeeded in selling them.
