cleithart

Vibert

Jehan Georges Vibert was like a 19th century Norman Rockwell. Here’s his depiction of “The Committee on Moral Books”:

More here.

Charles Goslin’s Advice to Designers

1 Apply the seat of your pants to a chair in a very quiet room.

2 Focus with undivided attention. There shouldn’t be any distractions, especially no music blasting through earphones.

3 Conceptualize, conceptualize, conceptualize. Students often say they made a design because they felt like it. They too rarely say they did it because they thought it through and wanted to use THIS concept.

4 Sketch out thumbnails with a thick black marker—a pencil or pen will make your drawings too fussy. Fussy is good when refining an idea, but you can’t refine “nothing.”

5 Ask yourself questions to help define the problem—you are your own best resource.

6 Push yourself to explore something new. There are wonderful things inside you, and if you don’t try things you’ve never done before, you will never find them. Keeping yourself off balance will help.

7 Enlarge some of your thumbnail sketches. There are times when a wonderful little fragment of a drawing is there, but you don’t know it or see it when it’s too small. Do it mechanically—on a copier or scanner. The tools are there, so use them.

8 Don’t be afraid to put stupid things down as ideas. The point is to keep moving forward—you can weed out bad ideas later.

9 Use symbols. Don’t make pictures of whatever happened—there is rarely an idea in that approach. BUT, don’t take the search for a symbol too literally by making a trademark.

10 Be your most severe critic. The only person you ought to be competing with is yourself. Push yourself in your sketch phase. Think of it as climbing a hill with a rock on your back—it seems like you are never going to get anywhere, but what you’re actually doing is investing—in the project and in yourself.
From Guide to Graphic Design, by Scott W. Santoro, Pearson Education; it came to me via Scott W. Santoro

See some of Goslin’s designs here.

Little Word

This is this week’s edition of Time’s Corner, my bi-weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Behold! My friend Brian Moats and I have started a publishing company! It’s called Little Word. We create children’s books that teach Biblical symbols and patterns, particularly typological motifs. Read more on our website. (If you click on only one link today, make it this one.)

Years ago, I saw this posted on Twitter:

At the time, I had already toyed with the idea of creating a “Through New Eyes for Kids” book series, and when I saw this tweet, I realized a series like that would have an audience. I opened a notebook and started scribbling down ideas.

Later that same year, I happened upon Anne-Margot Ramstein’s picture book Before/After. There are no words in the book, nor any story. Instead, each page spread has two pictures side by side and you’re invited to figure out the connection between them. Despite the fact that there’s nothing to read or fiddle with, it’s one of the most interactive books I’ve ever read.

One of the most common connections between the two pictures is time—hence the name: Before/After. A beehive becomes honey. A jungle becomes a city. Sometimes, Ramstein highlights time’s cyclical nature. Day, night. Summer, winter. High tide, low tide. My favorite pages are where one object remains fixed while everything around it changes. Time acts more slowly on some things than others.

This struck me as powerful way to depict typology. Take Samson. Arms outstretched, one hand on each pillar, positioned in exactly the same way that Jesus was on the cross. Put Samson and Jesus on two facing pages and invite the reader to make connections between them. Even a child could do it—especially a child.

Aedan Peterson actually did something like this in Ken Padgett’s The Story of God Our King. Three sequential pages show Jesus in the same posture, arms oustretched, while the scene changes around him.

Pretty cool.

Meanwhile, in his home office, Brian had been editing hours upon hours of footage of Jim Jordan, Peter Leithart, Alastair Roberts, and Jeff Meyers talking about Biblical typology. He had taught youth Sunday school classes on Through New Eyes and The Lord’s Service and found his students extremely receptive to the ideas in those books. It was just a matter of time before Brian decided to adapt Jordan and Meyers for kids. He approached me about the idea and lo! Little Word was born.

I’ll keep you updated on our progress here at Time’s Corner, but the best way to stay informed is to follow Little Word on all the socials. Click for the ‘gram, the Tweetster, the Facity-Face, etc.

What You May Gain from a Desert Island

And my great wish is, that young people who read this record of our lives and adventures should learn from it how admirably suited is the peaceful, industrious, and pious life of a cheerful, united family, to the formation of strong, pure, and manly character.
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson

What Church is For

Imagine, instead of asking someone “Where do you go to church?” or “Where do you worship?”, you asked, “Where do you go every week to renew your covenant with God?”

It throws a different light on your choice of church, that’s for sure.

Tomás Hijo

What is “Tech?”

Once upon a time, the word “technology” might have been applied to something such as a new design element that reduces frictional losses in a gear set. Today, the word is often shortened to “tech” and it typically means: finding new ways to insert a layer of fussiness into some aspect of life that is not yet subject to ~~fussiness~~ “optimization”, and then collecting rents from the friction this introduces.
Matthew Crawford

Responsibility and Challenge

This is Monday’s edition of Time’s Corner, my bi-weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

In the last issue of TC, I made the claim that three ingredients necessary to a boy’s education are teamwork, responsibility, and challenge. I’m not saying that including these three ingredients will solve all the problems that exist in modern schools. I’m merely observing the boys I interact with day to day and trying to understand why they find sports so much more attractive than academics. In other words, is there a way to make a boy care about school?

Some of you reading this will say, “A school shouldn’t cater to a boy’s tastes. The school should shape the boy’s tastes.” I agree with both statements, but I think it’s a false dichotomy. The rules of basketball don’t bend according to the players’ whims, but a good coach will study his players and adjust his practices according to their abilities. My question is not, “What does a boy need to learn?” but “How do we help him learn what he needs to learn?”

I had originally planned to write this in three installments. The first installment was several weeks ago, and so, to prevent what was meant to be a short series from going on forever, I’m going to cram Installments 2 & 3 into this issue. And by cram, I mean make one very succinct point. You’re welcome.

Responsibility

If W. H. Auden had ever founded a “College for Bards,” which he sometimes daydreamed about, the curriculum would have included not only reading, writing, and memorizing, but also care for domestic animals and garden plots. I suspect that he thought interacting with the natural world would help a budding poet be a little less of a fathead.

I like his idea, and not just for poets. Anyone who spends most of his time engaged in intellectual work needs to get out in the fresh air every once in a while. Working with your hands reminds you that the world does in fact exist and, what’s more, it doesn’t exist to please you. In Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soul Craft, he says, “The moral significance of work that grapples with material things may lie in the simple fact that such things lie outside the self.” In other words, you aren’t the center of the universe. Everybody needs to learn that at some point, boys perhaps most of all.

This is where responsibility comes in. Put a boy in charge of another living creature and he must choose between helping it thrive or letting it shrivel. Either way, he must do something. That’s an important lesson, and if the boy does his job, the school gets fresh vegetables besides.

Challenge

A long time ago, the word “challenge” basically meant a false accusation, or rather an accusation that a person would have to defend himself against. To “rise to the challenge,” then, could mean something along the lines of “prove ‘em wrong.” You’ve been called a coward. Prove ‘em wrong. You’ve been accused of theft. Prove ‘em wrong. Though we now use the word to mean “a difficult task,” it still carries an element of risk, a sense that something is on the line. If you succeed in overcoming a challenge, you will be justly praised. If you fail, you lose more than whatever goal you were reaching for. You lose the faith others have placed in you.

When you issue a challenge to a group of boys, many of them will take it as a test of their manhood. Boys take every opportunity to prove their manhood to themselves and to others, often without even thinking about it. “At any moment of a man’s life,” says Anthony Esolen in his book Defending Boyhood, “his manhood is subject to trial, to be won, again and again, to be confirmed or to be canceled. A man can lose forever his right to stand beside other men. He can fall to being no man at all.” Boys take their own measure (and that of their peers) against the standard of manhood, and issuing a challenge is like calling them babies and then saying, “Prove me wrong.”

Once again, I’m merely guessing here, but I have a hunch that many boys have never felt the gut-wrenching need to rise to and repudiate a challenge that was issued to them by a teacher. Rarely is there anything at stake other than their own financial future, which, let’s face it, most boys assume will take care of itself. In sports, the challenges and outcomes are very clear: you either win or lose. In academics, failures are more private and even somewhat relative. A student can work half-heartedly and still pass.

To make a boy do his best, the teacher should challenge him. But how? What would make a young man feel as though what he did in the classroom actually mattered? I’m still mulling over this one.

Ken White Designs