Skip to main content

Meat and Feces

Hello, dear reader

This post, like the title announces, is going to be about the difficulty of turning meat into decent and legible vector art without making it look like shit.

The problem is simple: meat, when cooked, turns into a brown colour, that, when accompanied by the salubrious smells of cooked flesh, delights the palette and the sinus. I love meat, in most of its forms, whether it be hamburger, steak or sausage.

Thus imagine my delight at receiving an assignment from StudentSN to create Ramadan (or Ramazan or Radaman) gifts and general decoration for them.*

I, almost at once, set out to fill my belly and my eyes with the sights and flavours of Arab and Turkish dishes which might very well be served up during a Ramadan Iftar. Lamb Chops were consumed, as was kubeba (the singular, meatball-like form of kibbeh), as were various sweets. All perfectly delicious and entirely pleasing to the eye. No pictures, as I generally trust my gastronomical memory to serve me on occasions when I am recreating food. This works very well in the kitchen and I hoped to successfully translate it to graphic design.

However, upon hitting the CS, I found myself confronted with some difficulties. Some of them were brought on by the sheer amount of food I had consumed over the last few days, others were more fundamental in nature.

My main problem was not the sweets (light palette, beige and golden syrup abound in the traditional arab desert), or the veg (multichromatic delight!), but the meats. The problem ran as following;
Meat, when cooked, takes on a colour palette consisting mostly of browns, blacks and the occasional red. This is( except for the red) the same colour palette that one might use when creating an accurate depiction of healthy human feces. This posed problems, especially in the case of kobeba, which is remeniscent in colour as well as shape.


Shit with parsley?

Not only that, but my culinary side, so used to making yummy food with ease and a bit of immagination, suddenly found itself making what can only be termed shoe soles (patent leather Budapester shoes, please, at least leave me that.) in stead of the lamb chops I remembered with such fondness from the meal two nights before.


Budapester Lamb Soles

But after some experimentation, and with some patience and a belly full of Pizza of all things, this problem was solved. To see if it was successful, I suggest you create an account with SSN, or wait for the end of Ramadan, when my NDA on this particular segment ends. It starts tomorrow and goes on for a month.

I wish all of those reading this and affected by it a Ramadan Karim!

* See also this post

Comments

Anonymous said…
your good in playing with words (: your multi talented and it seems you have a gift in writing, art designs and you have changed your title well atleast now it's recognizable c:
caramk said…
The old title was getting… well, old. Plus, even though I still adore blackletter fonts, I realised there must be a whole portion of the world that can either not read them or connect them to the wrong things. Plus I was playing around with some lovely new fonts…

Thanx for the undeserved compliments!

Popular posts from this blog

¡Carambolage Rocks! (Apparently)

Gather the barber shop quartet! Roll the Drums! Fire the Works! Open the ball! Vote Hillary! Raise the topmast! Scour the Plank! Split the Atom! Shiver me timbers! That brought on quite a bit of nonsensical jubilation, finding that iCeah of Wow Legs has nominated Carambolage as a Kick-Ass Blog. In fact I jubilated all through yesterday, pausing only to reflect on Microsofts new Ad, Shelves I'd like to have, Fembots and Virgin advertising. I jubilated through work and through a small spot of partying.I am still jubilant as I write this! And now, my speech: "We've come a long way, yahdiyahdiyah, achievement, blahblah, the people who made this possible, yakyakyak, our sponsors, moohdemoohdemooh, honoured to accept, beehdibeehdibeeh, Mom, God and the stinky state of Berlin. Thangyouthangyouverymuch." So thank you for the Award, iCeah, if you didn't have one already, I'd nominate you right back, Meanwhile, my link-list needs some updating. Also meanwhile, here'

The Clay Models

In an attempt to move away from the more dangerous things in life, such as hmanely catching rabbits, flying to the moon in search of Wedneslydale or sheeprustling, Messrs. Wallace and Gromit, formerly of Anti-Pesto, have taken up part-time modeling for Harvey Nichols. They present us with an amazing transformation, which, in a wierd way, actually looks cracking great! The campaign is brought to your poppers by DDB London with photography by Giles Revell. Wallace: Prince of Wales check grey two-piece suit by Paul Smith Gromit: Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and purple stripe silk scarf by Duchamp. Wallace: navy cashmere jacket and silk tapered trousers by Alexander McQueen, Dolce & Gabbana fitted white shirt and Giorgio Armani tie. Gromit: navy silk Paul Smith scarf Lady Tottington: black draped jersey ‘Acorn’ dress by Alexander McQueen, red patent ‘Triclo’ shoes by Christian Louboutin and metallic bronze ’Puffy’ bag by Zagliani More!

Bahar - a font finds its sea legs

Today, I'd like to share one of those longterm projects that seems to be nearing completion. BaharFraktur is a blackletterish font that started life as the Boob font in 2007, on one of Luc(as) de Groots brilliant font classes. I had been itching to do a blackletter font for ages at that point, loving the broken letters for their playful calligraphic qualities and the typesetting opportunities they offer. That they share a kinship with Arabic letting helped. So I hunkered down with fontlab to create a headline font, realising only weeks into it that I had embarked on the creation of a hungry, time-consuming beast which would not let me go for a couple of years. Since then I've been working on and off on this, returning to work on it fuller- time a few weeks ago… Below, you'll find a glyph list, complete with their unicode range, of the font as is right now. It's still missing the eastern european diacritics, a few dots and dashes of black here and there… but it's get