Today, I got three.

Here’s what one illustrator thought of when she or he heard the word “strength”:

My strongity strongitude is so strong that I can lift this barbell made of pure uranium! Clipart is a quick way to get things done, but come on. Even I have some standards.

On a related search I was looking for images that went with “strong” and ended up seeing … well, this:

The list of things that make my eyes jitter in this image is brief but profound. For starters, I can see the Schwarzenegger thighs suggesting strength, but I’ve seen some women who were bodybuilders, and they just don’t look like that. Is that muscle, or scar tissue?

And what explains the total lack of definition elsewhere? How can you get quads (?) that big, and even a hint of biceps, without something happening to your lats and abs? Was she the survivor of a bizarre accident that required surgical replacement of her torso?

Last, and possibly the most significant — why is she topless?

You just know this was drawn by a man. If you consider the definition of “man” to include fantasy-prone twelve-year-olds.

The final image, the hat trick, was what surfaced on a search for “fitness”. I guess we know what Cathy Guisewite will be doing with all her free time.

Obviously Cathy finally dumped Irving and moved in with Marcie, after she found Peppermint Patty doing it doggy-style with Snoopy. Presumably Patty was wearing a double-ended strapon at the time.*

==

* With no apologies whatsoever to Charles Schulz. You put it out there, man.

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She did an amazing, very courageous thing over the weekend of the Fourth: She went to Phoenix and met my folks.

Now you have to understand something. The arrogance and sharp sense of humor evinced herein is come by honestly. I got it from my dad, who got it from my Grampie. (Though it was my Grammie that got me into Godzilla, so … well.)

Over the Fourth of July weekend she was a hit. Got on beautifully with the most prickly parts of me pa and his forebears. On the Monday of our taking leave, she hit it out of the park when one of them made a comment about someone not being so bright, and she flicked at an imaginary bulb and said “tink tink”.

My half brother, in his laughter, looked at me in something like envy. How, really, how? Really? he seemed to be saying.

I’m still not sure myself.

My dad got it right when he said, “You did far better than you deserve.”

Yes.

I’ve never won anything significant. I’ve never done well at slots, and I don’t even manage to win those silly scratch card things they give you sometimes at the checkouts.

When I played Magic: The Gathering regularly, it was legendary how crappy my luck was. In sealed deck tournaments, I always ended up with crap for rares in my booster packs, while right beside me others got raging good cards. The closest I ever got to a victory came when I teamed up with another player, and I’m pretty sure I was dragging him down.

I don’t bother at all with the lottery, because it’s pretty clear I just can’t win.

Well.

If there is such a thing as a bank of luck, and you have a lifetime over which to withdraw from it, seems pretty clear to me that I’ve hit the perfect jackpot.

I’ve never won a $60mln lotto prize. Nor do I expect to. And I will not press my luck at all, ever again. My betrothed is far more valuable than any scratch ticket can ever be, more than a box of rares, more than a cluster of six numbers.

As the Mormons might say, a pearl of great price.

I’ve never won the lottery, and when I press my ear to her beside me, and hear her heart beating inside her, this unutterably sweet tolerant and patient lover resting calmly and warm in my life and in my arms — well, okay then.

Screw the lotto. I’ve won. I have won.

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I mentioned recently that I've been set some logo-design tasks by several departments wanting to internally brand their work, purpose, or function. One of those designs was finally greened last week, the one dealing with our EMR team and its several subgroups.

First is the overall logo (and yes, it really is called iCare):

iDidn't pick the name. iWish the iNaming fad would iVaporate. iFear iT won't, any time soon.

That aside, you can see the roundel on the left has four quadrants plus a central focus. Each of the quadrants represents one of the ancillary groups working on the EMR implementation and support. As you may expect, each group has its own variant of the logo with its quadrant selected. For instance, this is security:

Security focuses on keeping patient records safe from prying eyes. (Surprise!) One of the more significant aspects of an EMR is data security — if you're storing something digitally, it's only a matter of time before someone tries to get to it, for whatever reason. But it's not just about storage; any time data is transmitted, its stream also has to be secure. So we're looking at multiple levels of defense, from firewalls to encipherment to backing up records reliably.

The choice of a combination lock was obvious here.

Next is quality, referring to both the patient experience and the level of care provided on the back end.

Perception of quality in care is remarkably hard to wrangle. A gruff physician, or a nurse that accidentally pokes too hard when trying to run an IV, or even a tray of lukewarm food can adversely affect the patient's sense of quality-of-care. Needless to say, while all these are important points to consider, there are other things (labs getting mixed up, wrong procedures being ordered, medicine dosage errors) that are considerably more serious. The quality aspect is concerned with handling all these things, and more.

For this quadrant I went with a "first prize" style badge. Originally it didn't have the number 1 in it, which made it a little too vague.

Next we have sharing — primarily of patient data across the entire healthcare spectrum:

Information sharing can include lab reports, radiology, med information, data collected from the patient and family members, and more. The information has to be freely accessible on demand, all the time, anywhere — but it can't be open to just any person who feels like nosing around. Originally the circular arrows were more oval, and not as visually pleasing.

Finally we have health, which is dependent on more than simple healthcare:

Health in this context means dealing with the entire spectrum of patient care. Not just the immediate situation, but diet, physical activity, overall quality of life, mental health, and family or other support systems. The choice of a happy face was self-evident for the quadrant.

Clearly, all four of these divisions depend on each other, and they all interact with the EMR core, which is why I ended up going with this design. The final form was very close to what I originally sketched, too.

About the typefaces

The labels on the roundel are all set in Bank Gothic, a clean sans-serif that gave me a crisp look, even at relatively small sizes. The iCare (sigh) wordmark is set in Fontin italic, with its kerning hand-adjusted in some places. I like Fontin for its stroked letterforms and subtle serifs, particularly in the italic version of the typeface.

I've used it in a few other places — it and Baar Sophia, which is another typeface I've recently found some display-text uses for.

That's not to say I don't have uses for more conventional serifs — Adobe's version of both Caslon and Jenson really make me feel good, particularly the latter's ornaments — and I do fall back on super-bold faces like Hattenschweiler or Impact when I need them. I've even been known to use the occasional slab serif a la Rockwell or Egyptienne.

However, if I'm looking for something a little bit smooth and warm, something that stays crisp at smaller scales but presents enough detail to be interesting as a wordmark, I've discovered that Fontin really is quite pleasant, and that in general I'm leaning more toward stroked humanists.

I used it in our Route 66 Race for Hospice logo design, along with Raspoutine Classic (the word Race is Raspoutine):

The non-italic font of Fontin also looks pretty good — which is why I used it here — but for the larger wordmark its italic form just didn't have quite the stroke I wanted it to, which was why I went with Raspoutine instead.

I wouldn't use either Fontin or Raspoutine for body text. But for display text, I like their warmth.

Interestingly, the facility's primary logo uses Eras in the roundel itself, but Optima bold for the wordmark alongside it. This was a much-needed change from Peignot, which is a typeface that does to me what Comic Sans or Papyrus does to others. (Yes, someone felt that Peignot would be an appropriate choice for the original wordmark. I'm very glad I was able to shift us all away from it, too.)

The problem is that, because of the way Peignot was created, there is no such thing as an appropriate use for it.

Peignot holds the rather unique distinction of being deliberately designed to be hard to read in lowercase. It was intended to challenge the idea that there would be two cases of character forms. It's occasionally revived by people who don't know any better because they think it looks interesting, or cool or futuristic, but it's an arrogant typeface rooted in a worthless idea, and its utility as a display typeface — let alone for body text — is limited to the point of being essentially a design dead-end.

I know, I know, but I can't help it. Sometimes you gotta be a playa hata.

By the way, this is post number 601! Not only is it a sort-of milestone (600 + 1), but it's a prime number — and a damn big one too.

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EMRs are basically there to store patient records digitally rather than on paper. This is a stupefyingly obvious concept, and it might be shocking to realize that a lot of med professionals don't use EMRs at all, particularly those in rural areas.

The reason is because of HIPAA. The law makes it plain that any disclosure of privileged medical information to anyone not needing it will result in censure, fines, firing, facility decertification, the violation of Brownie Scouts by Satanic biker gangs, and Earth falling into the sun.

Since there are always security concerns, particularly dealing with digitally-stored and network-accessible data, there's a lot of resistance to adopting the systems.

Anyway, the security group, communications group, systems group, etc. each want their own logos to internally brand their work, which does make sense in a facility that covers a fairly wide county, deals with about 130 or so physicians, and ten times that number of employees. The trick is to do up a design that actually meets those goals.

That's a work in progress, though. More recently, I cranked out a design for a surgical practice with the initials MSS. The physician in charge there asked for a caduceus — hardly surprising — but one that incorporated the "MSS" into the design.

The thing about a logo is that it really needs to be a recognizable symbol, something that conveys a concept while at the same time branding a product or service. The term logo itself is rooted in the Greek for word, or possibly word-image. So even while it might not contain text, a logo has to convey something that could be put across in words as well.

Think of the Nike swoosh: You know what it is just by its being mentioned, and you know it conveys speed. (To my eye it's always resembled a road; it could also be seen as finishing-line tape.) The McDonald's arches are an iconic reference to the old design of their burger shops.

So I needed simple, and yet evocative, and recognizable and scalable. This is often overlooked by some designers; scalability basically means you can make the image wee teeny small or great big huge, and either way, it's still recognizable. Usually this means doing it as vector art; however, it's possible to make vector art that's essentially not scalable. Draw a nice picture at a canvas size corresponding to a sheet of paper. Put some words in the image, then reduce its size to an inch across.

I was toying with the idea of putting the initials on a shield, mounted to the staff of the caduceus; or possibly on a ribbon floating above or below; but those would have led to something possibly baroque and definitely a little intricate to be iconic. Scalability would go out the window on that one.

As I noodled and doodled, I realized in a well duh sort of moment that M, S, and S could themselves be reworked to form a caduceus, if I was careful about it.

I scribbled a bit more and quickly saw that ornamentation, such as the staff or feathers, wasn't going to work. It cluttered things up too much. So I boiled it down to the essentials. Got a workable sketch.

And knew I was not going to be able to scan and livetrace this one in AI. The results would have been a little too organic. I wanted something clean and crisp, but not entirely mechanical, a bit like a nicely-stroked, humanist sans serif typeface. An image that would reduce or expand well, be clean enough to not belong to a particular graphic style, but still have just enough warmth to it to feel less than totally clinical.

Well, after my Route 66 race shirt design, I was considerably less daunted by AI than before, so set to work drawing more or less freehand.

The first design was sort of there, but awkward. It felt a little too rounded and mushy, and I tried again — with results.

First, here's the aborted attempt.

It really did not work. The em was heading along the right path, but it was too narrow; and the snakes, in addition to being oversized, were asymmetrical. And I really did not care for their tails nor lack of heads; they looked a little too much like nematodes. Not the kind of thing you'd want to associate with a medical practice.

Well hell. So I went back, more or less literally, to that there ole drawing board, and with a bit of time, effort and tweaking, came up with this.

After that the rest was easy.

What pleased both the physician and me was the way the em hinted at the look of the local dominant mountain range. That wasn't entirely intentional, but when something works, you go with it.

Now, with the EMR integration design, I'll probably be doing something like it again in terms of process — starting out with a concept that's a bit overworked, but ending up with something that can do well on its own. Along the way I'll get to juggle the needs of several intercommunicating groups, each of which wants to feel equally important.

Ah well. Beats the hell out of working for a living.

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These are scaled to 1024 x 768 at 132 DPI, basically matching the reported display resolution of iPad G1. They were composed in InDesign, comprised of three basic layers: Two gradients (purple and pumpkin) with ink effects applied, with a woodgrain image laid atop.

After compositing, I PDFed the images, then converted them to JPEG via PShop.

The first one is just that; the second has an additional image, branches with buds on them, to add a little more richness.

They're below the fold. Enjoy!

Here's the one without the branch pattern:

Here's the other one, with the branches and buds:

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So here's the end of A Time Soldier's Story.

To wrap things up, we have a brief coda as well.

Hope you liked listening!

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Which was also an exercise in oy gevalt. Sure, everything gets backed up — except whatever music, videos and iBooks you might have had on it — you have to put them back on by hand. Gigantic pain in the ass.

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Anyway. We're nearly done with A Time Soldier's Story; this is part 5 of 6.

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A Time Soldier's Story part four! Woot!

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Certain individuals drove past the school and shouted racist comments. A local demagogue got on the radio and fomented action. The artists were instructed to “lighten” the skin of some of the kids’ faces.

Then there was an about-face, and the radio commentator got fired. (In this economy, I hope that means he’ll starve to death under a freeway underpass in six months.) The artists were called back in to re-darken the kids’ faces.

And if you think this is unrelated to SB 1070, you’re simply not in the room. This overt bigotry is a direct consequence of that filth-encrusted excrescence of a “law”.

Wonkette leveled on this one, as did The Stranger — and then none other than Roger Ebert, whose blog is probably the single greatest as-yet still partially-hidden jewel on the internet.

What he had to say is something you’ll want to read, but I also posted a reply to his site. It’ll get there eventually — he actually self-moderates, reading every comment before approving or rejecting it — but I thought I’d put it here as well.

After all, I live in this goddamned state.

Ebert writes:

‘Racism was ingrained in daily life. It wasn’t the overt racism of the South, but more like the pervading background against which which we lived. We were here and they were there and, well, we wished them well, but that was how it was.’

It’s still that way here. I’m writing from behind the entrenchments in Arizona, and I can assure you that it’s about as bad as you might believe.

SB 1070 — the “Ihre Papieren, bitte” law — has given troglodytes of every hue and stripe a sense of empowerment that they should never again have possessed. Even people whom I regard as functionally intelligent say things such as, “They should all go back home” and “My ancestors came here legally; they can do the same.”

Never mind the fact, of course, that the US is entirely and solely a nation of illegal immigrants. It was our ancestors who forcibly took the land from its original inhabitants.

The irony, however, seems lost on many. Illegal immigration is happening, sure, but the ills associated with it do not correlate. Crime rates have been steadily dropping for the last decade, not increasing. Illegal immigrants do not represent a fraction of the drain on the medical and social system that indigent, lazy, ignorant US citizens do. (Many of those vociferously opposed to “Mexicans” somehow getting “free health care” are themselves living off the public dole.)

So even fairly bright people are getting swept up in the wave of overreaction to a nonexistent problem. The only response they seem to be able to manage any more is one that is fear-based. Full of worry — manufactured by demagogues and spread by misinformation — and full of quiet xenophobia.

So they support laws that make Arizona look a hell of a lot more like Germany ca. 1934 than anyone really wants to admit. They say it’s to “get Washington’s attention”, but we all know about the wink and the nod that goes along with it.

They want to build an honest-to-godless wall between the US and Mexico. They don’t seem to be able to process the fact that no border wall, ever in human history, has succeeded in its intent — and has never said anything favorable about the country that built the wall in the first place.

And some of them feel it’s all right to use words that are crafted and intended solely to harm others, based on the shallowest of all conceivable “reasons” — pigmentation, culture, language.

There have been times in the past when Arizona’s politics have frustrated me, embarrassed me, annoyed me.

Now, they’re making me ashamed.

And they’re worrying me. Apparently some 20 other states are considering adopting measures like Arizona’s. 20 other states believe they’ve got sufficient support from sufficient crypto-bigots to pull a stunt like this one again.

And if those laws should pass in those states, you can be sure that the racists (and probably the homophobes and misogynists) will be driving down your streets as well, shouting inexcusable things to schoolchildren.

Shame them, when you can, when you hear them. Shame them back into the respectful silence they should maintain when in the presence of their betters.

Shame them in order to let them know that their bigotry and hate will not be tolerated in a civilized society.

Shame them until they crawl back under their wretched little stones.

For the love of decency and humanity, shame them.

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