Weekend report

Another busy weekend. Well, busy Sunday – Saturday of course was spent pining for Ashley, away in Ohio for the week. Yep, pretty much a whole day of sighing & moping around, oh woe is me.

Luckily, I got over *that* pretty quickly, and packed in enough on Sunday to make up for it.

Started off with a trip to the Design Museum, one of my favourite London museums – always interesting exhibits, and small enough that you can see the whole thing and not get overwhelmed. I went specifically for a small exhibit called ’50 years of Helvetica’, but that appeared to be over. Instead, the main attraction was architect Zaha Hadid – who’s designed some fantastic buildings, including, interestingly enough given Ashley’s present location, Cincinnati's Richard & Lois Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art.

Here's a photo of the architect's model... Not sure how much it looks like the real thing -- but I guess it's there!

I was more interested in the work of graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, in particular the typefaces he’s designed. I find it fascinating the variety of type that can be/has been designed, and the detail that has to go into making them consistent, and the way designers can be so precise in the mood each can convey. He’s a very political designer, however, and I started to get tired of the anti-Americanism that ran throughout about every piece on display, aside from the typography. It just got a bit old, surely there must be a *few* other targets in the world. Perhaps disagree with some current policies, but the country and its people do have some good sides, and are not solely responsible for any negative thing going on in the world today. (and I’m not a particularly gun-ho rah-rah USA-USA person, but really, the work started to grate. Maybe because it’s so easy to pick on America, work that does gets a little boring and trite. It’s much more of a challenge to have your art be a bit more open and questioning.

After that, headed over to lovely pub lunch with friends and home again just in time for tennis with Emily. I won’t go so far as to call it a game, as neither one of us can serve, and we’re lucky to keep a rally going of more than 3 hits... but still, it makes for an amusing afternoon. Chatty dinner followed, rerun of top 50 funniest movies (Number 1 is still Life of Brian; I've seen 37 of them, not bad I think).

And here we are, Monday once again...