Project Progress

Alas.  My attention's been directed elsewhere, regarding last week's post.  Usually when I research some project, I learn interesting things that I can talk about here, but this has been such fiddly work, of a peculiar type, and such small inspirations haven't arisen.  Yet, I'm far enough along to talk about the project itself.  Yay.

Not very impressive, is it?  For some time now, I'm going to be steadily populating the above white space, seeing if I can fit in 1600 items or so.  The number so far is a little less than 200.  Everything here is subject to shifting around, with adjustments to fonts, headings and such—the only thing that matters is the actual descriptions, which have to be as tight as I can make them while using all kinds of rich, vibrant words to paint images.

I'll be reposting the image every once in awhile, because that makes it fun for me.

After a long conversation Thursday, which became passionate and loud, my business manager (Yes!  I have one of those!  Isn't that scary?) convinced me the above format will go right over the heads of many, many potential clients, the sort who can't train their eyes to look at a lot of words jammed together or adjust themselves to numbers which follow descriptions.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Apparently, however, this is unreadable:

Kirtle dress ~ elaborate dress coat, with slit sleeves & collar, laced as corselet; favours cold climates; highly crafted; damask – 83 g.p. / 3¾ lb. linen – 2 g.p. / 2½ lb. velour – 36 g.p. / 5¾ lb. wool velvet – 689 g.p. / 4⅜ lb.

Common, ordinary people need something called "columns," with loads of white space, or else they consider the plentiful, remarkable content to be utterly useless and of no commercial value.  I tried to explain that columns and white space will just eat up space, removing any real cleverness to be found in the creation of the poster, since ultimately what remains will be just the same, dull, boring stuff that can be found on any equipment list.  But Mark says I'm going to face plant if I keep thinking that way, so I've agreed to make a poster that has a wider potential audience.

Wait, wait ... before you start screaming at the screen, wait.  I'm also going to make THIS poster, the one above, the original one I'd planned, without compromising my artistic integrity.  Then I'm going to sell both posters, independently, so that crazy lunatics like me—you know, that can read—will be able to buy one version that can sit in front of your toilet and never get old, whereas other people can buy their crutch-minded version.  It's my plan to build the deep one first, then figure out what content to drop in order to build the shallow one thereafter.  I may ask for some help on-line about that, but usually no two people can agree about what's superfluous and what isn't.  There may be no point.

Anyway, that's the state of my world.  The poster teaser post got a LOT of page views, so clearly there's something appealing about this.  I don't do anything halfway, so I'm frustratingly digging into the shelf-life of food products, what they taste like and other like details, because hell, I might as well go on being an extreme kook.  As such, this will take time.  Ultimately, I'd like a product that will mezmerise an onlooker, who's helpless to go on free-associating from item to item, until an hour goes by without notice.

That would be very cool.

Incidentally, I can't help noticing that the image above isn't very clear, due to blogger's policy of having the image upload capacity of a 2004 start-up.  If anyone wants to see a clear image of the poster, please email me at alexiss1@telus.net and I'll send you a copy right along.