Not A Blog™

Today was one of those days. Last night I was busy late into the night. Today was a day full of meetings. Keep an eye open for Sunday, though, because I will have something this time. It’s what I was going to put up last Sunday, but didn’t finish. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Not A Blog™ entry.

In high school, a classmate of mine brought in a copy of her parent’s copy of the Illustrated version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Having recently discovered the book at the time, I thought this was one of the coolest things ever. Unfortunately I only had a chance to look at it for about twenty minutes, and since the copy was in excellent condition and the book was out of print, there was no way I’d be able to borrow it.

I pretty much decided right at that instance that I would buy that book some day because it was awesome. That day has come. Well, actually, that day went by a few weeks ago. More correctly, I finally got that book in my own two hands. It’s still awesome.

Over the past few years, I’ve been occasionally checking up on the price. Back when I was in high school, you either couldn’t find it, or you could find it but it was really expensive. Reportedly, Douglas Adams bought a lot of the unsold stock, signed them all, and resold them through his own website. I don’t remember that this was happening—even though I distinctly remember visiting his website a number of times—or possibly it was very expensive (to me, at the time), and so never bought one of these. (It’s also possible they sold out in a few months). I’ve checked the website as recently as a few months ago and did not see any of these for sale. I imagine they’re collector’s items at this point.

In the meantime, two things happened. The internet became a lot more ubiquitous, to the point where it’s flooded with niche products such as the Illustrated Guide—and I grew up and started making disposable income. Imagine my surprise when—for the first time since graduating college—I did a quick search on Amazon for the book just out of curiosity, and found dozens of copies for sale, in all conditions, starting at less than ten bucks.

The day had come.

So I picked out a copy that was reasonably priced (twenty bucks), in an “almost new” condition (it is, which is awesome, no rips or anything, just wear), from a seller that had almost perfect feedback. Like I said, it came yesterday.

The book itself is oversized. (About 14″x 11″—whatever that is in book binder’s terminology. Quarto? That’s too small. Whatev’) It has beautiful large format photography, not just of the principal actors, but of models and sets that have been built. The graphic design and illustrative aspect of the book is interesting because it straddles the time period between traditional print media and model building technique and the familiar present day digital design processes and computer graphics. If this book had been created at any time in the past five years or so, it would be exclusively CG: not an improvement.

(Which raises the question: how long is it going to be until someone creates the “new” Illustrated Guide which is all CG. I think this would be fun if it were a fan project. I think it would be a shameless money grab if it were an intentional descision by Adams’ estate. Either way, I’d probably buy it.)

But more to the point is that the graphic design is a great example of pre-dot-com, post exclusively digital 80’s sensibilities. See, in the mid to late 80’s, everyone was all about the pixel fonts, grids, phosphor color on black, and the clunky digital look that we got from old computers and video game systems. There was a swing away from this in the 90’s—up until digital press and the web (and it’s low resolution) brought these things back into vogue just in time for the dot-com boom. Dot com design, if you think about it, is like 80’s design on white instead of black, and with Photoshop effects applied. Yay.

In the sense of the Illustrated Guide, it’s not overdone, thankfully. There’s a certain amount of Bauhaus inspiration in there (that’s cool), but thankfully what we don’t see is an overabundance of computer-ey type things. In fact, the models of computers are, in some cases, deliberately doped down to old-school interfaces with knobs and sliders. One looks like something out of Wallace and Gromit. Naturally this is perfect because that’s what Hitchhiker’s Guide is about: making fun of technology. (I have another article in the works about this, as well.)

One thing that’s very interesting to me is the use of large, pixelated graphical words. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or a mistake. It’s the sort of thing that would very well be considered a mistake in college, and you’d get points docked for it. Basically, it means a low-res version of an image was printed where a high-res one should have went. This makes me think one of two things is happening here. Either the majority of the book was laid out in a paste-up format, or prepress technology was limited enough to prevent these large elements from printing properly. I’m guessing the latter isn’t the case because the photos are huge and they’re not pixelated. But then again, the book doesn’t look like it was done as a paste-up, because it has a few things going on that are just plain difficult to do that way, specifically underlined and stretched type. In other words, I think it is a mistake, although maybe not a preventable one. (The background elements that aren’t pixelated are vector generated shapes.)

In other words, what I’m getting at is that this book looks like it was designed in the dinosaur-age of computers. (A strange phrase, I’ll admit.) You can tell. Well, I can tell. But despite this flaw—and perhaps because of it—I really like the whole package.

The story’s pretty good, too.

-Ted