- ARCHIVE / writing
- rebranding baltimore
We’ve tried for years to explain our fair city. The answer was here all along.
Baltimore has long been searching for the right tagline.
Back in the day we tried The City That Reads, which has to stand as the strangest city motto of all time (the fact that it was easily manipulated into “The City That [...] - interviewed by a big, shiny robot
Wherein I catch everyone up on the state of my work in comics (and probably ruffle a few feathers along the way).
It’s been awhile since my last book (Borrowed Time, Volume Two) came out, but I’m still kicking around in the comics industry. And I plan to keep doing that for a long time — [...] - the power and responsibility of editing
A good editor might make your writing. A bad editor will ruin it.
Raymond Carver has long been one of my favorite writers. His terse, emotionally complex prose isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I’ve found it to mine. Recent revelations about his relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, make me wonder just who it is I’ve [...] - the decline and fall of journalism
What ever happened to the art and craft of the newspaper?
As the final season of The Wire rips into a fictional version of the Baltimore Sun, series creator David Simon has penned a scathing editorial asking: Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?
Anyone who has followed Simon’s work over the years is no doubt aware [...] - new work: pressbox
A dispatch from the Slant Six-osphere…
I wrote the cover story for this week’s edition of PressBox, a local all-sports weekly. It’s a profile of Coppin State women’s basketball player Rashida Suber, one of the finest women’s players this area has ever seen.
Click here to read it. - trends for 2008, post three: bob powers
This is the third in a series wherein I solicit thoughts from some of my favorite creative thinkers about what they think 2008 (and beyond) might look like.
This installment comes courtesy of Bob Powers. Bob is the brilliance behind the Girls Are Pretty website and its companion book, Happy Cruelty Day. I recommend both [...] - saying more by saying less
Knowing when to let go is one key to effective communication.
Whether we like it or not, we’re in a world where the transparent, open-source nature of online activity has fundamentally changed the way people and businesses have conversations. In thinking about how it works and trying to figure out how best to participate, this is [...] - merle armitage: book designer
A tribute to the self-described “impresario.”
While digging through some old links today I stumbled upon something I bookmarked ages ago and promptly forgot: Roy R. Behrens‘ profile of American designer Merle Armitage. Of particular note are the images accompanying the text, which display some truly fantastic typographic sensibilities.
Armitage was the kind of highly-accomplished and versatile [...] - mad men: the carousel
AMC’s first scripted drama ends its first season in style.
Say what you will about Mad Men. That it’s paced all wrong, that it’s too morally ambigous, that its depiction of Madison Avenue in 1960 is either too inaccurate or not accurate enough. All of these are up for debate, but this much is not: that [...] - the question mark and the quotes
Editing isn’t always about what’s right. Sometimes, it’s about what works.
The title of my last post read as follows: what is “design thinking”?
The choice to put the question mark outside of the quotation marks was 100% intentional. It was also, technically, wrong.
Traditional rules of punctuation hold that punctuation marks stay inside the quotes. In most [...]