A Midsummer Night's Dream

Hey guys!
I am part of a youth theatre group, Celsius Youth Theatre, and right now I'm working on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. 
I'm going to be working on a couple things for this production, including designing the set, designing costumes, acting (I'm playing Bottom) and building the set and costumes. It's actually quite fun.
I get to work with my friend Kelsey (who I'm designing sets/costumes with) and my friend Daniel, who is directing the play. 
Designing a play is a really interesting process. It takes a lot of thinking to get to the point where you can say that everything is figured out. In  the world of a play you need to suspend your audiences belief enough that they can buy into the wonderful world that they see onstage. With A Midsummer Night's Dream, you can really push the envelope in the forest, where most of the action takes place, to create a dreamy, unrealistic space. It is, after all, the realm of the fairies, so you can make things stylized and angular and vivid.
Right now we've almost got our set design finalized (yay!).  Now we need to finish all the costume design.
I'll post pictures of the set and costumes (and costume and set drawings) after the plays run is over in November.

Vive le Shakespeare!
~josh
  
(Okay, technically I can't say "Vive le Shakespeare" because he's already dead, but what ever.)

Rambling about Helvetica

Happy are those who can post in Helvetica!  

Helvetica is a font, as you may or may not already know, that is extremely popular and VERY well designed. 

Helvetica was designed in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, as a replacement for fonts used in signage.

The designers of the font wanted it to be very easy to read and have no particular "character" to it so that it's uses could be varied without lending a certain "tone" or "feeling" to the text.

Helvetica's use is so widespread that it is quite astonishing.  A massive number of corporations use the font in their logos. For example;

Apple,

3M, 

American Airlines, 

American Apparel, 

BMW, 

Jeep,

JC penny, 

Lufthansa, 

Microsoft, 

Target, 

Re/Max, 

Toyota, 

Panasonic, 

Motorola, 

Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless all use the font. 

Even the movie ratings you see on the back of DVD's is set in Helvetica.

NASA used helvetica on the space shuttle Orbiter. The US and the Canadian Government also use helvetica. 

In fact, helvetica's use is so extremely widespread that there was a documentary made about it. (Which, by the way, is excellent.) 

Most road signs you will see are set in either helvetica, or a typeface based on helvetica.

And now I can type all my posts in it.

Life is good.

-Josh, who is extremely happy that helvetica has joined the Blogger universe.

Word of the Day Wednesday #2

Hey guys!
I've been looking at one of my new favorite nerd websites, The Phrontistery, and I found that it has lists of archaic and odd words organized by letter.
YES!
As you have probably noted in my posts, I love odd and weird words and random nerdy/techy/design oriented things and this website is just going to feed the geeky frenzy that is my brain.
Anyway the "E" section of this website seemed especially interesting, since I really don't think that people use that many "E" words. Other that "exciting" and "easy". And "exciting" isn't all that interesting of a word. Whilst I was searching I found this word; esculent. It means "edible" or "fit for consumption." Doesn't it sound awesome!? I mean, it's exceedingly more fun to say than "yummy".  Take this brief exchange with my mother, for example:

Mom: Here, try this cupcake!

Me: Okay. *Noms cupcake*

Mom: Soooo, how do you like it?

Me: It's most exceedingly esculent!

Mom: Why do I even bother?

Yeah, I'm a pretty weird child.  I blame this video.
Anyway, I better stop talking. As some wise person once said: "Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
And thus concludes this word of the day Wednesday.

May all your meals be esculent,

Josh.

(PS, what is your favorite word? Leave a comment below!)
((PSS, YES, I know this is posted on thursday, but better late then never. Right? No? Okay...))