7 July 2009: "Will a Helvetty tatty improve my personal brand?"

This post is about the triumph of form over content. By focusing on the non-transparency of fonts, Carles is concerned about various ways in which the medium can preclude the message, how form itself becomes discursive and competes with the ostensible message it was intended to simply contain and convey.

Fonts, once invisible to the average reader, have become palpable conduits of emotional valence as digital word processing has taught people from outside of the world of graphic design and print shops about the possibilities inherent in font selection. The result is that it is harder to access the words themselves free of distorting context, or rather, the context framing the message of the words themselves has been further complicated by technology that might have reasonably promised to streamline communications rather than muddle them. That Carles discusses this in the context of tattoos only amplifies the pathos -- even when paper is replaced by human skin, there is no guarantee that there will be no slippage of meaning, that the selected text will not mean something other than what is hoped due to contextual cues of which the author of the message is entirely unaware. We can't embody our ideas, which remain at several removes from our attempts to express them and retain an autonomy that we wish to deny them. Hence Carles, in his graphic arts character, admits that he is frustrated by the gap between being and creating: "I am interested in letting the world know what I’m all about, not only as a human, but also as a designer." Would that he could express his humanity through his design praxis, but the intrusion of form has foiled such a convenient identity between the two.

Rather than conquer alienation by fusing practice and theory, content and form, we are reduced to inane questions that intimate the loss of all possible meaning in form: "Do yall have a fave font that u would want to chill on ur body for the rest of ur life?" For the duration of our being, we are limited to such decisions, reduced to hosts for the design imperatives that have been loosed upon the social world, carriers for memes in the form of recognizable, taxonomized media. Thus Carles wonders if it is worth the trouble to tattoo anything but the name of the font in the font he has chosen to mark himself with. "Wonder if I should write the actual font name, or possibly something else sweet, like a Dave Matthews Band lyric." Nothing, Carles fears, can transcend that level of triviality.

With such a paucity of potential for expression, and with the relentless pressure to express ourselves uniquely, Carles knows something is about to blow: "Just trying 2 be an individual. Might just let the world know that I ‘h8′ America." Here he condenses the argument of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer into two sentences. Thwarted efforts at individuality produce a restless, reactionary populace ripe for exploitation by whatever dime-store fascist happens into the public eye.