userpic fever

[radfrac_archive_full]

I will probably have to get a paid account just so that I can have more userpics. My current choices are all text-heavy, and I'd like to have some that were just imagery, for balance.

It's probably wrong that I think about these things.

Someone really ought to write a Short Treatise on userpics. People's choices, design elements, creative solutions for size limitations, symbolic systems... I've seen such amazingly clever collages and layerings in that tiny 100 x 100 space. I love the way the stress of limitations makes people's creativity flower. It's a bit like Jane Austen's little bit of ivory, two inches wide.

Very fun evening looking at frock coat patterns with K. and going through her incredible collection of velvets. She is going to take the scattered scraps and scrapes of fabric remnants I have and make me a motley that Harlequin would envy.

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Comments

[chromemagpie.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm. Euphorigenic.

[radiantfracture]

You know it. It works well for this format because it's relatively narrow, yet the strokes are thick enough to be legible. And it seemed right for a rather Wildean quotation.

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[chromemagpie.livejournal.com]

It's a font that can be used for pretty much anything... part of it's beauty.

I want to make some user icons, too. You and stitch have such cool ones. But I can never think of anything clever. :P

You want a lack of clever?

[argus-in-tights.livejournal.com]

Have you seen my icon? Ah well. Yes, the flowering of genius that comes of constraint. I'm always reminded of the high end of the Academie Francaise - Moliere, Voltaire, Rabelais... When choices are limited, there is a certain extra attention to small detail that I think can only be explained as rebellion.

Oh, and by the way...way envious of your motley already. I lurve frock coats!

\i/

Re: You want a lack of clever?

[radiantfracture]

In fact I have a usericon that I made for you and just haven't sent you yet. You are under no obligation, of course. It is texty as are all of mine. I can promise it will be clever, though, because it is a quote of yours.

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Re: You want a lack of clever?

[radiantfracture]

I like that, detail as rebellion--the freedom of the mind, or using the tyranny's own fixations against it, exaggerating compliance until it makes itself absurd...

And then there are the excesses of fantasy as means of satire--which is what I think of with Rabelais.

You know, fantasy used to be an entirely more gruesome and provocative tool... I would like to see that done more often in the Genre.

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[radiantfracture]

Do you see how prettily it fits into itself, too? The descenders don't battle the ascenders. Like it was designed for tight spaces and quirky juxtapositions.

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[chromemagpie.livejournal.com]

It's really just the perfect font.

And, it's stayed on my favourite font list for almost a year now... which is a feat within itself.