fairfax – elastic wax

I’ve been reluctant to say that I am a complete dork when it comes to typography. I can spend hours looking through font specimen books for no reason other than just to gawk. Subtle differences between similar fonts pass most people by, but to me, it’s the difference between good design and hasty choices. So when it comes to events in Los Angeles that showcase interesting type related design, it immediately goes in my calendar. Which makes me mad that I completely missed John Downer at ReserveLA last night.

The blame for this falls squarely on me. I’m just over a week behind on my blog reading, and that can really add up. After a day, I usually have somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 unread posts. So when I ran across this post on Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog, I knew I had missed something important.

John Downer started his career as a freelance type designer in 1983 and is a master sign painter by trade. The Propagandist has a slideshow here of his work. It’s a great read if you enjoy design and typography. You can also see the line of shirts John designed for Freshjive on slides 1 and 25.

I don’t know if the exhibit is still up, or if it was a one night thing. I’ll update as soon as I know.

Feast or Famine: Animal

I’m going to start posting my epicurean exploits here, both as a way to remember the good and the bad dining experiences I have as well as to serve as a guide for others who enjoy splurging occasionally and going to a great meal. Most of the restaurants will be from LA, often thought of as having fewer quality restaurants than say New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or even Vegas. But in my experience, there are many amazing restaurants here in the southern part of the west coast. You’ll no doubt see a bunch of the restaurants I go to reviewed by my food nemesis Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly (more on that in another post), but here goes.

This post is dedicated to one of the restaurants in LA with the biggest buzz at the moment. And given the frequency in which restaurants open and close here, it thrills me that it’s doing so well. Animal on Fairfax has to be one of my favorite restaurants right now. If for no other reason than I couldn’t go a day in my life without eating some form of meat. As you can probably infer from the name, Animal does one thing and does it well.