Earlier in the week as I was returning home after a long day, I was annoyed to discover yet another take-out menu that had been stuffed under the door. As I bent down to retrieve it, my eye caught sight of dish Q3 from the Chef’s Specials. Amazing indeed!

Taking typographic cues from their original menu designs, I’ve decided to pay homage to some of the more amusing dishes I discover as both an avid consumer of foods and semantic curiosities.

As my role at work seems to move further away from Actively Making Things and increasingly more towards Supporting Others in Making Things, I’ve been thinking a lot (perhaps, too much) about what this means for me as a person whose identity has been largely shaped by the act of making. Truthfully, I’ve been feeling a bit like a Broken Earthworm, one who has somehow managed to lose her ability to regenerate a new head or tail. I realize that slow progress is all part of the journey to grow and develop new skills that will help me to be more effective, and truthfully, learning how to be a better writer is very much part of my ongoing education.

But, at the same time, I’ve been trying to keep up my core craft skills through personal endeavors outside of work. I spent this past weekend iterating on my friends’ project to map their social network (earlier version viewable here). This is one such visualization representing the length of association of friends and family members. Each individual (arranged in alphabetical order) has been indicated as a raspberry line—the length of which has been determined by the number of years they’ve known one another. Content aside, the most satisfying moment for me came when I elected to use Adobe Illustrator’s Add Arrowhead filter to terminate each line in a circle, all performed with a single click. Insta-Dandelion!

For me, this small act underscored the importance for me to keep my tools sharp, because, like it or not, tools often drive form. And while I typically cringe when I recognize whiz-bang! effects applied with wild abandon, for now, an understanding of What’s Possible far outweighs Not Knowing.

I’ll never forget the day in grad school when one of our visiting critics referred to my work as Aesthetic Pornography. To me, this was a pivotal moment of the soul-crushing variety—one in which I realized just how easily a designer’s intention could be eclipsed by the viewer’s impression, regardless of how rigorous the designer’s rationale was for the decisions he or she made. In fact, it was this very moment that spurred me to explore various ways of removing my “hand” from subsequent work, a pursuit I’ve since come to view as nearly impossible.

The image above is taken from an in-progress data visualization I’ve been working on for friends that maps their social network. Each circle represents a single individual: size is determined by the length of association, colors correspond to the nature of their relationship, position refers to geography. The detail shown here is North America—the outline of which is roughly visible by squinting.

In absence of a legend (or the above paragraph), what one is left with is the impression of randomly overlapping bubbles in bright, shiny colors. Aesthetic Pornography v2.0. Only this time, I’ll own it.

In our apartment, you’ll find stacks of books, magazines, and catalogs in every room. Some are perennial favorites—read, re-read, and referenced on a regular basis—while others have yet to be cracked since arriving home from Amazon or the local bookstore months, sometimes years, ago. We subscribe to a half-dozen magazines, but average at least four weeks behind on the weeklies, particularly those as dense as The New Yorker. We cancelled our subscription to Time Out, simply because the frustration that resulted from reading about the show we missed or the exhibit that just closed became unbearable.

(Mis)Readings attempts to document that which I’ve actually read. Page for page, every word ingested from books and magazines is replicated in its original typeface and layout. Colors and images have been eliminated. Headlines and drop caps loom large against vast expanses of white; credits and small point legalese rarely appears. What results is a visual record of my own predisposition toward content—that which is omitted is, perhaps, equally, if not more, significant as that which appears on the page.