Designing a font is like raising a child. You know your job is truly done only after it leaves home and becomes independent. The Bulgaria Moderna font was one of those kids that mature faster than you expect them. It was barely few months old when I received the first request for use. Since then, it got 3 major updates and reached more than 28.000 downloads. And even though the fourth update got delayed several times since I started working on my book, the project is far from over.

One of the biggest incentives for me to continue developing the font is that it gets used in so many creative ways. I was even contacted by the architect of a historical Bulgarian town who wanted to use it on a commemorative plate. To see his letters chiseled in stone is the dream of any typographer, dead or alive.

Another dream, equally exhilarating, is to see your font used in a book. To become aware that someone you don’t know picked it among millions of others and decided to weave it into the typographic fabric of his project. As a writer who has designed his own book after countless tests, I know how much thought goes into such decisions.

Few months ago I was asked to license my Bulgaria Moderna font for use in a book project accompanying an exhibition by the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Titled Resplendent Dress from Southeastern Europe: A History in Layers, the book is a one way ticket to Ethnographic Wonderland. It explores 19th Century costumes from Southeastern Europe and every single chapter heading in the giant, lushly illustrated 276-page eye-candy is adorned in Bulgaria Moderna glyphs, up to the cover itself.

And as much as it tickles my creative ego, it’s also a deeply humbling experience because the depth of knowledge and the attention to detail in this book vastly outstrip my own. It’s not every day that I get a lesson in my own history from people across the ocean. This makes me happy.

You can find the book on Amazon.

Alphadesigner Bulgaria Moderna Font in a Fowler Museum Art Book

Something really strange started to happen to the British Conservatives since they came to power. A significant part of them feels so frustrated with the European Union they are eager to take every opportunity to disrupt the ties Britain has with it, regardless of whether it makes sense. Their latest panic attack? The tsunami of potential immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania after the lifting of the work restrictions at the end of this year. Some conservatives seem so eager to play the scare card and collect any momentary dividends that they literary came up with something brilliantly retarded. You think the word is too strong? Well judge for yourself from this report in the Guardian:

Please don’t come to Britain – it rains and the jobs are scarce and low-paid. Ministers are considering launching a negative advertising campaign in Bulgaria and Romania to persuade potential immigrants to stay away from the UK…
The idea, however tentative, appears to clash with the billions of pounds Britain spent on the Olympics, partly to drive up the country’s reputation. It also emerged as the Home Office launched a guide to Britishness for foreigners who would be citizens which opens with the words: “Britain is a fantastic place to live: a modern thriving society”.

It really takes a lot of panic (or cynical opportunism) to assume that you need to trash your own country’s reputation to avoid immigration. The only meaningful explanation is that those who mastered the plan think such trashing will have a precise surgical effect, as if they are aware of a special communication channel which will restrict the message only to Bulgarian and Romanian nationals and also impede them from sharing it with anyone abroad.

I am happy to report that the plan backfired even before its implementation. Apart from the usual Twitter backlash, a Romanian advertising company took advantage of the stupid situation and created its own campaign, inviting Britons tired from the rain to come over and enjoy a better weather. One of the leading Bulgarian bloggers, Boyan Yurukov, took things even further and started an initiative urging anybody from the island to move permanently to Bulgaria.

Somewhere in the middle of this storm I’m throwing my own two cents, the map of Europe according to the Tories you see above, now officially part of my Mapping stereotypes project. Cheers and remember that the German edition of my Atlas of Prejudice book comes out this month. Unfortunately it’s too late to include the current map in it but maybe there will be enough pages in the coming English edition.

Who knows…

Alphadesigner Europe According to the British Tories

Conversations like these are becoming quite frequent in my home, where Facebook can be accessed 24/7 through 2 separate computers. Most of the time they (and their respective owners) operate from a shared desk. Which makes such moments hilariously awkward, since we often realize that if something is truly important, we could have chosen direct communication, instead of a post on Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.

But of course such an idea misses the big picture, none of us puts pictures on those social services just because we want to share them with our own household. We also want to reach our families, friends and other people, with which we love to interact.

What’s really alarming in such cases is not the vision of a common Borg-like collective in the near future but the palpable feeling that someone, for whatever reason, is messing up with your information stream and the fact that you can’t fully predict the consequences or completely understand the logic behind it adds an extra layer of creepiness to the sweet cherry pie.

Some uncomfortable questions spring to mind: How many people weren’t actually able see what you shared? How many settings do you have to switch on or off to make sure you have increased your visibility to the max? What red buttons should you press to make sure you see everything shared by your friends and never miss a beat? And last but not least, why doesn’t everything just work as you expect it?

The Social Networking Jungle

You can attribute this mess to Facebook’s notorious dynamism but let’s not kid ourselves. If things were so simple, Facebook would be a moon in the Disney Universe, right next to planet Cinderella and the Red Riding Hood Asteroid Belt. But those of you who don’t think Mark Zuckerberg comes from Krypton and have been on Facebook for a while, may have observed the evolution of the service from something used to connect people to a walled garden where you need a loudspeaker just to get the attention of your friends.

Twitter has similar problems with visibility but when you open your newsfeed there, things have a (chrono)logical order. If you follow a lot of people who post frequently, you naturally assume you won’t be able to always keep up with every single update. Respectively, you assume that your own updates may share the same fate. But there’s no extra factors in between. Twitter (or any other of the major social networks) doesn’t try to curate your stream and guess what is more likely to be important for you and what should be simply pushed back, or in the worst cases, completely discarded.

You may certainly end up frustrated if you miss something important but you will immediately find a solution, either by trimming the number of the people you follow or by organizing your sources in lists. Granted, it may take a lot of time and requires a lot of brain power. In other words, no different than real life.

But let’s assume you’re lazy, entitled and spoiled or you just don’t have a PhD in social networking, which is fine. I’m not trying to demonize information curating. Google does it with its search and it works well. Facebook does it all the time with the billions of posts it distributes every minute but the catch here is that the majority of users don’t have a clue how it works and I’m not talking about some painstaking specifics or obscure algorithms.

The Facebook settings are so opaque and change so frequently that few other than the most devoted fanboys know exactly where to click to activate or deactivate an option. It has been like that for years and there’s no end in sight, which is why it’s so hard to explain this messiness with the company’s dynamism. Your average hotel maid is also highly dynamic but she somehow manages to clean your room without reshuffling the furniture every morning or gluing your bed to the ceiling.

How Creating Confusion Can Be a Profitable Business Model

Every honest politician would confirm (forgive the oxymoron) that confusion is an element of power. Facebook doesn’t seem even a bit bothered about the fact that you can’t find your way in its internal labyrinth. It knows very well that your disorientation won’t trigger a revolt, it will simply give way to apathy, freeing your reptilian mind to do what it does best – relentlessly feeding its ego with clicks of attention. If power is an aphrodisiac, vanity is its love potion and I have a feeling someone in Facebook has already written a poem about it.

And once it has put your mind to sleep and unleashed the basic urges of you ego, Facebook will start charging. Confused over the visibility of your posts? Sure, ask your friends to make you a priority. Too shy to ask? Well, you can pay us and we will disregard their own settings and show them whatever bullshit you want. Just pay us.

This option is not a diabolical fit of my imagination, it is already live and it was rolled out in such a smart way that most people still don’t know it’s there to begin with. Facebook first introduced it for their Pages, claiming that they are trying to reduce the clutter with which brands clog our newsfeeds. Fair enough. Page owners (like me) we a little bit frustrated but it made sense to those of us who are running a business oriented page. I have even taken advantage of the option and paid for promoted posts.

But like it usually happens, the awkwardness was just around the corner. A few weeks later, Facebook enabled this option for personal accounts as well. Millions of egos in the world got a pre-orgasmic gasp when the tempting “Promote” link appeared on the bottom of each of their super important posts. Those who complained against this diabolic plan were quickly snubbed by the critics, who claimed that Facebook still offered you complete control over your setting, provided you negotiated the right conditions with your friends and followers, like marking people as “close friends” etc.

Again, the awkwardness is just around the corner. Apparently Facebook can alter your choices from time to time, issuing easy to miss one-time notifications about the permanent changes, for example “Notifications from X sources are off because you haven’t used them recently! You can turn them back on (link)” If you fail to take action the moment you see this notification, you will never know who those sources were. And there’s plenty of situations, in which you would prefer to delay making such a decision.

If you can follow suit with this without complaining of intrusion, I can assume you either work at Facebook or you’re someone who simply enjoys wasting his life making his Facebook profile a priority over everything else. The rest of us have better stuff to do.

Fighting Spam by Charging for Email

Remember when Facebook tried to reinvent email? That was fun. It simply added a rudimentary email option in its messaging service and for a while it was cool because it promised to strip human interaction of the last vestiges of formality: those hated distractions like the emial subject line and the “Dear Mister X,” and “Best regards!” lines at the end of each message. As it became clear that people didn’t use it as expected and even worse, some were simply refusing to open up their message boxes to anyone beyond their friends, Facebook decided to remove the available restrictions altogether and just like any other email, to force you to receive a message from anybody who sends it to yourusername@facebook.com

That made sense. But even in this case, awkwardness was just around the corner. Instead of delivering the messages in a single inbox, Facebook quietly designated a barely visible folder called… “Other”. How many people know about it? I opened it today for the first time and there were 3 messages inside. I didn’t receive any notifications they were there, even one-time snippets, saying “You have new messages in your… Other!” Nada.

And this is how Facebook intends to fight spam, by simply discarding every message which doesn’t come from your contact list. I know what you’re thinking, how come Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo never came up with such ingenious solution. Well, the answer is a bit complicated because the solution is actually… retarded and would have killed any of those services soon after its implementation. Facebook may get away with it. After all, there aren’t many people using it for email.

But Facebook masterminds apparently think otherwise. Locked in their Ivory tower, they seem to have devised an even bolder plan, which was revealed today by Mashable and is been currently tested in the US. The plan consists of charging people who are not your contacts for the privilege to send a message to you “Inbox”. If you don’t pay, Facebook kindly informs you that it will end up in your… “Other”.

It’s a sort of admission on Facebook’s side that their service sucks but the funny part ends when they ask you to cover the expenses. And in case you want to message a VIP, they will strip search you for money. Currently, during the testing of the payment option, sending a message to Mark Zuckerberg will cost you 100$.

And that’s how I know those guys are on crack. I’m just considering how to break the news to their parents.

Alphadesigner Facebook’s Grip on Your Information Flow

Alphadesigner The Digital Baroque 2013 Calendar

I am happy to announce that the German edition of my Atlas of Prejudice book will hit the bookstores in February 2013. The publisher is Knesebeck Verlag. Those of you familiar with the German market have probably seen a lot of its superbly made illustrated books, among which are bestseller titles like Christoph Niemann’s Abstract City. I couldn’t be in a better company. Seriously.

I have yet to sit down and fully comprehend what all this means. Mapping Stereotypes, the project that this book is based on, is 4 years old. By contemporary standards, this makes it as ancient as a Phidias statue. Despite that, with every passing year, it has managed to grow, almost by itself in a frictionless, kind of supernatural way. There was always something extra that was worth laughing at. What remained unnoticed was that it came hand in hand with something discouraging, even scary.

Those who ridicule stupidity long enough always get their hearts broken. As time passes by, it becomes harder and harder to separate the fools from the people you sympathize with. And suddenly the fun may turn to bitterness, resentment, anger, rage. Then comes a humbling point because as you dig deeper in the mud you ultimately discover there’s a stupid fool living inside your own self.

The human psyche is such a weird creature. All its problems have to be reverse-engineered. We spend most of our lives projecting expectations like an old cinema. Our eyes flicker, our guts roar and when the end comes, the film just flies off the feeder and then – silence. Few of us really take part in the movie itself. We are so scared to step in and assume our roles that we dedicate enormous efforts to deceive ourselves that the projection itself is the reality worth living in. Our emotional gluttony forces us to chase pleasure where it doesn’t exist. Our fear makes us choose sides in otherwise irrelevant alliances. Our prefabricated assumptions grow into parallel universes once they rub on our sensation-hungry minds.

If you assume those are modern, 21st century problems, this book will kindly remind you they’re not. America didn’t invent Wall Street. Britain didn’t invent imperialism. Stalin didn’t invent mass deportations and France didn’t invent peeing in the ocean. The impulse for all those things was already present, it popped in our little heads the moment we started thinking and truth be told, back in those days, it used to be much worse. That’s not exactly a consolation, but it’s good to know we have such a vast base for comparison when it comes to bigotry, stereotypes and prejudices. Human history, dear reader, is nothing but a branch of psychology and this book marks the beginning of my efforts to prove it.

This is why I had to write it myself. I had to design it myself. Illustrate it myself. It’s not stubborn egoism, it’s just an enormous pulsating zit on my face and I have to deal with it on my own because let’s be fair, who else would want to touch it?

There are 39 maps inside. Most of them you have already seen, although never in one single place. Others were made exclusively, inspired during the writing process. The remaining 41 pages you will have to read. Yeah, sorry about that. :)

P.S. And finally, after I bragged about how this is a one man effort, let’s backtrack a bit. Making this book wasn’t easy but whatever problems I encountered were mine alone. The wonderful team I worked with was no less than brilliant. I am very thankful to Martin Brinkmann, my literary agent who has the patience of a saint and the dedication of a nun. I was literary amazed by the skills of Christine und Christophe, das beste Ü-Team in der ganzen Welt, who managed to translate all my ridiculous map labels into German and still keep them embarrassingly funny! And last but not least, to Knesebeck for giving me absolute creative freedom. How many authors can enjoy this with their first book? That’s right, I am the only one. Up yours, Dostoevsky! :)

Alphadesigner German Atlas of Prejudice Comes February 2013