Jason

"Hi Ashlea,
feel free to come into the studio and we can discuss in more depth. But in the meantime here's a just few examples of what I mean regarding the typography. Apologies to general readers - this is pretty arcane stuff.

Starting with the cover - check the kerning in the title (and as we're now only talking about typography I won't hassle you again about the actual choice of title). Then the contents page - it looks as if you've centred the page numbers which creates an awkward alignment. Also perhaps consider tabbing a consistent space between the chapter numbers and headings (the capitals of the headers lead the eye along an inconsistent vertical). The tone of the work, due largely to the type and its composition, is deliberately and appropriately very restrained, but it's also very dry - these subtle details (and others) might help increase visual engagement without loosing this tone. In the body, details like unnecessary chapter indents at the top of columns (indents cue the eye to a new para so are redundant at the beginning of a text), and narrow column width relative to font size and text length could be reconsidered. Is there something subtle you can do to the centred chapter headings to add a little typographic colour? Why this specific font? Etc.

Let me know if you want further pedantic typographic harassment."

"In May 2009 I was invited by the Brumen Foundation to be on the jury of the 1st Poster Festival Ljubljana. As genuinely tempting as it was, with the other esteemed jurors including Alain Le Quernec, Anthon Beeke, Piotr Młodozeniec, Bruno Monguzzi, not to mention the prospect of catching up with my good friend Oliver Vodeb, Inkahoots has a longstanding philosophical objection to competitions so I politely declined.

We had also been asked to contribute the Festival's exhibition 'Masterpieces' at the National Gallery of Slovenia, and fortunately, the organisers were conducting a workshop to which they extended me an invitation as a mentor. This was a real honour and a great arrangement - all the benefits of an international competition (meeting brilliant people, seeing new places and great work) without the problems (many of which already mentioned in this discussion). Unfortunately I wasn't aware that the workshop itself had also been framed as a competition. The workshop outcomes of many excellent students from countries such as Italy, Finland, Croatia, Poland, Slovenia would be judged towards the '1st European youth poster competition'.

I'd flown 17,037 kilometers to help conduct a competition (about climate change!). It was a long way back to Brisbane.

My group had a discussion about the problems of sincerely confronting the issue of climate change with the antithetical mechanism of an adversarial conceit. It was decided we would complete the workshop, continue to explore these ideas critically, and boycott the competition.

We signed a statement (all participants except for 3 students, one of which won the competition - but that's another story) and read it publicly at the prize launch. This was our objection:"

"yes, this why I don't blog. Writing in a hurry means tone is not always as intended. Apologies if my comment seems too closed."

"I really like the idea of exploring these themes at Memefest, but we should aim for political clarity. Definitions of sexism that are so loose as to include 'women who hate men' aren't productive. Sexism like racism etc is SYSTEMATIC prejudice, (not merely the unbound prejudice of an individual) and therefore dependant on and reinforced by social, economic and cultural dominance. A woman who 'hates a man' might be prejudiced, but by definition (or at least any meaningful definition) is not sexist."