Don’t Give Up
This is something that I’ve originally made in 2007. I made a revision of it in 2022, tweaking a few typographic details that would likely be unnoticeable to non-designer. But even with the 2022 edits, I feel that it’s lacking something — perhaps the emotion of it.
So I tweaked it further today, and added an ever so light dark blue background to give just a touch of emotion. I also took the opportunity to place the circles dead center. That has been one aspect that always bothered me. The typographic forms were actually not balanced, and so the circles were not centered, but it feels weird when it is not.
I will likely tweak it further if I could somehow make the pink swash go further to the right, such that the circles would then be mathematically centered in the forms. But it could take some time.
It’s insane that 16 years later, this simple three word phrase would still mean so much to me — and that this simple philosophy would continue to encourage me to keep going despite all of life‘s many challenges.
- Original v1: 2007-11-16
- Revised v2: 2022-06-11
- Revised v3: 2023-11-16
Notes from 2013
This was created back in 2007 in response to a live cam for Poke New York. I don’t even know how I found them, but it is from there where I met @meat99 eventually. I gathered that this phrase has meaning for Meat99, though for me it is just an excuse for me to play with OpenType.
This is obviously set in Bickham Script Pro. Back then the OT version was just released by Adobe, and with very sexy contextual ligature support. Adobe also added the full glyph table to Illustrator right about think thus I was hunting for every opportunity to play with it.
2007 was a very manic year for me so the quote did not mean much then. But as with all highs they must always be followed by the low lows, and so I found myself looking at my designs years later and somehow it had encouraged me to not give up.
Life has a very wtf way of moving forward. The past me talking to the present me, as the present me now is writing to talk to the future me. And that is how it had been, how it is, and how it will always be.
Don’t give up.