I currently work at a well-known graphic design firm doing officey stuff. I’ve never trained in design beyond reading a book or two out of casual interest, and the only art class I took in college was ceramics, which is kind of the opposite of the precise, clean, corporate creative work that this firm produces. So this job has been something of an education. I didn’t imagine how many ideas graphic designers go through before settling on a handful of solutions to present to a client, and how many iterations of each idea get developed to come up with something that really works.

Then there are the mysteries of typesetting. Our business is heavily focused on creating “graphic identities” for corporations and other organizations. The major component of a graphic identity is the trademark, which is either a symbol, a logotype (the company’s name set in a characteristic typeface in a specific way) or both. So the designers in our firm spend a lot of time coming up with just the right typeface for a logotype, or even making letterforms “by hand” (on a computer, of course), and fretting about the way the individual letters work together.

One of the key things is adjusting the space between letters, a process called “kerning.” Basically, a font has a certain default spacing for each letter, but that space might be too much or too little, depending on the letters and the size. This example from Wikipedia is a nice illustration: The normal spaces between the W and the A make the word look strange — like the A and the R are conspiring against the W. The middle line is an example of computerized auto-kerning, and the bottom line was kerned by hand.

The thing with kerning is, there isn’t a single answer as to when a word is properly kerned. The Wikipedia article I took this image from implies that the bottom version looks best; I kind of like the middle version based on the spaces between the tops of the letters — but then I’ve already admitted I don’t know much about design. I’m pretty sure, though, that different designers would come up with subtly different ways of spacing the three letters.

One of our partners was instructing a young designer the other day on how to place some hand-drawn elements onto some photos for a kind of collage project. “Space them so they look even,” he said. “You know, like spacing letters. They shouldn’t actually be even, they just need to look right.” This struck me as a little secret that non-designers don’t know because we don’t pay attention.

With some of my earnings from this design-firm job I’ve bought myself a pedal steel guitar, a very complicated but beautiful instrument that I have no idea how to play. I’m taking lessons from Bob Hoffnar, a really talented player and a hell of a nice guy who luckily lives within easy biking distance of my apartment. I’ve only had a few lessons so far, and Bob is gradually introducing me to chords, scales, and the workings of the mysterious pedals and knee levers that create the characteristic pedal-steel sound.

One exercise Bob has me doing is kind of half way between practicing the instrument and meditation. I set my computer to play a sustained G note through my stereo. Then I find that note on my guitar. The basic way of changing pitch on a pedal steel is by sliding a polished metal bar (called the “bar,” “steel,” or sometimes “slide”) up and down the frets with your left hand. I position the bar on the third fret of the E string to get G. What you immediately notice as you play a G on the guitar against a pure G coming out of the stereo is that there are these little “whoops” that come in cycles — the two sound sources interfering with each other on slightly different frequencies. As you move the bar just a tiny bit up or down the fretboard, the cycles of whoops get faster or slower, depending on whether you’re moving further or closer to the correct frequency. As you get to the exact correct pitch, the whoops disappear.

The first part of Bob’s exercise is to find that correct home pitch. But you have to play lots of different notes to play, for example, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” (The Byrds’ version), the song I’m working on right now. So after you find that G, Bob has you move up a step and find the A two frets higher.

Now you’re playing this A against the same G drone in the background, and it doesn’t work the same with the little whoops. But you slow down and listen carefully to the sound you’re making, and you realize there is still a point where it’s absolutely noticeable the right pitch. The relationship between the G and the A creates some kind of harmonics (don’t ask me the details) that have a certain pure sound, kind of a slightly different timbre, than when you’re playing a slightly flat or sharp A against the G.

The same thing holds for the other intervals: major third, fourth, fifth, etc. Some of the intervals have noticeable whoops or beats as yo approach them, others just sound right when you hit the exact interval. So in this exercise, you find the pure G, then slide up a second to the A, back to the G, up a third to the B, and so on. The idea is to get used to the sound of playing exactly the right pitch, something that’s hard to do on an instrument where the frets are for visual reference only (the strings stay high above them). I can almost go into a trance doing this exercise, and it’s very pleasant and relaxing. It has also made me start to hear pitch, especially the relationships between simultaneous pitches, differently and to be a little more perceptive of “in tune” and “out of tune.”

I recently came across an interview Robert Rauschenberg did for the Archives of American Art back in 1965. Among various fascinating observations and anecdotes he says this, about having studios in different neighborhoods of New York over the years:

Every time I’ve moved, my work has changed radically. And I think that if it didn’t change radically naturally, then I’d do something about it and I’d force it to change. In this place the light is so different you can’t till so much because it’s a gray day but sometimes the light is so white in here, it’s not to be believed, because of these skylights. And that’s a very different kind of light from other studios that I’ve been in where the ceilings weren’t as high, but maybe the windows were bigger, and so there you’d get the light as it reflected, as it bounced off the floor and it would always be warmed up.

It seems there are many qualities in the world that are only really paid attention to by a few, even when they’re in plain sight. The spaces between letters, the intervals between pitches, and the particular color of the light in a room where the light bounces off the floor. You typically learn to notice these things when you have to accomplish some task: create a trademark for a major corporation, play an instrument in tune, make a painting. Noticing is a prerequisite to making. And as I learn to pay attention to when a word looks properly kerned or when my pedal-steel playing sounds in tune, I start to wonder what else I’m not noticing.