I’ve referred to Karim Rashid before with less than total respect.  What can you think about a product designer who only wears pink and white, inspired his own action figure, and hangs a neon “Karim” sign in his shop’s window?  Now I need to backtrack.  I just saw the designer give a tour of his New York City home on a cable design show and found him immensely likable.

And immensely inventive.  Apparently he’s designed more than 3,700 products, with new batches percolating all the time.  His home looks like a stage set for “The Simpsons."  It’s lined with padded pink vinyl and furnished smartly (and exclusively) with his own products.  Gathered like this in a controlled environment, each object glows.  Rashid’s products are all of a piece.  They render everyday things in rich, pastel colors and happy, biomorphic shapes.  To call Rashid an industrial designer seems like a misnomer, because there’s no trace of industry – either of hard work or of fabrication – in his work.  It looks to a future when objects have been entirely overtaken by designs.

Right now I’m immersed in Jennifer Egan’s novel “Visit from the Goon Squad,” which is structured as a series of flashbacks and flashforwards in the lives of some music industry professionals.  One stunning chapter focuses on a clique of high school punks in the 80’s in San Francisco.  They play in a band called the Flaming Dildos and listen to The Cramps.  The passages describing their look (dog collars, green hair rinse, tattered jeans, “drippy” black eye makeup) sent me reeling back to my own adolescence.  Not because I was a punk (I wasn’t; I was a Catholic-school nerd) but because I remember when it was still startling to see a girl walking down the street with white face makeup and a bull ring in her nose.

Punk-inflected music doesn’t sound as difficult as it once did, maybe because we’ve been listening to it for so long, or maybe because so much popular rap music is similarly sonically aggressive.  But there’s something about the punk image – the head-to-toe black-and-white thing – that’s still terribly dramatic.  The look requires a real disavowal of the body, and the risk of making oneself less attractive than one might naturally be.  It requires a great deal of commitment; it’s something deeper than fashion.

I just learned the difference between Helvetica (light) and Arial (dark).  It’s like the difference between romaine and iceberg, or, as one pundit puts it, between Jimmy Stewart and Rich Little.  Helvetica is the canonical modern font designed in 1957 by the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, which became, over the next decades, a kind of default typeface for graphic designers.  Arial is a font that was engineered by designers in 1982 in direct imitation of Helvetica, but with a handful of deliberately different details (like the tail in the small A), in order to dodge licensing fees to Haas.  Microsoft adopted and popularized Arial and since then it’s become a commercial standard, confused with the Swiss original.

I’ve always used the fonts interchangeably.  But the book “Just My Type” has opened my eyes.  Now I see the two distinctive, competing fonts everywhere I turn: subway signage, the tumblr interface, bank statements.  (I even passed on online test.)  Helvetica is nobler historically and also graphically.  It’s more rigorous and rectilinear: the bottom of the capital G is capped with an angle, and the ends of the large and small S are sliced parallel to the ground.  Anyone who knows the differences can spot them everywhere, and will never select Arial from a pull-down menu again.

The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star.  In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place.  Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract expressionist New York painters of the 1960’s, but ran away to New Mexico and stopped painting altogether for a while.  Looking at her paintings today, they seem to get at the fundamental conundrum that a painting is both its own new world and a canvas covered with paint.

The works at Pace, all six-by-six-feet squares, have been carefully gridded with graphite and filled with washes of white and light grey paint.  They are delicate – one needs to step right in front of them to see them – and they are luminous and musical.  I’m reminded of Robert Ryman, who also painted mesmerizing all-white squares.  But Ryman’s canvases are highly fetishized objects, all about the richness of the surface.  In contrast Martin’s canvases seem ideal, like fields of possibility.