Posts Tagged ‘typography’
“You cannot bore people into buying your product”*…
“… Unclear why Messam thinks it’s wise to feature a photo of himself running away from the voter.”
For those who think it trivializes our political process to judge candidates by their typography—what would you prefer we scrutinize? Qualifications? Ground into dust during the last election. Issues? Be my guest. Whether a candidate will ever fulfill a certain campaign promise about a certain issue is conjectural.
But typography—that’s a real decision candidates have to make today, with real money and real consequences. And if I can’t trust you to pick some reasonable fonts and colors, then why should I trust you with the nuclear codes?
Book publishers spend a lot on cover design. [The adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” dates from the time before books were sold with colorful jackets.] Candidates likewise spend a lot on their public presentation. Why? For the same reasons: voters (or readers) are going to make judgments based on design factors (whether consciously or not). So just as we should feel justified judging a book by its cover—because that’s what it’s for—we should likewise feel justified considering how typography reflects on each candidate.
Along those lines, my pet political theory is that even as they labor to reveal their characteristic strengths through typography, candidates tend to be more successful revealing their characteristic limitations. The evidence is left as a thought experiment for sufficiently motivated readers…
Writer, typographer, programmer, and lawyer Matthew Butterick‘s witty and wise observations on the design choices made by presidential candidates (so far): “Typography 2020: a listicle for America.”
* David Ogilvy
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As we face up to face-value, we might recall that this is the “birthday” of the earliest-known dated printed book: the sacred Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra. A copy of the Tang-dynasty Chinese version of the Diamond Sūtra was found among the Dunhuang manuscripts in 1900, and has been dated back to May 11, 868.
Frontispiece of the Chinese Diamond Sūtra
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit … a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space”…
Three months ago, I was a normal person. Now all I think about 24-7 is the dinkus. Did you know that dinkuses is an anagram of unkissed? I did. For the uninitiated, the dinkus is a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.
The dinkus has none of the asterism’s linguistic association with the cosmos, but that’s why I love it. Due to its proximity to the word dingus, which means, to define one ridiculous word with another, “doodad,” dinkus likely evolved from the Dutch and German ding, meaning “thing.” To the less continental ear, dinkus sounds slightly dirty, and I can confirm that it’s brought serious academics to giggles.
For me, a writer and reader, its crumbiness is its appeal. I need some crumbs to lure me down the page…
Daisy Alioto‘s “Ode to the Dinkus.”
* James Joyce, Ulysses
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As we separate our sections, we might recall that it was on this date in 1248 that The University of Oxford received its Royal Charter from King Henry III. While it has no known date of foundation, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second-oldest university in continuous operation (after the University of Bologna).
The university operates the world’s oldest university museum, as well as the largest university press in the world, and the largest academic library system in Britain. Oxford has educated many notable alumni, including 29 Nobel laureates, 27 prime ministers of the United Kingdom, and many heads of state and government around the world. Sixty-nine Nobel Prize winners, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have studied, worked, or held visiting fellowships at Oxford.
“Space: the final frontier”*…
This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.
One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.
The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”…
Find out the truth at “The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period.”
* the words opening each episode of Star Trek
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As your correspondent basks in confirmation, we might recall that it was in 1770 that Germany and France moved past 30 years of animosity, celebrating their new alliance with the marriage of Archduchess Marie “let them eat cake” Antionette and Dauphin Louis-Auguste de France (soon enough to become King Louis XVI), in a lavish ceremony at Versailles, in front of more than 5000 guests.
A torrential thunderstorm pre-empted the fireworks planned for that evening; but the celebration continued through May 30th, when fireworks on Place de la Concorde killed 132 people– a grim omen of a reign that would prove tragic.
Marie Antoinette in her wedding dress, which was adorned with white diamonds
“Only connect”*…
These days everybody knows about the ampersand. It’s one of typography’s most unique and interesting characters.
Its rise to hipster fame has catapulted the ampersand from the sketchbooks of type designers onto just about every printable surface you can imagine, the variations of which seem endless. From traditional representations all the way to hyper-stylised forms that bear little resemblance to the original mark.
The varied nature of its form allows type designers a little creative freedom, and is often seen as an opportunity to inject some extra personality into a typeface. Officially classified as punctuation by todays unicode, it was in fact, once the 27th letter in the English alphabet existing as the graphical representation of the word ‘and’…
Fascinating: “The History of the Ampersand.” For a celebration of this marvelous mark, see “And Further…”
* E.M. Forster
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As we ponder plurality, we might send learned birthday greetings to Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, better known simply as Erasmus; he was born on this date in 1466 (though some sources place his birth two days later). A Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, translator, and theologian, probably best remembered for his book In Praise of Folly, he was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament (“Do unto others…”), and an important figure in patristics and classical literature. Among fellow scholars and philosophers he was– and is– known as the “Prince of the Humanists.”
“Punctuation, is? fun!”*…
The average tweet is not an especially remarkable thing. It can contain letters (and almost always does), marks of punctuation (perhaps more of an acquired taste in this context), and pictures (mostly of cats and/or the photographer themselves). But in amongst these most conventional components of modern written communication are two special symbols around which orbits the whole edifice of Twitter. Neither letters nor marks of punctuation, the @- and #-symbols scattered throughout Twitter’s half billion daily messages are integral to its workings. And yet, they have always been interlopers amongst our written words.
Both ‘@’ and ‘#’ first crept into view during the Renaissance…
Old friend Keith Houston provides “A brief history of the # and the @.”
* Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
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As we hit the shift key, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Time Magazine acquired The Literary Digest— or its one remaining asset of value, its mailing list. Founded by Isaac Kaufmann Funk in 1890, then published by his company, Funk & Wagnalls, The Literary Digest was an influential general interest publication the grew in influence (its circulation topped 1 million) with it election polling. Starting in 1920, it conducted straw polls, all accurately predicting the outcomes of presidential elections… until 1936, when its poll called the race a likely landslide victory for Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas. In the event, of course, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was re-elected by a landslide– a result accurately predicted by a start-up polling company, George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion.
