Khürt Williams (islandinthenet.com)I wrote or linked to a number of articles in 2014 and 2016 about the downsides to social media and my attempts to free myself from Google and Facebook’s experiments. I no longer spend any significant time on either platform but I am quite excited to have found the tribe that understands the vulnerabilities these entities present to an open web.
Some interesting tidbits interspersed in a text written by someone who obviously loves the typographic arts.
At times the languages seems a bit too flowery, but it’s often in service of describing the character in language of the visual aspects of the fonts themselves. The potential false dichotomy is that these feelings may not be evoked the same way by everyone experiencing them in person.
Manton Reece (manton.micro.blog)Mike Monteiro wrote on Medium this week about the daunting, insurmountable problems facing Twitter’s leadership team. He talked about meeting in person with Jack Dorsey: We discussed Twitter’s role in the world stage. And I admired his vision, but feared his approach. Jack, and to an extent Twit...
This reminds me I need to get back to making my microcast so that I’ve got more than just the one episode.
people found type with strong distinctive strokes easier to read than flattened styles; and a greater distinction between letters led to a clearer (and faster) digest of information. The research confirmed that the key areas that make a letter most distinctive are it’s top half and right side, the eye using these flagposts to confirm what it anticipates may be there.
–general research conclusions from the 1970s at the Royal College of Arts Readability of Print Research Unit
Variety in width is particularly important, with the upper half of letters being more readable than the lower half.
These two quotes above come just as I’ve been chatting with a parent of a student who has reading issues. I had mentioned to her some research on improved fonts for dyslexia like dyslexie. They make me wonder if the mental processing for those with reading issues is possibly mirror reversed or other variations of “normal” readers’ capabilities that could also be remedied by various font manipulations. If different fonts can be read better (speed and comprehension) by “normal” readers, then certainly one could optimize for non-normal readers.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon
On a section of his website called Typecasting, the designer Mark Simonson
I liked the idea of people grousing about anachronistic typefaces in movies. I doubt many continuity, set decorators, or other hands on productions pay attention to these types of minutiae.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon
Septmber
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon
Even those who had previously advocated the printed dissemination of wisdom complained of dumbing down: Hieronimo Squarciafico, who worked with Manutius, feared that the ‘abundance of books makes men less studious’, and he dreamed of a scenario in Elysian Fields in which great authors bemoaned that ‘printing had fallen into the hands of unlettered men, who corrupted almost everything’. Of particular concern was the digested read and the accessible history–knowledge falling within the hands of those who had previously regarded it as being beyond their reach.
This sounds like the lamentation of every age even into the modern world of the blogosphere and even later Twitter and even the self-publishing platforms offered by Amazon. Still somehow the cream manages to rise to the top.
Added on Sunday, December 24, 2017 afternoon
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
Some basic searching revealed that in IndieWeb parlance, these types of functionalities are known as web actions. While they’re often added to make it easier for one site with the proper infrastructure to interact with another, they’re also designed for social web silos (Like Twitter, Facebook, et al.) to do this type of interaction simply as well.
As a small scale experiment, I thought I would begin manually and add some simple interface to allow Twitter users (who may not yet have their own websites to use to respond to me instead) to be able to quickly and easily reply to, repost, or like posts on my site. A little bit of reading on the wiki and Twitter’s developer site allowed me to leverage something into existence pretty quickly.
Interestingly, although there are many plugins that help users simply share a blog post to Twitter, I couldn’t easily find a WordPress plugin that already allows these other interactions as options at all. I suspect it may be because the other side of the interaction of bringing the replies back to one’s site isn’t commonly known yet.
I was able to write a post, syndicate it to Twitter, upload the button images, and then inject the Twitter post ID (939650287622434816 in this example) for my syndicated copy into my post like so:
<span class="syn-text">Respond via Twitter:
<ul class="relsyn">
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to=939650287622434816" target=""><img src="/reply-icon-16.png" alt="" width="16" height="11" /> Reply</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=939650287622434816" target=""><img src="/retweet-icon-16.png" alt="" width="16" height="10" /> Repost</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/favorite?tweet_id=939650287622434816" target=""><img src="/like-icon-16.png" alt="" width="16" height="16" /> Like</a></li>
</ul><script type="text/javascript" async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></span>
And voila! My new post now had some simple buttons that allow users a simple one click interaction with a popup window to reply to, repost, or like my post.
Naturally, through the “magic” of Brid.gy, I’m able to collect these responses via backfeed with the Webmention protocol using the Webmention Plugin for WordPress back to my own website. In simpler and less technical terms, if you use one of these buttons, your interaction with my website as posted to Twitter comes back to live on my website. Thus users can use Twitter to write a comment or reply on Twitter and it will display in my comments section just as if they had written it directly in my comments box. Likes and reposts are sent to my site and are displayed relatively naturally as facepiles under the comment headings “Likes” and “Reposts”.
I’ll do another manual example with this particular post, so feel free to use the buttons at the bottom of this post to make your response via Twitter if you wish.
Taking some of this code and abstracting into a plugin for others to use would be a nice feature. Doing this would also potentially make it available as a potential plugin in the larger IndieWeb suite of WordPress plugins. Perhaps it could be easily added into the codebase in one or another pre-existing plugins? I might think that David Shanske’s Syndication Links plugin or Bridgy Publish plugin might make sense as they’re already adding functionality for part of the publishing half of the cycle by either publishing to Twitter and/or importing the Tweet ID back into one’s WordPress site for potential display. One or the other could do a simple if/then on the existence of a syndicated Tweet, then extract the Twitter ID, and add the buttons to the interface appropriately.
It would be interesting to add full mark up to make <indie-action> functionality possible for a broader class of web actions, particularly if it could be integrated directly into WordPress in a more interesting manner to work with the Post Kinds Plugin or the IndieWeb PressThis type of bookmarklet functionality.
Instead of having these types of interactions injected at the bottom of the post, it may make more sense to have it display in the comment block instead.
I suspect that Facebook, Instagram, and others also enable some types of functionality, so adding the ability to use them the same way would be awesome. And even more so in the case of RSVP’s to events since Brid.gy handles those relatively well between Facebook and WordPress sites. (See this example.)
Go ahead and use the buttons below to interact with this post via Twitter.
The flowery language continues apace almost as if this were a love letter to the typographic arts.
There is seemingly no solid narrative thrust throughout the book, which easily makes it something that one can read a chapter or two of every day. One needn’t swim along linearly, but could dip in to sections here and there without much loss based on my reading thus far.
Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography, published by CUP in 1907, was printed in Caslon.
This is just painful to read, particularly as in the sentence before it was noted that Baskerville’s original punches and matrices are housed at the Cambridge University Press. Oh, the horror! It’s one thing if you’re Vincent Connare, but Baskerville?!
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening
I did quite like the section on Johnston Sans which I hadn’t previously known any history about.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening
In 1916, the same year that Johnston’s work appeared, Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant published their exhaustive study of the optical adjustments that were required of a typeface to aid readability and achieve visually balanced characters (this was the study that observed that a lower-case t often has to lean backwards, and the dot over the i has to be offset a little to the left.)
I’m curious to read more about the scientific research of perceptions in this areas, particularly if they’ve been updated in the last century.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 evening
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
I picked this up the other day while browsing at the library. It’s turned out not to have some of the actual mythological tales I was expecting, but, even better, it has some preparatory history and archaeology which I suspect will make my later reading of them more fruitful and interesting.
Myths flourish in societies where such issues are not answerable by means of rational explanation. They are symbolic stories, designed to explore these issues in a comprehensible manner.
This makes me think of complex issues of modern science like people (wrongly) believing that vaccines cause autism or in our current political situation where many blindly believe the truth of the existence of “fake news” when spewed by politicians who seem to be modern-day story-tellers.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
Medieval Welsh storytelling was close kin to poetry, and often the poet and the cyfarwydd were one and the same. Of course, modern audiences can only access the tales through their written forms but, even so, their beginnings as orally transmitted tales are sometimes betrayed by various tricks of the trade. Each episode is short and self-contained, as though to help listeners (and the storytellers themselves) remember them. Words and phrases are often repeated, again to aid memory. A third device also points in this direction, and that is the ‘onomastic tag’, the memory-hook provided by explanations of personal and place names.
This is interestingly relevant to some of my memory research and this passage points out a particular memory trick used by storytellers in the oral tradition.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
The Classical mythic centaur, which melds the forms of man and horse, has its Celtic counterpart in the Welsh horse-woman, Rhiannon.
Origin of the name Rhiannon
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
The weapons used were words and they could literally sandblast a man’s face, raising boils and rashes. The power of words to wound was a recurrent bardic theme in medieval Ireland; […]
I can’t help but think of the sharp tongued William Shakespeare or old barbs I’ve read from this period before. Obviously it was culturally widespread and Shakespeare is just a well-known, albeit late, practitioner of the art.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
So gessa [singular geis] acted as a device to keep listeners interested, and one can imagine how, perhaps, a storyteller would break off his tale at a crucial moment, leaving his audience to wonder how it would end, avid for the next episode in the ‘soap opera’.
This passage makes me think of the too-oft used device by Dan Brown’s Origins which I read recently.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
… red was the color of the Otherworld.
This is a recurring thing in myths. The red flames of Hell spring to mind.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
[…] this took place at the end-of-the-year festival of Samhain, the pagan Irish equivalent of Hallowe’en, at the end of October. Samhain was an especially dangerous time because it took place at the interface between the end of one year and the beginning of the next, a time of ‘not being’ when the world turned upside-down and the spirits roamed the earth among living humans.
Cultural basis of Hallowe’en? This also contains an interesting storytelling style of multiple cultural layers being built up within the story to bring things to a head.
Added on Monday, December 25, 2017 night
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
…[Jock] Kinneir and [Margaret] Calvert did something else important: they established that it is a lot easier to read lower-case letters than capitals when travelling at speed.
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
… and cows becoming part of the proceedings at any time.
Just a lovely quote nestled within this page…
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
…the iPhone has an app for font identification named WhatTheFont.
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
[Erik] Spiekermann’s blog, which is called Spiekerblog, contains acerbic comments on the type he sees on his travels.
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
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Red–Example to work through
Not the least significant of their innovations was to produce a $ sign; previously, printers had used a long ‘S’.
in reference to Archibald Binny and James Ronaldson of Binny & Ronaldson
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
Binny & Ronaldson’s best known font is Monticello, which they called Pica No. 1. This was a modern hybrid of Baskerville and Caslon.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
Many American book publishers, including Scribner and later Simon & Schuster, favoured what was known as Scotch Roman for their books,
a slightly more modern transitional face showing heavy influences of Bodoni and Didot.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
Franklin Gothic, a typeface named after Banjamin Franklin and first published in 1905. […] made by Morris Fuller Benton […] had its roots in the German Akzidenz Grotesk…
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
(The German designer and head of Fontshop, Erik Spiekermann, co-wrote a book called Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works).
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
But they [Obama campaign posters not set in Gotham] looked slightly wrong in Gill Sans and Lucinda, and they only fooled some of the people some of the time.
A solid reason not to be cheap on fonts or substitute well-known fonts for others. This chapter had some interesting branding thoughts on type for politics. The tangential reference here to Abraham Lincoln’s quote is well couched, but only vaguely funny.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 morning
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
This seemed interesting in the library when I browsed by, so I picked it up. Seems a quick/easy read. Covers some interesting material related to ars memorativa which I may find interesting. They also make some references to schema within Hollywood, so that may be useful too.
Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?
How many times have I thought of this very topic?
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned).” Sometimes we get advice about structure “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Or “Start by getting their attention–tell a joke or a story.”
Another genre concerns knowing your audience: “know what your listeners care about so you can tailor your communication to them.” And, finally, there’s the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition.
The common refrains, many of which can be useless.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?
This can be the holy grail of teaching…
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
What makes urban legends so compelling? […] Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short?
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
This book is a complement to The Tipping Point [by Malcolm Gladwell] in the sense that it will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell’s book.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.
I’ve always suspected that this was the case but never saw any evidence or reportage that back up this common Halloween myth. In fact, I recall taking candy to local hospitals for radio-graphic exams.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action […] both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory […] and both stories tapped into emotion: [fear… disgust…]
Many of these strike a cord from my memory training, which I suspect plays a tremendous part. Particularly the vividly clear and concrete details.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
There is no “formula” for a sticky idea–we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
… we an genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.
This isn’t far from my idea of genetically engineering memes when I read Dawkins back in the day…
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
- Simplicity […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
- Unexpectedness
- Concretness […] because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
- Credibility
- Emotions […] We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
- Stories
[…] To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. […] S.U.C.C.E.S.s
This seems to be the forthcoming core of the book.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.
The example they give of the [music] Tappers and Listeners is great to illustrate the Curse of Knowledge.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.
The JFK pitch to get a man on the moon was a great example here.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates. […] (For the other templates,
see the endnotes.) […] Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them [using the previous 6 categories]. […] It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas.
This is some very interesting data. I should track this reference down. Particularly when they did the follow up of training groups in these methods (or not) and realizing that those with the templates did far better with minimal training.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
The [Army] plans often turn out to be useless.
“The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point.
“You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen–the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect.
aka Complexity…
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
So, in the 1980’s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).
The way to plan around complexity to some extent.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. […]
What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. […] Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Some interesting examples in the sections on “Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines”, “Burying the Lead”, “If you Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.”, and “Decision Paralysis”
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS
vs
JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS
Interesting example for both memory and a definition of information.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
How does complexity emerge from simplicity? We will argue that it is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity.
This is how most would probably argue and it’s the magic behind complicated things like evolution.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas:
A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like a pyramid.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
The high-concept pitches don’t always reference other movies. E.T., for instance, was pitched as “Lost alien befriends lonely boy to get home.”
I’m not sure of the background of the actual pitch, but a little massaging really makes E.T. the tried and true story of a boy and his dog, but this time the dog is an alien! So again, it really is an analogy to another prior film, namely Lassie!
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions,
explanations, and inventions.”
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Contrast Disney with Subway. Like Disney, Subway has created a metaphor for its frontline employees. They are “sandwich artists.” This metaphor is the evil twin of Disney’s “cast members.”
Evil twin indeed. There’s nothing artistic about their work at all.
Added on Thursday, December 28, 2017 late morning
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
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