Yesterday morning I tweeted about letting go in 2018. Then Cate Huston and Jean Hsu told me about this project on 2018 liberation. And I agreed to join and wrote this post. It’s less well-formulated than I’d like, but it’s really how I’m feeling and thinking about all the things I want to let go of in 2018.
Thanks to Cate Huston for starting us off with her New Year’s Liberations. We need to be explicit about what we say no to, to make time and room and mental energy for what it is we want.
In lieu of resolutions this year, Cate Huston wrote a set of liberations, starting a movement. My friend Jean Hsu also wrote a liberating, personal list, which is where I discovered it, and Ellen K. Pao has a characteristically thoughtful entry. I like the framing a lot: rather than creating a set of requirements for my new year, which is what a resolution does, I’m freeing myself from a set. So here’s my list of things I’m liberating myself from in 2018:
I too want to know how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom when he was digging a hole all day. It was apparently a cultural touchstone by this time after its publication in 1939.
I wonder if Boing Boing got the name of their site from Susan’s curls in this book?
“Dawnzer lee light” reminds me of the similar concept “with liberty and just a straw.”
My favorite has to be Ramona staying in her seat because she thought she was going to get a present.
But type designers were more like apple growers cultivating unique fruit without protective fences; whenever someone stole them, they could argue that apples were the result of the sun and rain and God’s own fair intervention.
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… and font-editing software such as Fontographer.
Might be worth playing around with this program?
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A recent example concerned Segoe, created by Monotype and licensed to Microsoft, which bears a close relationship to Frutiger. Their common usage is different (Segoe for screen display at small sizes, Frutiger for signage), …
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There are hundreds of small presses in the Uk, Europe and the United States. One of the newest is White’s Books, which in the spring of 2010 had just eight titles in its list, …
I’m curious to look at some of these.
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Your choice may often come down to “Has it got a small caps italic?” So few of them do.
Ha! I have in fact actually made this very decision before.
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There is another rare feature that places his [White’s] books among the remnants of a type museum–the setting of a catchword at the bottom of the right-hand page.
I did always appreciate this vestige of publishing.
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Sabon was developed in the early 1960s for a group of German printers who were grumbling about the lack of a ‘harmonized’ or uniform font that would look the same whether set by hand or on a Monotype or Linotype machine. They were quite specific about the sort of font that might fit the bill, rejecting the modern and fashionable in favour of solid sixteenth-century tradition–something modeled on Garamond and Granjon. They also wanted the new font to be five percent narrower than their existing Monotype Garamond, in order to save space and money.
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Here are the rules as [Paul] Felton considers God intended them:
- Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document.
- Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of the page.
- Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy.
- Remember that a typeface that is not legible is not truly a typeface.
- Honour thy kerning, so that white space becomes visually equalized between characters.
- Thou shalt lay stress discreetly upon elements within text.
- Thou shalt not use only capitals when setting vast body copy.
- Thou shalt always align letters and words on a baseline.
- Thou shalt use flush-left, ragged-right type alignment.
- Thou shalt not make lines too short or too long.
Quick synopsis of Felton’s book The Ten Commandments of Typography / Type Heresy
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Or this observation on digital type from the design critic Paul Hayden Duensing: ‘Digitizing [the seventeenth-century typeface] Janson is like playing Bach on synthesizer.’
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… type was like painting and architecture: an elitism prevailed, and what you produced was only half the story, and what you said about it counted just as much.
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But he [Sebastian Carter] also championed the not-such-a-great-job, the pieces of design and printing that didn’t turn out to be beautiful or clear, merely interesting. He illustrated his talk with some items that were ‘pretty cruddy’, and suggested that these too had a place in our world. ‘I would not want to live in a world of exclusively good design at the bus-ticket level,’ he said.
delivered mid-October 2004 Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at the St. Bride Institute
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Thus armed, ‘the designers of tomorrow will not look back; we give them the chance to fail abjectly and completely; they’re all in the typographic gutter and some of them are looking at their scars.’ The result, of course, would bring forth more failure, but also types of originality and brilliance.
This sounds to me like statistical mechanics at work in design. Many will be in the median, some will be three signma out and either be truly great or out of the game altogether. The question is how to encourage more at the higher end, knowing that evolution is a very strong selector. In fact what does the distribution over a few generations look like with evolution in play? How strong is it?
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Peace
Why wasn’t this used in it’s actual face like the other examples? Was it not available? Or too expensive for one word?
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‘Where is the language of protest now?’ he asks. ‘We have been led to believe that culture was only there as a financial opportunity.’
Quote from Neville Brody
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The key, Brody said, in a strange echo of Morison, was ‘to change a newspaper entirely, but to make sure no one noticed. […] When we first showed it to focus groups they didn’t notice it had changed, but when we told them it had changed, they hated it.’
Sounds like America’s racial culture in the last 60 years. The question is did they hate it because they’d been lied to and it was a psychological effect after-the-fact when they obviously otherwise didn’t know?
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Buffalo and Popaganda
again, no exemplars of these faces
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the @ […] may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as amphora or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is shtrudl, meaning strudel, in Czech it is zavinac or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (Affenschwanz or monkey’s tail in German, snabel-a, meaning “the letter a, with a trunk,” in Danish, sobaka or dog in Russian), or to both (escargot in French).
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… and we were sucha funny family, a little bit Alan Bennett.
Who is Bennett? Curious cultural reference that doesn’t play in the US…
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Rather than ten letters of each new typeface showing in Handgloves and the rest of the alphabet shown beneath it, each font now comes with words unique to its character, style and possible use.
Kind of similar to the quirkiness of paint chip color names, somewhat useful, but meant to help sales too…
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Coles introduced me to Chris Hamamoto, who had a long list of Handgloves alternatives on his computer. Anyone in the office could add to it,
butthere were certain guidelines:The key letters, in order of importance, are: g, a, s, e. Then there is: l, o, I. And of lesser importance but still helpful: d (or b), h, m (or n), u, v.
Verbs or generic nouns are preferable because they don’t describe the font (like adjectives) or confuse the sample word with a font name (like proper nouns).
Avoid tandem repeating letters unless showing off alternatives.
Use one word, as spaces can get too large and distracting at display sizes.
This could actually be a rather interesting information theory problem.
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‘Real men don’t set Souvenir,’ wrote the type scholar Frank Romano in the early 1990’s, […] ‘Souvenir is a font fatale … We could send Souvenir to Mars, but there are international treaties on pollution in outer space … remember, friends don’t let friends set Souvenir,’
Souvenir bold evokes 1970’s porn and Souvenir Light evokes the Love Story movie poster, romance novels, and maybe the poster for Flowers in the Attic for me.
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… you can fire up one of a number of software programs — TypeTool, FontLab Studio and Fontographer are the most popular — and begin your quest.
I want to look at how these work.
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He [Mathew Carter] replied, ‘Some aspects get easier. But if you’re doing a good job you should feel that it gets harder. If you think it’s getting easier, you ought to look out. I think it means you’re getting lazy.’
Carter on whether computers have made the life of a type designer any easier.
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In 1968 the influential graphic design review The Penrose Annual asked exactly the same things: ‘Aren’t we done yet? Why do we need all these new fonts such as … Helvetica?’
The answer, than and now, is the same. Because the world and its contents are continually changing. We need to express ourselves in new ways.
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‘There are only thirty-two notes on a tenor saxophone, and surely to god they’ve all been played by now.’
Matthew Carter on Why New Typefaces?
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… there is a lavish app called TypeDrawing, which takes even the plainest fonts to exciting new heights; it may be the tool that teaches children about type–the modern version of the John Bull printing kit.
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…a set of Type Trumps–the designer’s version of the kids’ card game, with each font card rated for legibility, weight and special power.
an interesting set of “trading cards”
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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?
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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.
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Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?
This can be the holy grail of teaching…
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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… 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…
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- 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.
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It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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”
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Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”
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The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still.
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J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS
vs
JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS
Interesting example for both memory and a definition of information.
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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.
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Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials.
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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.
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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!
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Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions,
explanations, and inventions.”
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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.
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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
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Binny & Ronaldson’s best known font is Monticello, which they called Pica No. 1. This was a modern hybrid of Baskerville and Caslon.
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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.
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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…
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(The German designer and head of Fontshop, Erik Spiekermann, co-wrote a book called Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works).
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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.
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…[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.
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… and cows becoming part of the proceedings at any time.
Just a lovely quote nestled within this page…
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…the iPhone has an app for font identification named WhatTheFont.
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[Erik] Spiekermann’s blog, which is called Spiekerblog, contains acerbic comments on the type he sees on his travels.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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… red was the color of the Otherworld.
This is a recurring thing in myths. The red flames of Hell spring to mind.
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[…] 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.
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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?!
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I did quite like the section on Johnston Sans which I hadn’t previously known any history about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Septmber
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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.
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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...
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.
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.
Since its creation in 1499, Michelangelo's Pietà has inspired emotion, faith, and imitation through its elegant depiction of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. Yet few know the secrets that are still being uncovered about this centuries-old statue.
