Not the least significant of their innovations was to produce a $ sign; previously, printers had used a long ‘S’.
Highlight (yellow) – 14. American Scottish > Page 197
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 14. American Scottish > Page 197
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 14. American Scottish > Page 197-198
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…
Highlight (yellow) – 14. American Scottish > Page 200
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).
Highlight (green) – 14. American Scottish > Page 202
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 15. Gotham is Go > Page 219
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
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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.
Highlight (yellow) – 10. Road Akzidenz > Page 143
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
… and cows becoming part of the proceedings at any time.
Highlight (blue) – 10. Road Akzidenz > Page 144
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 12. What the Font > Page 175
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.
Highlight (green) – 13. Can a font be German, or Jewish > Page 186
Added on Wednesday, December 27, 2017 night
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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.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Prelude & Chapter 1
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 15
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 22-23
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 22-23
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; […]
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 34
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’.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 36
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 36
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. Word of Mouth: Making Myths > Page 36
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
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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.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Chapters 6-9
Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography, published by CUP in 1907, was printed in Caslon.
Highlight (yellow) – 6. Baskerville is Dead > Page 103
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
Highlight (yellow) – 8. Tunnel Visions > Page 109
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.)
Highlight (green) – 8. Tunnel Visions > Page 119
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
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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
Highlight (yellow) – 3. Legibility vs Readability > Page 52-53
Variety in width is particularly important, with the upper half of letters being more readable than the lower half.
Highlight (yellow) – 3. Legibility vs Readability > Page 55
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
Highlight (yellow) – 4. Can a Font Make Me Popular? > Page 66
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
Highlight (gray) – 4. Can a Font Make Me Popular? > Page 72, last paragraph
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.
Highlight (yellow) – 5. The Hands of Unlettered Men > Page 80
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
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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.
It’s the holiday season and I’ve already gotten dozens of letters, emails, and calls for support for a variety of charities. Also in the wake of Patreon’s recent attempt to change their payments structure, I’ve recently seen some people attempting to set up their own payment pages to allow people to support their work or efforts on many fronts, whether they be artistic, creative, or even business-oriented.
To that end, the missing piece on the other side of the equation seems to be the profile page of sorts that identifies me as a supporter of various causes. To remedy that, I’ve created a /Supporting page as the beginning of showing which organizations, institutions, artists, and other entities which I’m actively supporting or have supported in the past.
If you’re looking for something to support yourself, I highly recommend any of the organizations which I list there. I’ve added links to the organizations themselves as well as quick links for how to support them directly.
For the technically inclined, I’ve marked up the organizations with h-cards and include their homepages with u-url and p-name microformats as well as the rel=”payment” and u-payment microformats.
Lane lays out a “brief” history of the 4 billion years of life on Earth. Discusses isotopic fractionation and other evidence that essentially shows a bottleneck between bacteria and archaea (procaryotes) on the one hand and eucaryotes on the other, the latter of which all must have had a single common ancestor based on the genetic profiles we currently see. He suggest that while we should see even more diversity of complex life, we do not, and he hints at the end of the chapter that the reason is energy.
In general, it’s much easier to follow than I anticipated it might be. His writing style is lucid and fluid and he has some lovely prose not often seen in books of this sort. It’s quite a pleasure to read. Additionally he’s doing a very solid job of building an argument in small steps.
I’m watching closely how he’s repeatedly using the word information in his descriptions, and it seems to be a much more universal and colloquial version than the more technical version, but something interesting may come out of it from my philosophical leanings. I can’t wait to get further into the book to see how things develop.
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane
Without all the jargon, we’re actually using our own websites to carry on a back and forth threaded conversation in a way that completely makes sense.
In fact, other than that our conversation is way over the 280 character limit imposed by Twitter, the interaction was as easy and simple from a UI perspective as it it is on Twitter or even Facebook. Hallelujah!
This is how the internet was meant to work!
A hearty thanks to those who’ve made this possible! It portends a sea-change in how social media works.
A quick, but interesting peek into where he intends to go. He lays out some quick background here in the opening. He’s generally a very lucid writer so far. Can’t wait to get in further.
Some may feel like some of the terminology is a hurdle in the opening, so I hope he circles around to define some of his terms a bit better for the audience I suspect he’s trying to reach.
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane
This last section got pretty heavy into evolution and touched on ideas of information theory applied to biology and complexity, but didn’t actually mention them. Surprisingly he mentioned Jeremy England by name! He nibbled around the edges of the field to tie up the plot, but there’s some reasonable philosophical questions hiding here in the end of the book that I’ll have to pull into a more lengthy review.
