A transmission from the deep south.
And I knew when he didn’t meet my eye that he was not going to write down anything, not going to take care of it. Knew when he said, “No problem, sir,” like the thing he wasn’t even going to bother to do was a favor to me instead of his job. Knew from his fucking haircut.
— Jeffrey Zeldman on hotel wakeup calls in “Foreknowledge Of Things Trivial — Or, The Lamentable Desk Clerk”. Artfully told, and certainly struck a nerve.
Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.
— Take a few minutes to read Frank Chimero’s advice to a graphic design student in its entirety. Plenty of sage advice and wit. I like the closing line: “This about sums up everything I know.”
The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, of like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details.
— Robert Bringhurst, writing in The Elements of Typographic Style, which you’ve all read, right? (via Frank Chimero)
Yesterday I wrapped up work on Coming & Crying, the Kickstarter-powered first release from Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell’s Glass Houses Press. The perfect cover photograph is by Nikola Tamindzic, and I handled design duties inside and out.
Oh, also — Dolly is a hell of a typeface.
We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.
— An excerpt from Franny and Zooey by the late J.D. Salinger (1919-2010). (via Peter Nidzgorski)
Jeffrey Zeldman writes for 24 Ways on the vast, real problem of getting embedded type to render consistently across browsers and platforms. He explains why the appearance of type in Safari looks so different — Apple appears to have implemented its own hinting engine that ignores data in embedded font files in favour of its own rendering rules — and is rather glib about the likelihood of an easy cross-browser solution:
There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing — the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of
@font-facewere supposed to save us. I don’t know that even mighty Typekit has figured out every needed variation yet (although, working with foundries, they probably will).
Ugly rendering by browser makers is the key reason services like Typekit and its ilk are still a tough sell for most projects. Unless your audience is overwhelmingly using Webkit, results like these are hard to avoid. The tragedy of this is that Typekit is a terrific service doing its darnedest to conquer these issues through technical smarts and by working with type makers.
Update: I’ve edited the last paragraph to better convey my thoughts.
Laura Brunow Miner’s much-anticipated new project launched today, a crowd-sourced take on The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, showcasing user-submitted photographs with accompanying text. At any one time the site offers a handful of “themes” open to public submission, from which the best photos and captions are selected and published. Laura’s design is bold and beautiful, putting the images centre-stage, and it looks as though the design for each feature will be customised to some degree, which I like. I’ll be submitting to this for sure.
What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.
— A single line from a terrific email response by author Dave Eggers regarding creativity, criticism, selling out and “the unshakable need to reduce”. You’ll be glad you read this. (via Wilson Miner)
Why do we Tumbl? In the end, we use Tumblr not because it’s a great way to connect with our readers (though it is that), or because we believe this or something like it is a part of a new way forward for interaction between publishers and audience (though we think that too). We use Tumblr because it’s fun and while, you know, you can’t eat fun, or trade it in for fistfuls of dollars to fund serious journalism, we believe there’s a value in doing things we like simply because we like to do them, and that hopefully our fellow Tumblrs will too.
— Newsweek on why they use Tumblr. (via Meaghan O’Connell)
I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
— Cormac McCarthy during a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen. (via John Gruber)
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email me.
