http://www.rightreading.com/blog concept to publication Mon, 12 May 2008 14:46:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Print publishers are currently caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a weakening economy and higher prices for essential costs such as paper, freight, and postage. The soft economy pressures publishers to lower prices on books, but this is difficult to do with the cost of paper at an all-time ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/12/print-publishing-caught-in-pricing-bind/ "Lynx-eyes to our neighbors, and moles to ourselves.” -- La Fontaine uh, er, um, erm and eh Dumbest of the twenty worst? Soft shading in Photoshop Pro rata, pro ratad, prorate (editor's dilemma) Massimo Vignelli's New York subway map Six-Word Memoirs: Life Stories Distilled link love http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/09/friday-roundup-18/ Working with Garamond Premier Pro for my book on Persian ceramics, I have been impressed by the range of sizes and weights the typeface includes. There are regular, medium, semibold, and bold weights for each of the sizes. In addition, the display size offers an extra-light weight in both regular ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/08/garamond-premier-pro/ Paul Rand offers some answers in this four-minute video. According to the youtube info, it was "created for his posthumous induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2007." http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/07/what-is-design/ In yesterday's discussion of the map for my Persian ceramics book, I mentioned that I hadn't settled on a map color scheme. Subsequently I decided to pick up the scheme from one of the objects in the book. Shown is a detail of that object, which I'm using as ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/06/adjusting-map-color/ After a long interval in which nothing happened, suddenly I'm back working on my little book about Persian ceramics (the trim size, 9.5 x 10 in., is small by museum publishing standards; it would have seemed large back in my text-based literary publishing days). This book required a map. I ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/05/on-the-making-of-maps/ "If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which …." – William Butler Yeats Design is best from small teams An interview with type designer Jos Buivenga Teaching Typography in Buenos Aires Resist Redesign Cyan, The Color of Timeless Marketing More on creative commons and copyright Small Press Spotlight: C. M. Mayo Are you your bookshelf? Even ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/02/friday-roundup-17/ Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn't this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto IV in the San Francisco Chronicle get some sort of award? Cultural revolution often comes from seemingly imperfect people and unpopular places. The ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/05/01/overblown-prose-for-the-ages/ This is pretty awesome. When Hillary challenged Barack to a "Lincoln-Douglas" style debate, Fox TV's national news ran the following graphic. I guess they thought she said "Lincoln-Douglass." What a debate that must have been! . via Wonkette . http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/30/is-our-journalists-educated/ The Porchez Type Foundry has restored a former feature of its site, a whirlwind tour of the history of typography. It says on the site that "This history, normally told from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, is from a French perspective, allowing the reader to form one’s own opinion." It's ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/30/a-quick-history-of-typography/ Don't waste time taking those long multiple-choice tests where half the answers seem equally right but answering one way says you should be an airline pilot and another means you're destined for accounting. Instead, take Tom's instant vocational test. Based on science! Results guaranteed! And it's random! Okay, ready? What we ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/29/publishing-role-visualization/ Say you need to do a quick web page from a Word document. I know Word claims to have a "save as html" function, but it produces hideous code. The easy way? Get a gmail account, attach the Word document to an e-mail, and send it to yourself. Then just select ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/29/easy-conversion-of-word-documents-to-html/ Oxford University Press has placed the data from its World Atlas of Language Structures online. There's some interesting information here. Following are some examples. The map below shows this distribution of various arrangements of objects and verbs, and adjectives and nouns. We can zoom in on the map to see how English ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/28/language-maps/ The resourceful C.M. Mayo -- a Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, the author or editor of several books, and founding editor of the bilingual chapbook series Tameme -- is preparing a panel on "Writers's Blogs: Best (& Worst) Practices" for the Maryland Writers Association Conference. In preparation ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/25/tips-for-writers-who-blog/ “If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which ….” – William Butler Yeats Getty Images Bought by Hellman & Friedman Online reading counts too Amsterdam, world book capital Ways to get your magazine article queries accepted Humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago Buy your own New York subway map for only$299 Royals reduced ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/25/friday-roundup-16/ Here's a simple quiz. Indentify these writers based on these brief, slightly edited excerpts from their Wikipedia entries. I have provided the author's images above, in a random order. These writers are all men so that I don't have to play around with the pronouns; I'll do a female ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/24/classic-writers-quiz/ But fie! What does that frothy mewling crook-pated ratsbane know about cussing? . http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/23/cuss-o-meter-calls-us-clean/ Why? Well consider the case of Emine and Ramazan Çalçoban. Theirs was a fatal love affair. But it was hardly Romeo and Juliet. In the beginning all was sunbeams and roses for this young Turkish couple. But then things started to go bad, and get worse, and finally they separated. A ... http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/22/better-dot-those-is-and-cross-those-ts/ Typeheads might want to try the Rather Difficult Type Game. I scored 32 out of 34 (didn't notice which two I missed). Most of the questions can be figured out by elimination, but it kept asking me about typefaces like Affair and Yanone Kaffeesatz, about which I know nothing. . http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/21/a-rather-difficult-font-game/ "If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which …." – William Butler Yeats Judging books by their covers On Choosing Type History out, celebrities in 61% of historians rate the Bush presidency worst ever Backlash against ABC News Stinehour Press closing World Book and Copyright Day http://www.rightreading.com/blog/2008/04/18/friday-roundup-15/