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“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

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 and italic.

Different fonts are provided for four type sizes: caption, regular, subhead, and display. The caption fonts, for example, have large x-heights and heavier strokes in order to hold up at small sizes. The display fonts have elegantly modest x-heights and light stroke weights suitable for presentation at large sizes. The header for the image above is the medium display weight (to balance some of the dark fonts,including the caption fonts, which would not ordinarily be used at this large a size. The fonts also include a full range of diacritics and foreign-language characters.

Garamond Premier Pro was designed by Robert Slimbach on the model of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon; it represent a reworking and expansion of the earlier Garamond Pro. It is available in OpenType from Adobe.

I sought to maintain the fidelity of the metal type as revealed in the specimen material—rather than taking a more subjective approach, such as attempting to reproduce artifacts of letterpress printing, or at the other extreme, modernizing form through heavy-handed stylization or drastic structural modification. I feel that by overtly imitating the appearance of an outdated technology, a digital type can appear antique, or even quaint, while excessive stylization can diminish the organic properties inherent in a hand-cut type. With Garamond Premier, I followed the details of line and form displayed in the original metal type as much as possible in order to reveal the ideal that I felt Garamond and Granjon were trying to achieve in their work. By preserving subtleties of shape, a level of fidelity is maintained that would normally be clouded by the noise-generating effects of letterpress printing on handmade papers. Throughout the design process, I repeatedly returned to the original proofs to ensure I was preserving details I felt were essential to the design. At the same time, I often felt it necessary to carefully adjust shapes and parameters in order to harmonize the varied work of these two individual designers within this single type family.
– Robert Slimbach

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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.”

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 a section opener.

This is a beautiful fritware bowl with underglaze and overglaze foliate decoration. It dates from 1180-1250 and is thought to come from Rayy or Kashan in Iran. The abstract patterning is unusual on this kind of bowl.

In order to replicate the object’s color scheme, I simply adjusted the main hue/saturation slider in Photoshop until I approximated the reddish brown colors of the dark areas of the bowl. Because the type is not part of the underlying image, it was unaffected. Then I picked up the teal blue color from the bowl with the eyedropper tool. I had made the water areas of the map flat, so they were solid colors. I selected a portion of one and then chose select similar color from the selection menu and filled the selection with the new color.

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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 originally intended to send it out to a professional map maker, but because the budget is tight, I ended up doing it myself.

The curator wanted to show a lot of information, including modern country names (but not boundaries), rivers, seas, a mountain, a regional designation (I think this is analogous to something between “the Bay Area” and “the Midwest”), and a lot of cities/kiln sites. He also wanted some “light topography.”

Shown is a screenshot reduced in size, so it’s slightly crude. This is a work in progress, and I haven’t decided on the final color scheme yet.

I don’t kid myself that I can produce a map of the same quality as a professional (although this compares favorably to the maps I was given as aids to positioning elements). But I do have certain principles that I hope keeps my maps from sucking too badly:

• Information must be legible
  It is remarkable how many maps break this seemingly obvious rule. This meant I had to keep my background map rather light and make the overlay text as dark and large as possible.
• Map elements should be clearly distinguished by typography
  While country names are among the largest geographic elements, in this map they function just as modern reference points, and the main information is historical. I set the country names in small caps in a nonassertive color and the city names (really the main map information) in black in the typeface’s bold caption font.
• All type should be horizontal
  This isn’t always possible, I guess, but I will go to great lengths to achieve it. The model maps I was given had type running this way and that, following the directions of rivers and mountains for example. I think this is migraine-inducing.
• Map typefaces should be compatible with the book text
  Maps sometimes are produced seemingly without any reference to the context in which they will be placed. This map uses the same type family that I use in the text of the book (Garamond Premier Pro).

At some point in making a map like this you will be tempted to fudge some elements to make the map look better. Cities that are too close together, for example, present problems when you are pushing the size and weight of the type for legibility. As I mentioned, this is a work in progress,. But I have done my best to be fairly accurate in positioning the cities. Tageo.com is a helpful database of geographic coordinate information.

I suppose you could view maps on a sort of spectrum. At one end you have satelite photography, which captures geographic relationships with absolute fidelity but offers no filtering or organizing of information. At the other end you have something like Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York subway map, which presents information pertinent to the map user with scant regard for actual geography. For each map, the maker must determine what information the map is attempting to present and then find the appropriate point on that spectrum to achieve the desired result.

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“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 though you know they’re heartless bastards they still manage to astonish with their mean-spiritedness
• John Denver karaoke sparks Thai killing spree
• Commas, turning up everywhere
• Young me / Now me

Link love

• Who’s linking in

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 most influential athlete was labeled a draft dodger. The man who helped bring rock ‘n’ roll to the mainstream grew a huge gut, wore sequined jumpsuits and then died in the bathroom. One of this country’s greatest defenders of free speech was dismissed as just a pornographer. But Muhammad Ali, Elvis and even Larry Flynt are remembered for their contributions - just as one day, the makers of Grand Theft Auto will be known as more than peddlers of video game sex and violence.

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Shown: Spirit of 1976, by Thomas Christensen

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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!

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via Wonkette

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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 not evident to me what is particularly French about this history, but maybe it will become clearer in the second part, to be released soon, on twentieth century and contemporary fonts.

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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 have here are the first pages of results from flickrCC for a few publishing-related activities. Which set of images do you immediately respond to? Don’t look at each thumbnail, just get a quick impression. And absolutely no thinking allowed.

Editor

Publisher

Author

Translator

Marketing [Specialist]

Graphic Designer

Okay, I admit it, I just like images.

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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 “view as html” and save.

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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 relates to other European languages in this respect.

The next  map shows the kind of distinctions or lack of distinctions made in words for green and blue and other colors.

The final example charts rhythm types. I didn’t realize how predominant the trochaic type — represented by the red circles — is. (This is the strong-weak-strong-weak pattern: DUM-dee DUM-dee DUM-dee.)

Much of the data is technical and will be mainly of interest to linguists, although translators would be well served to give it a look. It seems to me that writers may wish to glance at this kind of information as well, not only to better understand the medium in which they work, but maybe also for insights in handling dialect and conveying regional flavor.

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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 for the conference, she asked me to list three do’s and dont’s for writers’ blogs. My answer in brief: Don’t be too self-referential, Do have a consistent focus, Do create useful and original content, Don’t confuse press releases and publicity materials with blog posts, Don’t blog in a vacuum, and Do be generous. To learn more you’ll have to head on over to Madam Mayo’s place and read the full post.

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“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 to vanity publishing

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 version later.

1
He developed had a close relationship with his mother. In order to appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, he obtained a volunteer position at a library. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave which was to extend for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He did not move from his parents’ apartment until after both were dead.

2
Supposedly studying medicine in Paris, in reality he squandered money his family could ill afford. He returned home after a few months, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. She finally passed into a coma and died; he refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside, and after her death he drank heavily

3
He was devoted to his father. The same year his father died he suffered a severe head wound: during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia. While recovering from the accident, he began tinkering with a new style of writing, for which he would become famous.

4
His parents were first cousins, members of a family that included brewery owners, bankers, and businessmen. Bullied and depressed as a schoolboy, he attempted suicide several times, some, he claimed, by Russian roulette.

5
Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor. He suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk.

6
He developed a staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). He enjoyed ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we, and called the wind “that which blows” and the bicycle he rode everywhere “that which rolls.” He lived in a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. Guests had to bend or crouch.

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Click here for the answers.

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(inspired by this quiz)

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But fie! What does that frothy mewling crook-pated ratsbane know about cussing?

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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 flurry of e-mail incriminations followed, and finally Ramazan in frustration complained to Emine, “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments.”

Unfortunately, Emine’s cellphone didn’t have available the dotless i character that was needed to properly read Ramazan’s s_‘k_‘s_‘nca(run out of arguments); instead, she read the word in his message as sikisince, forming the sentence “You change the topic every time they fuck you.”

And that’s the message Emine showed to her father, who immediately called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. When Ramazan hurried over to apologize, he met an entire family armed with sharpened knives. Ramazan was seriously wounded, but he struck back, killing Emine; later, he committed suicide in jail.

See, typography matters.

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via Gizmodo
(image borrowed from this page)

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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.

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“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

How did the order of letters in the Western alphabet get so firmly established that there are more similarities than differences between such languages as Latin (a, b, c), Greek (alpha, beta, gamma), Arabic (alif, b?’, t?), Hebrew (aleph, bet, gimel), and so on? As Jonathan Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones observes, the order can be traced back 3,500 years to the Ugaritic alpa, beta, gamla.

Part of the answer might lie in the use of letters to indicate the assembly of parts in construction projects. Witness this passage, which Hoefler came across in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, 1996

Ancient Near Easterners used fitters’ marks, single letters of the alphabet apparently used to indicate the order in which various building materials are to be assembled. Various decorative ivory pieces from Nimrud, Iraq, were letter-coded to show the order in which they were to be inserted into furniture. In a temple at Petra, Jordan, archaeologists found “large, individually letter-coded, ashlar blocks spread along the floor of [a] room … in the temple structure.” In a 1971 salvage expedition of a ship downed off Marsala, Italy, Honor Frost discovered “letters at key places where wood was to be joined … the ship assembly [was thus] a colossal game of carpentry by letters, like a modern paint-by-numbers project.”

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Shown: Artist’s reconstruction of the palace at Nimrud

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