Month: April 2008
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.”…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Here’s a simple quiz. Identify these writers based on these brief, slightly edited excerpts from their Wikipedia entries. I have provided the author’s images above, in a random…
But fie! What does that frothy mewling crook-pated ratsbane know about cussing? .
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…
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…
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,…
Recently I had occasion to research rates charged by designers for text-based book work. I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems,…
Among the words I’d like to retire, toward the top of the list would be branding. It’s not, of course, that I’m opposed to marketing, or creating a…
There’s a collection of supposedly x-rated movie posters from the 1960s and 70s over here. What’s a little surprising about the collection is that the graphic design is…
This is off topic from my usual subject areas, but I haven’t seen this technique suggested anywhere else, and I thought I would share it since it’s so…
Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently By Raul Gutierrez Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your…
Barcodes are the graphic designer’s bane. I’ve tried to integrate them in designs through color and other placement, but you constantly run up against the distribution people who…
Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini’s The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities–From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums is a real eye-opener. I had…
Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others…
That’s what Rachel Donadio, in an article in the New York Times, calls this sort of situation: You’re in the getting-to-know-you stages of a relationship, and you encounter…
Nice conceptual book cover, via Book Design Review. Literary aspirations can be a heavy burden indeed. .