David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
For years, my home computer setup has been in need of an ergonomic overhaul. Not able to find any computer workstations that adequately accommodated my non-traditional setup, I have been using an art table for my computer. To say that it has made computer use undesirable would be an understatement.
During my studies in Italy, I took this photograph of an inscription inside of the Amphitheater of Pompeii. It dates to sometime shortly after the restoration of the Amphitheater after the earthquake of 62 A.D.. This is a fascinating specimen to me because I think it exhibits the relationship between medium and form in type design.
In Fred Smeijers’ Counterpunch: Making Type in the Sixteenth Century, Designing Typefaces Now, he implies that serifs such as those on the typography of Trajan’s Column are a product of the form derived from brushing the letters on the stone (the type was brushed on before being chiseled in), and trying to complement the one-sided serif that inevitably showed up at each stroke’s terminus (p. 53). This may very well be the birth of the serif, but I think at least for this inscription, the limitations of the chisel spawned the serifs.
One reason I believe the form of these letters is derived from the chisel rather than the brush is the lack of weight variation in the strokes that a brush would yield from changes in pressure. Another reason is that the serifs only appear where a stroke doesn’t terminate into another stroke. You can imagine how unsightly the terminals of a stroke formed by a chisel would look if the designer hadn’t turned the chisel perpendicular to the stroke for a finishing touch. Notice how the “D” doesn’t have serifs, such as would be the case on a brush-derived letter such as Trajan. This may have been the first sans-serif type design were it not for the limitations of the chisel.
Of course, a digital type designer doesn’t have this concern, and it makes it easy to wind up designing a typeface that doesn’t have the rational beauty that tool-derived forms have. This can be difficult to achieve when you’re designing by drawing the outline of a type design, rather than using a tool to draw the individual stroke.
I was first introduced to this method in Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.
A variety of margin-to-whitespace ratios can be achieved with this method, from the economical to the luxurious. You now have beautiful margins. Best of luck with filling in the rest.
This Blog intentionally left blank.
I have noticed in looking around at desks of various people in my office, that some people, like myself, take a “Google” approach to organizing: everything is just in one big pile, and when you need something, you just sort through it and find what you need. Other people take the “Yahoo!” approach to organizing: everything is in nice, neat piles, or even filed away by project or what have you.
Don’t you hate getting a two-minute long voicemail from someone, at the end of which, they tell you their phone number so fast you don’t have time to write it down? People will like you much better if you leave your phone number both at the beginning and the end of your message. They get two chances to write it down, and if they miss it the first time around, they don’t have listen to the entire message again to get another chance.
I dedicated today’s would-be blogging time to researching and writing a comment about Typographygate, the scandal surrounding forged documents about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.
As an “expert” I can say these documents were definitely not created with technology that would be available in an office in 1972. As you will see if you read my comment, these documents are forged very badly, so badly I wonder if they meant to make a few mistakes.
I came across The Visual Thesaurus, which is a fascinating tool for examining the relationship between words. This is a great example of Human-Computer Interaction knowledge at work. Sophisticated visualization applications such as this will continue to bring art and technology together, and demand graphic designers that have a much better understanding of technology, psychology, and the relationship between form and space in establishing hierarchy than today’s graphic design curricula tend to offer.
A common trend in writing is to come up with “clever” names for articles. This annoying attempt to create reader curiousity is only appropriate for print design. The web is another story.
Not only is writing on the web for humans, but it is also for machines, or in many cases, humans using machines that help them find what they want. If a typical contemporary print magazine contained an article about naming articles, there is a good chance that it may be called “What’s in a Name?” While this is annoying to a reader who is trying to decipher what the article is about, this title will not be significantly detrimental to a reader’s ability to find it (though I have many times flipped through my magazines, trying to find that great article I read, only to find out after scanning over the right issue many times that it had been named irrelevantly). However, if that same article is put on the web, not only do you essentially exclude your useful article from search queries about “naming articles appropriately,” but you also run the risk of mucking up the search results for someone who is looking for the origin of the popular Shakespeare quote.
So, next time you write a blog, imagine, if you were someone searching for the information in that article, what words would be in your query. Then, try to include those words in the title of your blog. It’s true that the contents of the blog may be relevant to what someone is searching for, but that information only has a <p> tag around it. The title of a blog on my page has an <h3> tag on it, which holds much more weight as important information to a search engine than a <p> tag. Then, in the archive of my blog, each page <title> includes the title of the blog in it, which I have found to have more semantic weight than anything for determining search rankings.
Keep in mind that you should title your blog postings relevantly. Just because “brittney spears” is a popular search query, including it in the title of your blog post won’t help your search rankings any unless there is truly valuable information in your blog about brittney spears. Search engines such as Google will get you sorted out one way or another if your information isn’t truly pertinent to said search query. I know that seems to run contrary to my previous point about the Shakespeare quote, but nevermind that, just be a good web citizen and name your blogs appropriately.