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.
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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.