Extra-Slanty Italics Introduced for Extremely Important Words

NEW HOPE, MN—In an attempt to address writers’ ever-growing word-emphasis needs, Minnesota-based Pica Foundry has developed a new, extra-slanty italic font, design director Jordan Soderblum announced Monday.

“When writing important words, authors too often bypass regular italics in favor of all capital letters, which not only look awkward but also disrupt the flow of the text,” said Soderblum, whose new italics design is slanted at a more acute 60-degree angle instead of the normal 75. “We believe that the additional 15 degrees of slant will allow authors to create a much more intense and immediate reading experience.”

Soderblum said that his design team is currently developing a demi-semibold typeface for writers who “kind of, but not really” want to accentuate subheadings.

— The Onion, June 16, 2009

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Breaking news in typography

This 19th-century painting by Yi Ungnok is in the form of a large screen. It is an excellent example of the Korean painting motif of chaekkori, or scholar’s accoutrements. (The screen is in the collection of the Asian Art Museum.)

Chaekkeori paintings depict items from a scholar’s study. They always include stacks of books, brushes, ink sticks, inkstones, scrolls, and antiquities.

Scholars reading this may wish to post in a comment or e-mail me “chaekkori” paintings or photos of their own studies to extend the tradition into the 21st century.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Scholar’s Accoutrements

This site has been around, in various forms, for a long time. It began as an auxiliary to the Mercury House book publishing site that we put up in December 1994. At that time it was my personal page on the MH site, and so at first it developed a kind of resume-like structure, hints of which can still be seen here if you look hard enough.

One result of this sprawling accretion of 15 years of content of various sorts is that it’s become a bit difficult to keep everything tidy and up to date. So, after I got hacked last fall I patched the vulnerabilities and removed the garbage and restore everything as best I could.

But is wasn’t until I got a comment asking about typefaces over at the Asian Art Museum site that I realized that I had reverted the typehead section of the site to an older iteration that was unsatisfactory in several ways. So I’ve spent a part of today getting the section in better shape. I’ve improved the navigation of the pages and generally tightened things up a bit.

I’m afraid the discussion of faces tends to favor the traditional and doesn’t get much into many of the interesting contemporary faces that have been created in recent years — that is an assignment still to be completed.

Generally for each face I show a sample (mostly without, so far, comparing the many different digital versions that may be available), highlight identifying features, discuss the designer and history, talk about the qualities of the face and how it might be used, and give a few quotes from type designers or users about the face. For example, here are a few quotes about Bembo (a face I like and have used often):

• “Bembo roman and italic are somewhat quieter and less faithful to their sources than Centaur and Arrighi. They are nevertheless serene and versatile faces of genuine Ranaissance structure.”
  —Robert Bringhurst
• “On the whole it has to be said that while the first italic [Fairbank] has too much personality the second [Bembo italic] has too little. While not disagreeable, it is insipid.”
  —Stanley Morison
• “Tolerable but uninspiring.”
  —John Miles (RN)

There is much more that I need to do to make The Typehead Chronicles truly top-drawer, but there is some content there that might be of interest just the same.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The Typehead Chronicles of Thomas Christensen, ABCedminded Typographer

There are special issues for American designers when working with Southeast Asian subjects. This book demonstrates, I think, how they can be successfully addressed.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Designing a book on Southeast Asian Art

Now some folks are proposing that we also ban apostrophes, claiming that its easy to read text without them. Considering that hardly a day goes by that one doesnt wince at wrongly used examples, the proposal has a certain appeal.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Whos to say whats best?

Answer after the break . . .

• The Bendrix title appears in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
• Caulfield is from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• Darkbloom is from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
• de Selby is Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman
• Hibbard is from Rex Stout’s The League of Frightened Men
• Penrose is from David Lodge’s Nice Work
• Trigorin is from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull
• Vane is in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison and others

It must be said that the list is rather imbalanced at the moment, with some obvious omisions and a great deal of Gilbert Sorrentino and Anthony Powell.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

What do these books have in common?

• Designer Humor : heartfelt message using Papyrus
• Bitterness as mental illness : Post Traumatic Bitterness Syndrome
• Why retranslate? : Well, why not?
• Sex with ducks : “Gonna Huey, Dewey, and Louie all over the room”
• Sex with flowers : The bee’s knees (photo at Frisco Vista)
• The Treasury of Ornament : Love ‘em like ducks
• Gender and sex : Language has gender, animals and plants have sex
• 70 percent of praise is sarcastic : Good one!
• University presses in trouble : Who’s surprised?
• Books as home furnishings: “I want the look of books”

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Friday roundup

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The dangerous world of butterflies

Ineachday put up some old family photos. Can this blurry fellow really have been me once?

(Yes, this is a rare personal post on Right Reading.)

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The strange passage of time

Now consider the second image, the logo of the Art Fund, which offered £80,000 toward the purchase of the Bassetti. Maybe not quite as gallery worthy. Unless you ask the Art Fund, as they insisted that in order for the museum to receive the funding their logo had to appear alongside the artwork. To his credit,Timothy Potts, the museum’s director, declined the gift, saying:

Logos are the currency of marketing and commerce and this introduces a promotional element into the galleries that we regard as an unnecessary and unacceptable distraction – no matter how worthy the object of promotion.

Here we see an unintended consequence of branding run amok — logos are proliferating like tribbles. These days there will be several of them on every copyright page I work on. Praise be to Mr. Potts for drawing the line at letting them into gallery labels!

.

via David the Designer

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

(He)art and commerce

Which search engine gives the best results? Sure, Google’s by far the most popular and has the largest infrastructure. And there could be interface preferences to take into account. But just in terms of sheer relevance of results, which is best?

Now you can test this yourself, using Michael Kordahi’s blind search web application. It strips the formating out of the results for a search and show you results from Google, Yahoo, and Bing in random order. Above are the results for a search for “right reading” (without the quotes). Out of vanity and self-interest, I don’t much care for the results on the left, which presume I’m most interested in finding a book guaranteeing reading improvement for my child. The other two show my website in the first slot, but I prefer the middle results, which also show this blog (as opposed to the html home page) in the two spot rather than the four slot as on the right.

Results were running about 45% google, 30% bing and 25% yahoo, but someone was gaming the system and Kordahi has removed the totals for the moment. But you can still do your own tests.

Okay, let’s unveil the contestants.

I pronounce Google the winner on a search for “right reading,” followed by Bing; Yahoo brings up the rear, from my partisan point of view, on this one. Which is best for you?

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Blind testing search engines

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Barcode scanning a personal library

I was doing okay until I got to Samuel Butler.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

100 best novels quiz

This is via Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s twitter account. He writes “These ladies are amazing athletes -even back in the day!” Be patient — the fun starts about one minute in.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Amazing athletes

I was looking for a video to help explain the Fibonacci sequence to someone who didn’t know about it. There are a lot of them that aren’t especially helpful. This one is okay (apart from the spooky music). Maybe a really excellent one will still present itself.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The golden mean and the Fibonacci sequence

The design firm Pentagram was recently honored for its long-term collaboration with the Public Theater in NYC. The video includes more than 300 pieces.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

15 years of work in 45 seconds

• Books from heaven : Books from earth
• 25 Intriguing Facts About Gabriel García Márquez : For example, his mother is most proud of “having a daughter who is a nun.”
• Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists’ research : Wikipedia is the new commons
• Harry Clarke : Illustrations for Poe
• Arial is everywhere : Even in Amsterdam
• Murakami’s novel a hit in Japan : Before it is published
• Translating Genji : On the occasion of its 1000th birthday

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Friday Roundup

This photo, which I took at the Snoeck Ducaju & Zoon printing plant in Ghent, Belgium, a few years back, clearly shows the four-color printing process. The workers are cleaning the presses, and they have removed the plates. From back to front you can see the colors of conventional four-color (CMYK) printing: black (the “key,” K), cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y).

Yellow plates are made not to look quite the color of yellow ink in order to see them better. The yellow is added last, and too much can create a kind of milky fog, so adjusting the yellow is often a place to start in color correcting on press.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

The four-color process

.

via BuzzFeed (”I went to this store. It was a huge disappointment.”)

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

When kerning goes bad, 2 . . .

Just saying.

.

Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic publishing.
Follow me on twitter.

Ugliest Google logo ever