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We’re in the midst of prototyping the user interface for our Enterprise 2.0 application. I’d been seeking some inspiration, wandering various design and programming sites, when I ran across this phrase: “At some point during every programmer’s career, he or she becomes fascinated by typography.”
At least I think it went something like that. I can’t remember which blogger said it. That’s the curse of having one’s feed reader filled to the brim with interesting things to read.
I must have reached that point in my career, because I’ve spent the last week devouring Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. I found a glowing review of the book while checking out the I Love Typography blog, itself a great find during my one of my web wanderings. Now that I think of it, I must have run across the phrase while hunting for the typeface for the infovark logo at myfonts. Or was it fonts.com? Or fontshop?
Ah well, I was doomed to be a typography geek anyway. During my college years I worked on my university newspaper, The Chronicle. If you’ve got even a hint of journalism in your blood, you’re bound to spend a significant portion of your life considering the contrast between tracking and kerning, or pondering the subtle mysteries of grid layout.
If you’ve been bitten by the typography bug, there’s no better place to start than Thinking with Type. In a single slim volume, it gives you an overview of typography from the letterpress of Gutenberg to the Internet of today. Its three major sections touch on the essentials: letter forms, text blocks, and page layout. You’ll find diagrams, examples, and images throughout the entire work. I’ve found it as useful for design inspiration as for reference. The appendix is crammed full salient quotes, useful tips, and the meaning of all those editing marks that used to make my newspaper columns bleed red. To top it off, the inside cover of my paperback edition contained samples of all the major fonts described in the book. Find a place for it on your bookshelf next to Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.
Oh, our logo font is ITC Avant Garde Gothic, by the way. And I’ve now decided to program in Consolas, based on sound advice in the Hamstu’s typography of code. Or maybe Bitstream Vera…
Gord says: Ha! I write all my code in anonymous. (Sadly, everyone can still tell that it’s mine…)
2 Comments
Ben Tremblay
Call me cynical (Go head, call me cynical. No, really, go ahead.) but in my experience “pretty print” shifts the transaction away from contents. (I would have loved to explore this in a formal academic cog-psych setting but I was distracted by taxonomy / ontology … trust me to be painfully earnest. Not actually cynical; actually gung.ho)
The situation was this: MIL-SPEC documentation of an avionics R&D project for the Fed … “strict” hardly describes it.
This was shortly after the earth’s crust had cooled; 9-pin printers were considered deluxe.
As the tech_docs geek in our “Integrated Logistics Support Group” I would routinely and regularly circulate the latest version of module docs to team leaders and whatever mgt-types had insinuated themselves into the loop.
Event: when I started printing those out with what was then top of the line laser printer (You really don’t want to know how slow it was. Really.) quality of review crashed. I mean crashed.
So: If you want someone to unthinkingly buy into what you’ve written, by all means optimize the aesthetics.
If you want a critical review of what you’ve produced … I suggest you invest in a time machine to some other era. From what I can tell McLuhan’s “medium is the message” has taken over entirely.
#matrix #borg
29 Feb 2008 05:02 pm
Gordon
Ben, I reckon…
You’re Cynical!
29 Feb 2008 09:02 pm
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