Fonts and Chickens

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“I’m not so smart. I just capitalize the first letter of every sentence so that I seem that way.” :)

Danial Godwin on his blog New Perspectives.

Hello Reader,

Got fonts for good UI, user interface?

I  once felt a deep anger, back when the World Wide Web first appeared. Do you remember? 

Back when a friend owned a book called The Mac is not a Typewriter I felt hot frustration at struggling to understand my computer’s word processing features. That feeling has faded. Meanwhile, my anger at the creators of the WWW dimly remains: Those nerds! They neglected to have each new paragraph indent. 

At the time, a new practice of not indenting, while not used for personal letters, had become normal for business correspondence, since it saved the secretaries from having to pound their typewriter space bar three times. But if you opened any real book or magazine, you could easily imagine how unattractive this practice would be to read for any length of time. What were the nerds thinking?

Did they think the Net was to be used only for short business memorandums, by folks with no attention span, by folks who—God knows why— preferred skimming to reading? For folks who don’t value a page being user friendly? I simmered and boiled: “Do they expect us all to be computer nerds?”  And no, I can’t merely do the “space bar thing” to indent, because my Word Processing function translates differently on different devices. (I’ve given up on trying to type an ampersand to show “and.”)

Another thing: The only reason our computers offer us a choice of different fonts was explained by Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs, during his commence address at California’s Stanford University. He explained that back in his university days he had taken a calligraphy class, and so he introduced various fonts to Apple computers. And then, he said, the other computer companies had to follow Apple’s lead! —Whew, close call!

I remember, as a child in first grade, our class being led up a long staircase to the “old school” (built immediately postwar) for the first time. There we were to read a new-to-us softcover textbook the teacher was putting up on an overhead projector: The adventures of Dick and Jane. She explained to us the funny “g’s” were the same as the normal plain “g’s” we were accustomed to for our hardcover book about John and Janet. This was my first introduction to different fonts, for different purposes. 

I think the two important font words for you to know are “serif” and “sans serif.” Serif is good, like that funny g. Serif letter lines, such as the italics on this (Times New Roman) page, vary in width. You will recall from French, and from Shakespeare, (sans teeth, sans eyes) that sans means “without.” Sans serif, then, is like writing with a stick in the sand. Sans serif is O.K. for big sand writing, brief reading, and headlines, but not for long-term real reading. Serif fonts are much easier on the eyes.

How queer: Just as there’s two main typefaces, just so are there two main types of people: The types who don’t care about fonts, and the types like Steve Jobs who care very much. Hence books will often expend a page at the back solely to explain the font: Somebody at the publishing house cares. I respect that.

As for respect, there was a man who greatly admired his wife Alice. She died. He wrote a thin loving book about her. That man was Calvin Trillin, a writer for The New Yorker magazine. He wrote About Alice.

At the back of that book is the usual page headlined ABOUT THE TYPE

“This book was set in Walbaum, a typeface designed in 1810, by German punch cutter J.E. Walbaum. Walbaum’s type is more French that German in appearance. Like Bodoni, it is a classical typeface, yet its openness and slight irregularities give it a human, romantic quality.”

For a book about dear Alice, I am sure a romantic typeface was picked with care.

As for caring, I care about this blog for posting my essays. One of my joys in life is putting two subjects in the headline, separated by “and,” then writing about each, and then subtly showing how they are connected. My original inspiration for this was the old essay by Hugh MacLennan, The Shadow of Captain Bligh, that starts out with him in an easy chair hearing pretty classical music, while reading about the ugly Mutiny on the Bounty, and then suddenly realizing that both things, pretty and ugly, were going on at the same time in history. His essay braids these two topics, then MacLennan explicitly connects them at the end to suggest why we don’t have classical composers today.

My second topic is a guest fiction I think you’ll like, where the writer challenged herself to stick to 50 words. 

I call it fiction because it may have been written “in character,” or as the “real” Cindy on a cloudy day, or as showing the “everyday” Cindy. You can’t tell, and I won’t tell. You may know Cindy’s name from her comments on my blog; I know her personally as a fellow fiction writer here in Alberta. For the font I chose Helvetica, because it resembles chicken tracks.

I Don’t Give a Shit About No Chicken!

By

Cindy Webb Morris

The label read “humanely treated”. 

I had no wish to harm a chicken. 

But a boy’s body on a beach and a group of girls captured for sex left me with little sympathy for the chicken. 

When humans treat humans humanely and children range free, maybe I’ll change my mind.

Sean Crawford

October

2017

Footnotes:

~As regards the “user interface” of “page” users, researchers using “(geographically) split ads” for mailing coupons have shown that people respond better (mail more coupons) to ads where the paragraphs are indented. …And they especially like when you can drop a big starting letter, like in a medieval manuscript.

~Needless to say, kids are taught by their English teachers to have only one topic in their essay, with a topic sentence placed right up front, but that is because kids are kids: They need the discipline. …Later, as adults, there may be time to learn about a delayed topic sentence, inductive writing where the thesis comes last, and terms like braided and montage essays.

~I have to wonder about people who skim as a “lifestyle choice”: Do they even read the liner notes that come with their music albums? 

~If people can’t slow down to “get into” the lyrics for a song, does that mean they can’t bear to read a poem? Is that why people so seldom put — “wow, look what I found!” — a poem onto the Internet?

~My fellow writer, Rudyard Kipling, saw poetry as being such a natural part of life, that when he wrote a short story he just naturally tacked on a poem for his readers too.

I’m trying to imagine how some rich, brainy computer nerds could go years without a single poem…It does not compute.