monday, october 16, 2006
Keyboard typing, laserjet printing
Movable type makes you think about:
- The tiny spaces between words and letters
- Whether you have enough “F”s to finish your idea
- How “A” and “a” are completely separate letterforms
- How slow the previous process must have been to make this such an improvement
- How 10em, .2em, and 1em are things you can hold in your hands (and how .3em, 200em, and 0em are nonsense)
- How nice it would be to work with a monospaced font
- Uncommon punctuation as a limited resource to be gathered and treasured
- The negative space on the right end of a line of type
- The drop-down font menu as an analog of labeled font drawers
- How separating content from presentation is impossible in some cases
The little dingbats on the left represent an Apple/command key on my PowerBook keyboard…Gutenberg-style. My galley is full of Helvetica 14 right now, with some Helvetica 10 for effect (caps lock, shift, etc.) and various pieces of punctuation stolen from the Ornaments/Misc. drawers. I know the PowerBook keyboard isn’t in Helvetica, but I wanted to use it anyway. Yes, I’m enjoying this stuff.
It turns out part of my family set newspaper type for generations, which makes me happy: journalism and this laborious print design are antecedents of the things I’m interested in.
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