I believe I agree with the sentiment here regarding ads, especially on pages that are intended for reading.
As for Readability, I wish that it were an unnecessary tool. It is a much more difficult project to try to educate writers and designers and readers about typographic treatment on the web. It is more work for the standards makers and browser builders to devise, agree on, and implement ways for type to be treated far more intelligently on the web. But it’s worth it, because even though there are rules and guidelines to making texts more readable, writing will never be one-design-fits-all.
So, David Pogue, I know you’re listening. Take on this cause! If people are responding to you so well on Twitter, point them in the direction of somethingbyMandy Brown. The best way to tackle the readability of the web isn’t by trying to automatically reformat it (although it’s a good stop-gap). No! We need to raise awareness to push the community of people who write for and publish online to take the extra care to make words readable.
I’m a little late on posting this, but it’s still worth a read. Stephen T. Asma wrote a great little piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about our relationship to the idea of monsters and makes the case that even in a liberal world of moral relativism, the idea of the monster is a useful – and accurate – construct. Good stuff touching a lot of ground.
Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
His thoughts on so-called Search Engine Optimization are spot on. The crux:
Remember this: It’s not your job to create content for Google. It’s their job to find the best of the web for their results. Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.
It sounds obvious, but there are still too many people contributing to the web who believe that its inner workings are magical. Success on the web, to my mind, is far more predictable than in publishing, politics, movies, etc. The only way to compete on the web is through quality.
I recall one marathon twelve-hour session of passion many years ago now. It was only afterwards that I realized I had barely had a single trace of an analytic thought for the longest period I could then remember. I was never happier. As I finally collapsed into my lover’s arms with the final orgasm that drained every last drop of desire or need from my body and soul, I understood for the first time why the French call coming “le petit mort”. It can be the emptying of self entirely. Which is why sex is so close at times to the presence of the divine, and reflects and incarnates God in ways few other things can so easily. We are more animal and more divine in sex than in any other activity.
For context, John Kricfalusi created The Ren & Stimpy Show. Here’s his take on the new movie based on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:
I had a tough time sitting in my seat through Meatballs, because what was happening and who it was happening to was not remotely interesting. It’s hard to pace a story around characters with no personality.
But as a cartoonist and designer, there was enough visual interest and unique action throughout the movie that intellectually I found things to stimulate me.
It was an optimistic portent of what could be. It’s basically an undirected film – but one that allowed many of the artists to take nothing scenes and add some kind of cleverness, design and action to the formulaic events being told by the story.
This in itself is so far ahead of an overdirected film (overdirected by executives typically, not by directors that actually have a point of view or style) that stops creativity from happening every step of the way, just so that more stock plot points, filler and bad puns can happen.
I think this kind of thing is enjoyable to read not just because of how harsh it is, but because it touches on something that is really true about the current state of, in my opinion, not just animated films, but most major films. I often find myself settling for the little things in a movie that make it good, rather than expecting something more, maybe in order to seem less like a cynic and an asshole.
But the truth is, there’s a lot of terrible stuff out there, and the industry that has grown around making movies has moved it from an art form into a calculating box office science. I can only remain optimistic by holding onto my belief that the creative juices going into films have stagnated due to lack of competition. Lower production and distribution costs, one hopes, will eat away at the joint monopoly whose long project has been the reduction of creative work to “content.”
Time will tell. Quality endures, but only if it can first find life.
Not really a great read either, but Michael Baigent did get me with this zinger:
An early example comes when the ubiquitous protagonist Robert Langdon arrives in Washington by private jet. In a particularly mundane exchange, he is told that he would look good in a tie. He hates ties. Suddenly the reader is treated to a history of ties involving Roman orators and Croat mercenaries. It is as if Brown wants us to think that he is a great scholar rather than a deft hand at computer searching.
Dan Brown, unfortunately, is not the only person who might be guilty of this.
Ben Fry, introducing a spell-binding visualization of Charles Darwin’s changes over time to The Origin of Species:
We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.
Geoffrey Nunberg discusses Google Books in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently, Google Books suffers from some pretty shoddy metadata, leading to some humorous juxtapositions and labels. Nunberg’s diagnosis:
It’s clear that Google designed the system without giving much thought to the need for reliable metadata. In fact, Google’s great achievement as a Web search engine was to demonstrate how easy it could be to locate useful information without attending to metadata or resorting to Yahoo-like schemes of classification. But books aren’t simply vehicles for communicating information, and managing a vast library collection requires different skills, approaches, and data than those that enabled Google to dominate Web searching.
Came across this again while digging through the DF archives. Rob Walker profiles the then-two-year-old iPod for the Times:
A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this – it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
(Emphasis mine.)
This idea has, I think, taken root since then, and a respect for the relationship between usability, readability, and visual character on the web in particular has really grown. And yet, some companies seem to continue to try to “copy Apple” in all the wrong ways, drawing the wrong inferences, and learning the wrong lessons.
Think about what you’re making, respect the user and the reader, and make informed decisions along the way to the best of your ability. Setting everything minimally against a white background is not the great lesson of Apple’s success. The takeaway is to place an emphasis on the user in the design process and not to underestimate the value of quality.
I am super excited about these. Maybe if they add ligatures, lining figures, and proper small-caps to Georgia, the Webkit and Gecko teams will figure out better ways to support these things in their type implementations. Here’s hoping anyway.
Also, is it just me, or does that shot of Verdana Ultra-bold (I assume) look like it has a lot of potential? I could see that finding its way into some of my own work.
If you care about making websites, and you haven’t read this already, I strongly recommend and support Jack Shedd’s point of view regarding the new markup specified by HTML5.
To my ear, this is a much sharper and more clear-minded approach to thinking about the markup changes than those put forward by Zeldman and friends. The difference, I think, is that the “Super Friends” want to improve a standard that is close to being adopted to fit the way they work. Shedd wants to take a step back and say, what is the real problem here?
I respect and appreciate both methods of critique, especially with regards to something as wildly complex as Web Standards, but in this case, I have to say that Shedd is bringing up some very valid concerns, and I hope more discussion comes out of his article.
UPDATE: On further thinking about this, I feel it is necessary to clarify that I don’t mean in any way to impugn the efforts of Jeffrey Zeldman and the other members of the “Super Friends.” (I do think the name is silly, but that is surely the point.) I think it is prudent to point out that the other key difference between the two sets of critiques is that one comes from a group and the other from an individual. Shedd doesn’t have to get anyone else to agree with him before posting the recommendations and critiques that he offers, which is both an advantage and disadvantage.
I finally got a chance to read through the whole thing. As one commenter notes, reading through this process is mesmerizing. My favorite bit:
If you’re familiar with Bodoni and Didot, you’ll also be able to see my many departures from those faces. The very slight flares at the ends of the thin flourishes, for example, are a personal favorite detail of mine. Without them, the end of a thin stroke seems arbitrary to me, like, “well, guess it may as well end here…”. I prefer to say, “This is exactly where I want the stroke to end”—to make the last bit of ink (or toner, or whatever) to be like a punch line or dessert—kind of a little tiny celebration at the end of something joyful.
ICANN, keeper of domain names, allows a 5-day grace period within which a domain name may be returned gratis. “Domain tasters” take advantage of this by registering excessive numbers of domain names, throwing up advertising on them, and then leaving before they get the bill.
Now, ICANN has implemented a penalty fee for large numbers of cancellations. Johm Timmer reports:
In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009.
The numbers dropped from 17 million in June 2008 to 60,000 in July 2009. This is fantastic news.
First off, I love the Ninjawords online dictionary, and have for some time, since I first discovered it through Wordie.
This story, however, is outrageous. The gist is that the Ninjawords developers had to remove “objectionable content” from their dictionary in order to get it published in the App Store, removing words like “ass” and “snatch.”
Take a moment to breathe that in. Apple. Censored. A dictionary.
The situation with the App Store in general seems to be showing a particularly ugly side to Apple, that I would have never expected to see so fully a year or more ago. I don’t use an iPhone, but I was happy that they came up with a model for the App Store that seemed to be so beneficial to the little guys in software development. The App Store, in theory, makes iPhone applications compete primarily on quality, not brand recognition.
Kernest is one of the first good options for using embedded fonts in a website. Unlike projects like Cufón or sIFR, Kernest takes advantage of @font-face embedding, which is now supported by Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
One of the problems with @font-face at the moment is that Safari and Firefox support font formats like OpenType and TrueType, while Internet Explorer only supports Embedded OpenType. The usual workaround is to supply a different format depending on the requesting browser. This is exactly what Kernest takes care of for you.
Not only will it serve the right file type depending on the browser, it will only serve the font files when the request comes from a domain name tied to that particular font. Many of the current selection of fonts are free, but in order to make them available to your domain, you must activate them. Based on my brief use, this is a very simple process, requiring only a user account, and adding new domains is completely effortless.
After activating a font for your domain, you simply link to a stylesheet specific to your domain on their server. It is worth noting that there is no javascript involved, and this is as it should be.
I’ve been trying Kernest out for a few days now, and have found the experience very pleasant all around. I don’t know much about what TypeKit’s model will be like, whether they will have some fonts available free of charge, or if there will still be a charge for the service. If not, Kernest looks like it could be a great free alternative for projects without a budget for fonts.
And in the meantime, I highly recommend giving it a try. There are already several serviceable fonts on the site. I’m currently using Droid Serif from Ascender Corp
I had high hopes for Ross Douthat’s column at the Times, but haven’t often found myself reading him since the move from The Atlantic. When I do take a minute to check on what he’s been writing about, he simply seems out of place. Perhaps the Times really can’t handle a conservative voice like his.
Perhaps it’s evidence that evolution has programmed boys to compete within large groups, so they can learn to eliminate rivals for women — and that girls have been programmed to judge, one-on-one, who would be the most protective father for offspring.
Am I the only one who thinks these kinds of articles are idiotic? Why is Dan Benjamin linking to this, much less agreeing with it? First of all this is a story in Time magazine – not exactly a bastion of rigor. Second of all, the only thing an fMRI study like this shows is that by the time boys and girls have reached this age (8 to 17, according to Time), their brains have become “hard-wired” to function differently in social situations. This says nothing of the possibility that social factors – which, oh, by the way, have taught these kids language – have forged these “hard-wired” distinctions. But please, go ahead and assume that studies prove what you already accept as common knowledge. Take it away Dan:
This may not come as a huge surprise to parents of teenage kids, but now there’s some science to help explain the difference.
Part of what is appealing about Andrew Sullivan’s blog is that he has Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner there who clearly help prepare a lot of his posts, and I imagine make the construction of the blog an actual conversation. I also like that he often posts readers’ emails in full when they make a good point, no matter what their view. Here, Patrick is filling in while Andrew is taking a break, and continues the practice of posting thoughtful emails from readers. A taste:
Domenech asks why less [sic] Americans are married with kids at my age, and the best he can come up with is that tired old socially conservative canard of uppity women and a pornography-filled society. Does he really want to know why there is a greater delay in marriage and rearing children than there was in 1970? One word: cost.
Of course, the act of posting these in such a respectful way encourages other readers to send in their own thoughtful emails.
Digital clock: only figures, no case, only the necessary – only accurate time. Each figure has self-contained power supply and independent control, it can be fixed to any surface autonomously. A light sensor will switch the clock to an invert mode: the figures are white in the dark time of day and black at daytime.
The thing is, I’d be happy if these actually got people to upgrade from IE7, IE6, or even IE5. Everyone seems to be responding to these as though Microsoft is desperate to go after Firefox and Chrome (and maybe Safari). But if you watch “G.R.I.P.E.S.” it’s pretty clear that these are at least partially an effort to get people using older versions of their own browser to get with the program.
I never said this, but these ads are actually a good showing from Microsoft.
To understand the units of time we need to investigate the number systems of ancient civilizations. How did the Sumerians count to 12 on one hand and to 60 on two? What advances did the Babylonians make and how did they use this number system for measurement? And what refinements did the Egyptians make to time measurement to give us the system we still use today?
My dad would like this. Pico Iyer lives in a “two-room apartment in nowhere Japan:”
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all.
So I am glad, honestly, to have the old world of print and film supplemented by the new world of text and video. And I’m eager to stick up for casual and often vulgar online writing and culture as long as I’m not forced to defend them in grandiose terms. The internet often gratifies my curiosity and sense of humor, no small thing but nothing to confuse with whatever it is in me—something far more deeply interfused—that is gratified by poetry, philosophy, history, modes of writing that hardly exist online. What are the native species of internet prose? Op-eds, diary entries, aperçus, allusions, screeds, and scrawls of graffiti—worthy forms but marginal and perishable like little nodding flowers along a river.