keming. (kĕm'-ĭng). n. The result of improper kerning.
Coined by David Friedman at Ironic Sans.
(via the also brilliant Erin McKean)
Photo: untitled [New Sicilian Pizza 7.99] by Joseph Robertson; some rights reserved. He has a fabulous typographic Flickr set.
I’ve been swooning over Matthew Woodson’s work at ghostco.org for months, so when a story landed on my desk that actually involved a ghost, I knew whom I wanted to ask to illustrate it.
I love the simultaneous attacking/comforting embrace of this ghost, as well as the little details like the texture of his hair and the pattern of the living boy’s sweater vest. In fact, I like it so much that I printed it out large and stuck it on the wall behind my desk. You can see an uncropped, larger version of the image on the story page: Brother’s Keeper (scroll to the bottom).
I’ve already asked Matthew to do another drawing for us, so watch this space . . .
A lot of great stuff in this interview with Peter Mendelsund by Christopher Tobias at design:related:
I definitely gravitate towards using illustration, in general, more than photography in book jackets; and the more abstract the better. I think this approach leaves more to the reader’s imagination. It’s easier to be evocative without being literal. Though, upon reflection, those geometric jackets were to some extent influenced by the fact that they were all designed in Quark, which, really because of the limitations of the software, one finds oneself designing with the most accessible tools—boxes, circles, in flat colors or simple blends on top of art. It’s more tempting in that environment to simply place a shape on top of art. In PhotoShop, or InDesign, of course, because of the ease of blending layers, compositions tend to be denser, shapes more amorphous, and the final result, well, more photographic. We need software updates here at Knopf.
Cant. Stick. To. Just. One. Quote. . . .
Continue reading “Interview with Peter Mendelsund”
[W]hatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.
From “Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location” by Sam Roberts, New York Times, 2/18/08.
I am a big fan of the semicolon, myself; it’s an extremely useful punctuation mark.
(Thanks, Rob!)
Photo: laserColon laserSemiColon by Andrew Plumb / ClothBot; some rights reserved.
This makes me happy.
My friend and fellow club member Eric Skillman, an associate art director at the Criterion Collection, has been interviewed over at WizardUniverse.com. They’re rather in need of a proofreader, but Eric’s intelligence and charm nevertheless come through.
For example I’m looking over the DVD’s on my desk —[Aikira Kurosawa’s] “Drunken Angel”, which is one we did with Jock (The Losers, Green Arrow: Year One, Faker). There’s a scene towards the end of the film where the characters are wresting around and the Matsunaga character knocks over into some cans of paint, and the paint spills in an artful kind of way and what was his black suit gets covered in white paint, so its a sort of a transformative moment where he’s rebelling against the Yakuza influence, which is represented by the snazzy black suit that he’s been wearing and he becomes purified in that scene. We took that and said that sort of scene and idea is what we want to riff off of. We took that to Jock, along with this idea that there’s this sump thing in the middle of the town that’s full of mud and its like this sucking hole that the center of town is being sucked down by the Yakuza influence, so we said maybe give us a backdrop of this muddy, crappy, sumpy grossness then a slosh of white paint with the character sort of crawling through it, and then he took that and abstracted it one step further and did his thing and then that became the cover.
Do freelance artists usually get notes like that?
Usually.
The Wizard Q&A: Eric Skillman, by David Paggi, posted 2/11/2008.
To see more of Eric’s work (other than at your local video store) and to read a lot more about his design process, see his fine, upstanding blog: Cozy Lummox.
Commenter “elle” is trying to find a book that’s “kind of like a manual on how to design interiors.”
Like why you use a space break, why you indent certain amounts, why chapters start new right and things that break down the skeleton of a book. It’s something that is never really taught and you kind of do these things without a reason why, its simply because “you just do.” Do you know why a part opener always starts new right backed blank? I don’t. I just know it does.
Why do we have double breaks? Why does the text start flush left afterwards?
Anyone? Anyone? The usual books I recommend are The Elements of Typographic Style and The Complete Manual of Typography, but neither of these goes into the reasons behind design conventions, as far as I can recall.
Suggestions?
Photo: Girl inspector confers with a worker as she makes a a careful check of center wings for C-47 transport planes, Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, Calif. Photographed by Alfred T. Palmer. From the Library of Congress’s Flickr project. No known copyright restrictions.
I was looking for a particular image (which I did not find) on Google Books last week, and I stumbled across this fabulous tome: English Literature: An Illustrated Record in Four Volumes. Volume II: From the Age of Henry VIII to the Age of Milton. Part II, by Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905). It has illustrations on nearly every page, most of which are title pages from the books under discussion. Some are gorgeous, some are appalling, nearly all are interesting. And they’re all well within the public domain.
Continue reading “A thin slice of history”
RTFMCreative Commons licenses are a wonderful thing. Without them, I’d probably be unable to do my job, so I am extremely grateful to all who apply a CC license to their photos.
All, that is, except people who mark their work with a CC license and then get huffy when someone actually uses it.
Continue reading “Read the Fine Print”
How do you name your style sheets, those of you who bother to use them at all? Below are some of the most common style names I use for book work, which are cribbed from various sources. I use these same abbreviations to key manuscripts on those rare occasions when I’m copyediting text for someone else to typeset.
Warning: This is supernerdy. Do not click “more” unless you are prepared to be bored out of your skull.
Continue reading “How stylish are you?”