I Don't Deserve This

About a month ago, I posted my entry for Illustration Friday. My thumb has just about recovered from the abuse of all the carving it took. It is a lot of work but so worth it. It was a woodblock of an ox and offered the remaining few in trade. One of my IF friends, Susan Sanford of ArtSpark Theatre, took me up on the offer. I just received this amazing piece of art. I'm certain I got the better end of this deal.

As for Illustration Friday itself, hopefully, once tax season, Easter and spring break (whew!) are out of the way I can get back to being a bit more regular and friendly.

Type Tips – Not Justified

From FontShop founder Erik Spiekermann

Avoid flush settings! Most applications create justified text by hideously stretching and squishing words and spaces. Note that it takes many hours of tedious work to typeset justified text that is truly well-proportioned and legible. For this reason, professionals prefer to use ragged-right composition, either with or without hyphenation, depending on how much line-length variation they wish to allow. This gives the text a more harmonious appearance and makes it easier to read, since all wordspaces have the same width.

If you are up for a history lesson on the origins and use of justified typesetting, ITC's U&lc tackles the subject quite well. And please people, there is no such thing at right- or left-justified type!

Type Tips – Ligatures

From FontShop founder Erik Spiekermann

A ligature is defined as the visual or formal combination of two or three letters into a single character. They consist of letter combinations such as ff, fi, fl, ffi. Ligatures keep letters from overlapping and improve legibility. For example: affluence, configure, deflate, affinity.

For more info on ligatures, kerning and tracking the Design Center has a pretty good article posted.

conTROLL

Yesterday, I posted about CHAOS so it only seems fitting that today should be about CONTROL.
Wired's Clive Thompson has a very informative article about moderating discussion boards in the April issue. The article covers troll control or how to effectively moderate open discussion boards. He starts out with “Obama sucks” and it’s all uphill from there with information on automated moderation like crowdsourcing and disemvoweling and selective invisibility. Take note that banning the offensive “miscreants” only “nurtures their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker.”

Slashdot uses crowdsourcing to keep thier boards civil. A very basic explanation is that it is a rating system derived from comments about particular posts. The comments come from randomly selected readers who have the this commenting ability only for a short time before others are selected to comment. Disemvowelling is Thompson’s favorite and I would have to agree. Vicious attacks are almost rendered useless by removing all vowels from an offensive post. Teresa Neilsen Hayden, a moderator at Boing Boing uses this method. Selective Invisibility is the most diabolical of them all. The software by Disqus (the company moderates 90,000 blog threads worldwide) is also a ratings based method. The difference here is that a troll with a lot of negative ratings is rendered invisible by everyone but himself.

This is what you get when you open your discussion boards to everyone. You can either hire an army to moderate your boards, eliminate those boards or employ some method to contain the damage. All of these methods walk a very fine line. One one side is a world where the very nasty troll reigns supreme. On the other is Oceania and Big Brother.

Type Tips – Figuring It Out

From FontShop founder Erik Spiekermann

Good text typefaces have “old style”, “text”, or “lowercase” figures – 1234567890 – instead of “lining” ones – 1234567890. Lining figures were originally designed to be used with setting of all capital letters. Lowercase figures blend in better with the text settings, as the figures behave like lowercase letters with ascenders (6 and 8) and descenders (3, 4, 5, 7, 9) and x-height-only characters (1, 2, 0). While they fit in text very nicely, the good looks have one disadvantage: each of the figures have individual widths, meaning they won’t sit directly underneath each other in columns. Their descenders may also clash with ascenders when the columns sit closely on top of one another, as happens quite often in tabular settings. Lining figures are, however, all the same width, making for a somewhat uneven appearance, as the 1 takes up the same space as the 8, but in tables, they are much easier to add up. Some fonts offer “tabular oldstyle figures”, which will allow table setting.

Read more about figure styles.