Dan Wybrant has a collection of photos with descriptions of the typesetting and paste-up techniques used by a campus daily in 1970. We bitch about InDesign crashing, but we don’t have to type blind with a machine that punches holes onto paper tape. There’s also a lot of fun to be had with a wax machine if you happen to come across one.
Category: links
One space after a period
Despite whatever you’ve been told in the past, you should only put one space after a period, not two.
Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It’s arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that’s how we should do it.
In my high-school typing class, we were working on ancient ICON computers which used monospace type, and were told to leave two spaces after a period for readability. I then spent years developing muscle-memory that had me double-tapping the spacebar after every full-stop. In university, I started writing for one of the newspapers and got yelled at for putting in double spaces and messing up the copy-setting — I learned quick. Fast-forward to book design, and given any sort of manuscript, getting rid of the double spaces is one of the first priorities. Remember, just one space.
Cracking scratch lottery tickets
Mohan Srivastava, a statistician from Toronto, cracked the numerical system behind a series of scratch lottery tickets.
“Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”
Eventually the gaming commission listened to him and removed the tickets from stores.
Live translation on a phone
The Google Translate app for Android can translate live speech and offer a translation. The Babel fish approacheth.
Online news in 1981
From an old news report — it used to take about two hours to download an electronic newspaper with connections fees of five dollars per hour. Oh, and the newspapers weren’t in it to make a profit.
Tree of Codes
A set of photos from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.
Knowing sushi
If You Knew Sushi examines the world’s biggest seafood market, where a bluefin tuna can fetch the price of a small home. Japanese fish buyers have a finely honed craft.
“I tell you, Nicky, these Japanese guys, they take a little, thin slice from the tail, hold it to the light, look at it for a minute, then make an offer. God knows what they see.”
What the Japanese buying agent determines by his quick and practiced analysis of that sliver of tail is an indication of the tuna’s inner color, its oil content, and the presence, if any, of parasitic disease. A smooth-grained and marbled tail is a prime indication of quality. The richness of the tuna’s lipid content, its fat, can be gauged by how slippery the slice of tail feels between the fingers. Pockmarks reveal parasites. It’s a complex diagnostic method that is mastered only with years of practice. The overall form and color of the tuna are also quickly assessed at the same time. The ideal of these qualities, inner and outer—the word for this ideal is kata—is also a bit of a mystery to outsiders.
Duelling cellos Smooth Criminal
http://youtu.be/OlVbEclPj4c
Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic playing Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson. That is all.
They embrace solitude
Jennifer B. Kahnweiler writes about why introverts can make the best leaders. The five key characteristics of introverted leaders that help them succeed:
- They think first, talk later
- They focus on depth
- They exude calm
- They let their fingers do the talking
- They embrace solitude
Selling old typefaces
An interesting thread on Typophile concerning whether or not you can digitize and old font and sell it by its old name. The thread devolves in true internet fashion, but worth taking a read through if you’ve ever considered remaking an old typeface.
Bottom up draft beer
GrinOn has developed a method for dispensing beer from the bottom, allowing the cup to be filled nine times faster. The post includes a video of them pouring fifty-six beers in sixty seconds.
The key is the use of a cup that features a hole at the bottom and small, circular magnet that rests over it. When placed on the system, the magnet is lifted up by the pressure-driven beer. The cup fills up until the weight of the liquid pushes the magnet back down over the hole. The cup can then be lifted off and the beer consumed as normal.
MoMA adds typefaces to collection
The MoMA has added new typefaces to its permanent collection, including: OCR-A, FF Meta, FF DIN, Verdana and Gotham.
This first selection of 23 typefaces represent a new branch in our collection tree. They are all digital or designed with a foresight of the scope of the digital revolution, and they all significantly respond to the technological advancements occurring in the second half of the twentieth century. Each is a milestone in the history of typography.
The site lists all of the typefaces and the reasoning behind the selections.