ArchivesBut what about the typography? It's mostly justified, except where it isn't. Dashes appear without letter spaces either side, so they look like hyphens and thus change the meaning of the text. Has anyone else noticed? Does anyone else care?
Yes, they do. Searching on 'Kindle + typography' yields a cool 1.5 million results. Grabbing a fact at random (all those years working in PR; what do you expect?) I see that reading from a Kindle is 10% slower because the eye and brain must work harder to interpret the text.
I acknowledge all the advantages of ebooks but when I read fiction, I read for pleasure and good typography is part of that pleasure. That's the way I am; you could say it's my default setting.
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( 3 / 236 )And before you mention it, yes, I do know how to spell water, but this is Warter, near Pocklington in Yorkshire. The picture in question is David Hockney's massive 50-panel painting of woodland, currently on show at the York Art Gallery, on loan from Tate Britain.
It fills one whole wall of the gallery and all day long people are popping in and out to sit with it for a while. I went to see it, loved it, then had to go back after the local paper printed a small monochrome image. It looked different; shapes and shades which I hadn't noticed in the vast, full-colour version had somehow become obvious in a much more restricted medium.
It's not that surprising. Words can do the same thing, moving effortlessly from a web page to a brochure, from a poster to a swing-tag. Each one the same, every one just a little bit different.
Always assuming that you started out with the right words in the first place ...
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( 3 / 259 )Well, not exactly, but the sun is shining and it seems like a good time to freshen up the blog. (Most particularly, it's time NOT to have a Christmas item heading the page. How many times have I nagged clients about not keeping their postings up to date? )
This writer's life moves with the seasons and today I've passed an important point. For the first time this year, I've had to lower the blind because the sun was shining in my eyes when I started work. There's a patch of sunlight on one end of the office sofa, so I sat in it, like a cat, to have lunch. OK, so I'm still wearing a pulse warmer on my mouse hand to keep my wrist off the somewhat cool desk top (writers can sit for a very long time, hand on mouse, just about to make that critical edit).
On the windowsill, the African Violets are soaking up the sun and rewarding me with intense, almost luminous flowers. I keep wondering about that sunny window ledge. Should I have some sort of solar recharger on there so I can ripen the BlackBerry for free? Or would I have to use it for a million years in order to offset the energy used in making it?
Oh dear. The sun's just gone it. At least that's one problem solved.
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( 3 / 292 )I just love a good statistic. It must be all those years of crafting omnibus survey data into press releases. I also love bad statistics, especially the ones held up to the light by The Guardian's 'Bad Science' columnist Ben Goldacre.
Based on this year's Christmas card haul (not yet complete, but a very convenient number which makes the maths easy), here are my design and content findings:
Of all cards received, 82% are secular and 18% have some Christian connotation. Of the latter, 66% feature the Magi in some style or other.
Of all cards received, 38% feature snow scenes. This is pretty much like looking out of the window for most of the country - or like looking out of the window a couple of centuries ago. No-one has sent a snowbound Heathrow card.
Of all cards received, only 6% feature robins. This development has been welcomed by the Non-Exec who, for some reason, doesn't like robins.
Of all cards received, 32% depicted creatures other than robins (including kangaroos!). Of these creatures, the largest single species was bears (25% of all creature cards.)
So, what does that all mean? You tell me. Suggestions, please, on a Christmas card...
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( 3 / 320 )So I'm at a business seminar and the speaker is up there on the stage with his microphone and his presentation. The subject is innovation, so there are some fairly interesting things being said.
Now before he stood up,the organisers put up a hash tag, so that people could tweet the meeting. How very cutting edge. So what happened? Instead of living in the moment, actually listening to what the person in front of them had to say, certain audience members began tweeting the fact that they were at a seminar.
And what were they tweeting? Truly absorbing stuff, like "I'm here at X listening to Y." No you're not. You're fiddling with your phone!
If the whole audience had done it, we could have been a trending topic by the time the guy sat down. But then, no-one would have listened to what he had to say.
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