Wednesday, December 28, 2011

mood, typography, cognitive therapy

Mood's been uneven. The Christmas trip down to LA was good. The Penguins keep winning.

I'm knee-deep in a gorgeous book, The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst (an acclaimed Canadian poet as well as a typography nut). It's not quite a textbook, and not quite a treatise, on the art of typography. The book follows its own stated axioms, and does so beautifully. Even the paper is beautiful.

Consequently, I'm dreaming up ways to re-format all the documents I used in classes. I'm being playful and ridiculous with the Professional Ethics syllabus, for instance.

One dilemma I already know I have regards the use of ligatures. In a lot of typefaces, they are very nearly obligatory. But since I provide documents online as well as well as in hard copy, I need fonts that are good screen fonts, and ligatures are not very clear on a screen. This is a good problem to have, because it keeps me off the streets and out of my head.

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