Usain Bolt has a long one. Lewis Hamilton’s too, and getting bigger all the time. Lester Piggott’s was very impressive in his day, and Rachael Blackmore’s just got one of her own. Boris Johnson certainly doesn’t have one, nor any […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Typeface of the week – Comic Sans
Few typefaces are so well-known and instantly recognisable as Comic Sans. Even people with no interest at all in typography will pick it out from a random selection of typefaces, having no clue what the others might be called. And […]
Don’t judge a book by its cover – just take a close look at its face.
Hard to believe now, but there was a time when books were all written by hand, came in large and bulky volumes available only to the very few – and very rich. Imagine monks seated in their ‘scriptorium’, hunched over […]
Typeface of the week – Baskerville
For many people, the first reaction to Baskerville will be Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, probably the great detective’s most famous adventure. That was first published in 1902 and the Baskerville typeface dates from the mid-1700s and […]
Typeface of the week – Univers
Univers lives up to its name – it’s universal, probably the most used typeface in the world. The popularity is largely because it’s so bland, characterless, and inoffensive that it can safely be used for anything from baby food to […]
If one picture = 1,000 words, how many does a movie need?
Imagine a movie running in your head… just like reading a book when a mental projector illustrates the action as you turn the pages. (At least it does in my case.) The same principle applies in script-writing – or screenplay […]
Typeface of the week – Rockwell
Perhaps because it’s reminiscent of typewriter output, Rockwell creates a sense of urgency as a text-face – that you’re reading direct from the author’s page without the intermediate delay of a compositor having to assemble the words or key them […]
The best of all possible worlds?
All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds. (orig: Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles). This was the maxim of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s political satire, Candide. Whatever misfortune befell, Dr. Pangloss […]
A rational approach to music theory
Written music conveys information from the composer to the performer who then presents it to the listener. Some of this information is essential and some is extra. In simplest terms, essential information is ‘what to play’ and extra information is […]
The Mystery of Booey-Gooey’s Tower (solved)
A friend was telling me about his unfortunate car accident, a rear-end shunt, that occurred, he said, on Al Bidda, “near Booey-Gooey’s Tower”. Now I know Al Bidda pretty well. I walk the length of it every Friday lunchtime on […]