Also, I realize they went for a USA Today style color coded section-type thing… but man did I prefer the whitespace employed before to identify a section. Graphic design is really difficult, especially on something like a newspaper — I just think that this design needed a few more revisions before going public.
They’re not fonts! explains the difference between “font” and “typeface.”
Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects
but use fonts to create the finished art.
Essentially, if you are talking about the appearance of text, you are speaking about what typeface it is set in. “Font” is like an implementation, or an instance of a typeface. Quoth wikipedia:
In typography, a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size of a particular typeface. For example, all characters for 9 point Bulmer is a font, and the 10 point size would be another font.
Know the song “Hallelujah”? The one that goes “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for music, do you?” (That was from memory!) Anyhow, I first heard it but Rufus Wainwright, and loooved it. However, there’s much much more to this song. In this great piece, clapclap.org covers everything you’d need to know about the song.
Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen
song is featured prominently in no less than three
separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and
can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies
and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack
to a montage of people being sad.
What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that
happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”
What I find particularly hilarious are the comments about the original:
This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a
warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and
labored under the impression that he was a crooner.
It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed,
and remained that way for some time; in the major
Cohen biography, published in 1996, there’s no entry
for the song in the index, despite the fact that the
book’s name is the same as the album on which
“Hallelujah” originally appears.
Read on for the rest of the fascinating story. I’m not going to quote one more piece of the story because you should see the whole thing. Yet… I can’t resist:
The usage was so pervasive that, based on the numerous
OC Mix CDs that were released, it seemed to inspire
musicians to create their own soundalike songs, and to
boost those artists who had already been working that
sound. (This was the “indie rock boom” that the OC
supposedly instigated, bringing sensitive-crooner bands
like Death Cab For Cutie to fame and fortune.)
The most prominent example is Imogen Heap, someone
who I, at least, had not heard of since a cassingle
was mailed to me in 1998. But Heap’s song “Hide and
Seek” soundtracked the final moments of the OC’s
second season, the slot occupied a year before by
a full rendition of Buckey’s “Hallelujah.” This pairing
was so successful that, for the finale of season three,
the final moments were accompanied, once again, by
Heap, this time covering —and, to be clear, I am not
shitting you—“Hallelujah.” This is the point where the
OC consumes itself whole, and it is a sickeningly
gorgeous thing to watch.
Articles, coverage like this, is why blogs are winning. Any magazine editor in their right mind would say “this piece, so involved and extensive as it is, can not run in any music magazine.” But they would be wrong. Yet anything truly interesting, in depth, or innovative continues to be placed either online or in a frighteningly few publications. And so the exodus from the printed to the digital word continues. (via Deron Bauman at kottke, via Andew Simone)
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got “it” when you’re so busy that each day slides by in a swirl of homework and exams. When there’s a clear path laid before you, with structured credits and definite milestones, you can fool yourself into living and growing by the academic metric alone. Some are intelligent enough to see beyond the schedule and grow; others, such as myself, blindly follow the rigmarole.
So, blithely, I emerged from the snow-blindness of endless textbooks and assignments, thinking I had some grasp of things. The real world, without explicit benchmarks and frighteningly lacking in guideposts and waypoints, is a much much messier place than college.
This is not to say that 9 months out of college have helped me reach some epiphany. No, I make no such grand assertions. The time has, however, allowed the veil to lift and afforded me invaluable perspective. Diving back into the structure of professional school this coming August, I must realize I do not yet have an understanding of the world but of the world’s messiness.
After all, the fabric that weaves our lives in and out of people and places is not staid or predictable but a messy, complex, intricate, ethereal, transient, gossamer thing. A beautiful thing.
Whilst doing a bit of research for a project, I took the time to look through Wikipedia Statistics — the results were staggering. Consider this: Wikipedia averages 40 thousand (40 000) requests per second. Thus, in 3 seconds, Wikipedia receives more requests than tumbledry has in the past 5 years.
What’s even more staggering is the traffic: Wikipedia averages 500 megabytes per second in bandwidth. For reference, that’s equivalent to about 12 music albums per second.
Totals: over 100 billion requests per month for Wikipedia articles, with over 1.3 petabytes of data. Plugging those numbers into something like Mosso’s calculator shows that hosting a website with traffic similar to Wikipedia’s would cost over $3 million per month.
Ahh, where to start. Well, Netflix (your favorite place to rent movies online, receive them through your mail, then mail them back) has been hosting a competition for a while now. The object is to come up with an algorithm to make helpful suggestions for what a person should rent, based on their rental history. Think of it this way: teams are given access to 2+ gigabytes of data. Within this data are many anonymous movie rental histories. So, let’s say you have a history of 30 rentals from one person. The goal of the competition is to examine the first 15 rentals, then correctly predict a percentage of the next 15 rentals.
What a bunch of drivel. Just because their level of knowledge
isn’t what we have today, doesn’t make it any “easier.” Do you
have any idea at all, or can you even comprehend, the kind of
mathematics that were employed back in the day to solve anything?
Take a look at the Principia for example. The geometry is insane.
I’m a graduate student in Physics and I can’t really follow his
proofs.
Furthermore, because early scientists did not have as much to build
on, that makes it all the more difficult. Where was Faraday to get
his inspiration on lines of force? What lead Maxwell in the right
direction to unifying light with electromagnetism?
It’s great that 3rd graders know about electric circuits. That’s the
point of scientific progress. That doesn’t make the original task
trivial in any sense.
In other words, I hate you.
Whether or not you like the punchline at the end (it’s pretty much the reason I posted all this), that’s a pretty good point.
If you happen to be cooking a delicious chicken burger from Trader Joe’s on your stove top in your apartment, and you remove it from the pan in which it was cooking, you should make sure that you turn off the gas on the hot pan. If, in the event that you forget to do this, you should not panic upon realizing that the heat has been on an empty pan, and then pour water into the pan. This action will fill your apartment with incredible amounts of (admittedly delicious smelling) chicken smoke. You should, however, DEFINITELYOPENALLTHEWINDOWS you can get to, turn on a vent fan, and hope to everything that is good in the world that your smoke alarm doesn’t go off.
If possible, after clearing out the smoke, you should enjoy your dinner, take a nice hard workout, and then shower with the window open, so the cold air from the outdoors fills your shower with thick billowing clouds of freshly scented steam.
Designers Toolbox: Proof Reading Marks. Many of these are obsolete in this era of computers, but I still use the marks for delete, new paragraph, comma insertion, transpose, and change to lowercase.
Dan, of Dan’s Data (naturally), wrote a really informative article, called The Great Apathetic Revolution. It’s about this ridiculous situation: it is illegal to back-up copies of DVDs, games, etc. that you have legally purchased. Further down the article is a great set of facts describing the internet:
But P2P transfers, almost all of them copyright-infringing, now account for at least a third of all Internet traffic. Plus almost 10% for good old newsgroups, almost all of whose traffic, by volume, also breaks the law. YouTube accounts for about another 10% of all Net traffic all by itself.