Today’s Lesson – Small Caps

An interesting article about Small Caps from I Love Typography.

Small caps are one of those things that I’ve never noticed properly before. I understand little about typography but I am intrigued and find letterforms and font design very beautiful.

One of the examples is small caps within a piece of text talking about PRIDE and HUMILITY.  This is were I have probably seen small caps used most, in older text and old-fashioned novels. Still I shall see if I can find some small caps used correctly elsewhere today. But it won’t be online as it seems these unusual font types are not respected by the www.

I wonder how many specialist ‘font grammar’ items like this will be lost in time.

Printing’s Alive

Clever video about printing being alive and kicking, and being a vocation.

He makes some great points about why computers can’t compete with the printed word. If I had a print job and they were in my neighbourhood, they’d get the gig.

(Apparently it’s an homage to a set of videos called Regrets which are also well done, if a little dark in their humour. I had previously seen a video micky-taking ad agency video which attacks the truly jaw-droppingly awful agency.com video. This was all from some time ago but priceless.)

Cut URLs down to size

There are some helpful sites that I am at a lost to see how they ‘monetise’ their work. TinyURL.com being one of them. Or rather, I’m amazed that people are sensible enough not to be too greedy.
This is such a useful site that I use all the time, and have seen being used by countless others, I’m amazed it hasn’t been bought by Google. That said, I suppose they get a pretty penny from the Adsense ads. I really wonder who gives money by those donation buttons. I have once, so with billion’s of hits I suppose a tiny fraction giving a tiny amount makes it a good business.

I’m intrigued how it ‘never expires’ either. Gosh, people are clever.

Ideabook is…full of ideas

A fellow called Chuck Green writes the site www.ideabook.com. Basically it’s an ‘expert in his field’ type of site with design tutorials and full of great tips. I’ve followed it for years and it’s been a real fountain of knowledge (I’ve checked; it is fountain, not font or fount). He has the most elegant ideas about design and is a great teacher – concise, fun, useful.

I’ve just noticed Chuck has a blog at www.pageplane.com. It has a link to Jeff Bridges website; www.jeffbridges.com. Worth a visit. A refreshing and friendly site, full of his drawings. It is this fantastic randomness of links that I love about the internet!