Ampersands

Collecting interesting articles about ampersands:

Our Middle Name by Hoeffler & Frere Jones

The Funkiest Ampersands You Have Ever Seen by Chris Spooner

The Ampersandby Max Cafisch at Adobe

The Mesmerizing Curves of Ampersands by Brian Holt at The Design Cubicle

Ampersands with Atittude by Huw Wilkins at Smashing Magazine

Ampersand where it comes from by Artemy Lebedev

Ampersand Blog by Stephen Gose

Ampersandland at Flckr

The Ampersand by Aegir Hallmundur at the Ministry of Type

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BraveFont from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

Font Conference from College Humor

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Typography on TV

I managed to make it through only the first 15 minutes of the new TV show "Fringe." However, the typography was awesome. Take a look:

The skills of workers

A couple of nights ago, I couldn't sleep. For some reason, I thought back to my days of working in the corn canning factory for Green Giant in Le Sueur, Minnesota.

The work was all-consuming. We worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. We had the option of taking one day off, but the prospect of overtime pay made that choice unlikely.

For about one month, my entire life was consumed by factory work. All of which is lost, over and dead. I spent a few moments looking for images of husking machines, kernel stripping machines, etc. The knowledge is gone. The reality that consumed me for a brief period of time is lost in the ether.

This happens all the time. The everyday life of workers: the machines with which we interact, the quotas which guide our actions from moment to moment. They are all gone. Lost in the wind. Overpassed by progress. New machines. New technology.

Skills that marked us as valuable workers have died again and again, as technology makes us obsolete.

I wish I could do what Gene Gable accomplished in his article Waxing nostalgic over paste-up. He talks about the skills that I mastered nearly 20 years ago that made it possible for me to live a productive life and earn a decent, union wage. These skills have all become obsolete now. The lives of printers and typesetters have metamorphosed into unrecognizable cockroaches of progress.

What do we, as workers, do when our skills become obsolete? What choices do we have? How do we honor our learning and skills once they are no longer needed?

Typographic Art

Lovely images and brilliant use of type at the website for Jeremy Pettis. I chose to display "Fruitbat" because my dearest cat of all time was named Fruitbat. Sweet!

Hey Belledame, he's even got an emu for you!

Playing with the layout

Tonight I started playing around in the new blogger tools. Since I don't have the choice anymore to stay with the old blogger, I might as well play with the new one.

Something about myself: I am a "dragged-kicking-and-screaming" adapter. I bought a CD player last year because I figured they were finally catching on. This year we bought a TV with a built-in DVD player so we could try out that new technology. The thing tanked after a couple of months, but it was fun while it lasted.

Being forced to upgrade in Blogger was a trauma I managed to survive.

About 10 years ago I watched an amazing exodus of skilled workers: printers and pressmen, become extinct as technology raced past them. I figured typesetters were next, but a few of us survive.

I'm all about print and I get it. I know what works and what doesn't on the printed page. I can kern a document within an inch of its life. I can make type sing off the page. I can make it invisible so that thoughts flow directly from the page directly nto your consciousness with no distractions or side trips.

So it's bizarre to be communicating in pixels. HTML coding is not that different from traditional cold type. I know I could learn it if I put in the effort.

But, you know, I bought a CD player last year because I believed they were catching on. I bought a DVD player this year.