February 2008 Archives

“While the bullet point’s existence certainly predates PowerPoint, in popularity it is a curious byproduct of the computer program. Until recently it was merely a typographical mark, a solid dot, used in a particular kind of list, usually in an advertising context, to distinguish items of equal weighting. Typesetters would have created bullets by filling lower case o’s or by using various dingbats. Now, a plethora of Web sites exists to advise upon its usage: according to one, by adding emphasis to a list with bullets or icons (in PowerPoint you can select animated or sound ones) your list takes on new importance and invites readership. It has become an increasingly noisy sign that requests, with more urgency than a new paragraph can muster, the renewed and exaggerated attention of a reader: ‘Read This Now!’ it seems to demand. Despite the bullet’s mysterious past—in typographic histories its origins are either guessed at or omitted completely—and the fact that there is no bullet point button on the computer keyboard (it’s Option 8 on Macs and Alt-0149 on Windows); it has somehow finagled its way into popular usage to the extent that it is now the punctuation mark of our era.”

—Alice Twemlow, From the (A) Trivial to the (B) Deadly Serious, Lists Dominate Visual Culture, 2003; from Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, 2006.

“Why . . . are readers on the Web less patient than readers of print? It is a common assumption that digital displays are inherently more difficult to read than ink on paper. Yet HCI [human-computer interaction] studies conducted in the late 1980’s proved that crisp black text on a white background can be read just as efficiently from a screen as from a printed page.
    The impatience of the digital reader arises from cultural habit, not from the essential character of display technologies. Users of Web sites have different expectations than users of print. They expect to feel ‘productive,’ not contemplative. They expect to be in search mode, not processing mode. Users also expect to be disappointed, distracted, and delayed by false leads. These screen-based behaviors are driving changes in design for print, while at the same time affirming print’s role as a place where extended reading can still occur.”

—Ellen Lupton, The Birth of the User, 2004; from Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, 2006.

“The beauty and wonder of ‘white space’ is . . . [a] modernist myth that is under revision in the age of the user. Modern designers discovered that open space on a page can have as much physical presence as printed areas. White space is not always a mental kindness, however. Edward Tufte, a fierce advocate of visual density, argues for maximizing the amount of data conveyed on a single page or screen. In order to help readers make connections and comparisons as well as to find information quickly, a single surface packed with well-organized information is sometimes better than multiple pages with a lot of blank space. In typography, as in urban life, density invites intimate exchange among people and ideas.”

—Ellen Lupton, The Birth of the User, 2004; from Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, 2006.

Takashi Murakami liked this modified billboard so much that he had it shipped to his studio in Tokyo. Via BoingBoing. The exhibition, at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is over, but you can still take a tour of it, with Takashi himself as your guide, here.

“In the future graffiti, it turns out, may become a last bastion of free speech. Rules and regulations will be put in place, but graffiti will be an important tool, a digital scribbling democracy keeping the legislators in check.”

—Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

“Back in the 1960s one of the earliest writers, CORNBREAD, tagged the Jackson 5’s 747 when the pop group made a stop in Philadelphia. . . .
    CORNBREAD . . . was mistakenly reported shot dead in 1971 by local papers in Philadelphia. To prove he wasn’t, he broke into the Philadelphia Zoo and tagged both sides of an elephants behind with the words ‘CORNBREAD LIVES.’”

—Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

“‘I am amazed, o wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen,’ reads an ancient wall in Pompeii, ’since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers.’”

—Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

Ask your parents if Obay is right for you. More information is available here, here, and here.

“Our second act opens on a huge synthetic, silver orb floating in a cavernous black space. The orb is immensely powerful, the tool of a new world order sworn to wreak havoc across the galaxy, hell-bent on destroying ancient preconceptions pertaining to class, race, economic group, and sexual orientation, mercilessly tearing down any and all social barriers in its path.
    This orb is a mirror ball.”

—Matt Mason, referring to the rise of disco in The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

“Humans have always created new things by repurposing old ones. Like when some New England college kids began playing catch with empty cake tins in the late nineteenth century and invented a new sport (the tins all came from the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut).”

—Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

“Despite the short-lived nature of this subversive shake-up, Hurricane Punk was one of the most powerful youth cultures the world ever endured, leaving a deluge of sounds, scenes, and movements in its path. The innovative ideas that traveled through the prism of punk illuminated every subculture that followed, wiping the slate clean of perceived limitations and introducing a range of new possibilities. Punk presented us with a new perspective, a perspective we can apply virtually anywhere.”

—Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism, 2008.

“He turned the tuning knob of the radio and tried the aerial at every angle its swivel allowed. His fingers moved in hesitant concentration, someone feeling out, listening for the combination that would spring a lock.”

—Nadine Gordimer, July’s People, 1981.

—Saul Steinberg, from Steinberg at the New Yorker, 2005.

There’s no other word for it, this type quiz is Fontastic! (Thank you Stephanie Clark.)

“‘Was the film good?’. . .
    ‘It was very sad,’ she said, ‘but the colours were lovely.’”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

“There was starlight, but no moonlight. Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold wash of an unshaded globe over a marble slab, but starlight is alive and never still; it is almost as though someone in those vast spaces is trying to communicate a message of good will, for even the names of the stars are friendly.”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

“A curious garden sound filled the café—the regular drip of a fountain—and, looking at the bar, I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream—the red of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis—across the floor of the café.”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

“I noticed that his crew cut had recently been trimmed; was even the Hawaii shirt serving the function of male plumage?”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

“‘He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up, as I might have said, ‘A blue lizard,’ ‘A white elephant.’”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

“I am always amazed by what lies buried in the mind until one day for no particular reason it rises up and makes itself known. That night in bed, a vision of Elizabeth’s face entered my consciousness, and I saw clearly that she had gray-green eyes. It was a  small fact I hadn’t realized I knew.”

—Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company, 2003.

“According to an anonymous tipster from the Clinton campaign, Obama has outright stolen his campaign slogan. The tipster said that the slogan, ‘Yes we can,’ was lifted directly from Bob the Builder, a British construction worker who coined the phrase in 1999.”

—Barack Obama campaign plagued with scandals, say anonymous tipsters at the Clinton campaign.

Wrong Font Chosen For Gravestone. Via MB, Michael Bierut at DesignObserver. He’s a funny man, Michael Bierut is, as anyone who has seen Helvetica knows. A funny man, with an eye for the occasional funny font-related Photoshop collage. . . .

“‘I have found out everything. We have come to the wrong star. . . . That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange.’"

—G.K. Chesterton, The Ballade of a Strange Town, from Tremendous Trifles, 1909.

“Working men of all countries, blog! And working women too, and unemployed bastards, CNN journalists, and disgruntled students and angry wives, and everyone else with a grudge, a bean to spill and a story to tell. You have nothing to lose but your gags.”

—Erik Ringmar, from Guerrilla Bloggers and the Old Elite, a response to the recent sacking of Chez Pazienza by CNN, for having a blog.

“Some blogs—by pundits, professors and pompous gits—would seem to have little to do with . . . identity-creation, but of course that’s not really the case. These blogs are superficially about current events, but their real topics are their authors. The blog is where you make yourself into an authoritative person, a source of information and insightful analysis. A long-haired, middle-aged, professor might use his blog in order to affirm his identity as an eccentric outsider still in touch with his students. This . . . is a kind of dreaming, a fantasy-creation which the blog helps make real.”

—Erik Ringmar, A Blogger’s Manifesto, 2007.

“Corporate practices in recent years have become increasingly repressive. Computerized technology has provided unprecedented ways of policing staff. Email and web use are monitored, and keystrokes on computers are routinely recorded. As American companies in particular have come to realize, scared workers bring in higher profits than happy workers.
    But computers are not only enslaving employees but also helping liberate them. Employees are turning to the web for emotional sustenance and support. You blog in order to make friends, deal with stress, with unreasonable bosses or difficult colleagues. You blog to sound off or take the piss and you blog to subvert a corporate image which presents you as an ever-smiling manikin. You blog to stay sane. You blog to stay human. . . .
    In this new and far more insecure world, your only source of protection lies in your personal achievements and in the friendships you can strike up. Your blog helps promote both. The blog showcases your talents and it connects you to a larger world. In the new labour market success comes to those who stand out, while the people who get screwed are the ones who keep their heads down and hope for the best. It actually might be safer to blog.”

—Erik Ringmar, A Blogger’s Manifesto, 2007.

Having just finished reading Erik Ringmar’s A Blogger’s Manifesto (see previous posts) I feel compelled to toss onto the site a few words of my own. The best blog in the world is I Just Want To Be A Tugboat Captain, and it’s pure coincidence that I happen to know its author. He was a graphic design student of mine about a dozen years ago. He was a good student, and when he graduated he moved to New Orleans and worked as a professional graphic designer at a very pleasant and successful graphic design firm.
    But . . . oddly . . . he wasn’t satisfied with his life. He joined the Peace Corps for a year or two, and then . . . but I don’t want to give it all away. His name is Dave . . . and he Just Wants To Be A Tugboat Captain. Check it out!

“There were two rooms, full of period ‘Alaska furniture’ made from orange crates, Blazo boxes, and egg crates.”

—John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977.

“If you were looking toward Mount Everest from forty miles away, you would lift your gaze only slightly to note the highest in a sea of peaks. Forty miles from McKinley you can stand at a bench mark of three hundred feet and climb with your eyes the other twenty thousand feet. The difference—between your altitude near sea level and the height of that flying white mountain—is much too great to be merely overwhelming. The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. Until it takes itself away, you watch it as you might watch a hearth fire or a show in color of aurorean light.”

—John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977.

“The easiest way for college professor ‘bees’ to administer their ‘idea poison’ is through their ‘thought-stingers,’ commonly called ‘books.’”

—Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), 2007.

“I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left — dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified — what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but these were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.”

—Oliver Sacks, from Patterns, a look at visual migraines published just today at the New York Times. Oliver Sacks is brilliant, of course, and the article is well worth your time. If you’re into these things.

“In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans were called to meet abstractions with metaphors in a series of gaudy figurations popularly called ‘The War On . . .’” So begins The War On The War On.

“By and by Dr. Claypool laid down his pen and read the result of his labors aloud, carefully and deliberately, for this battery must be constructed on the premises by the family, and mistakes could occur; for he wrote a doctor’s hand—the hand which from the beginning of time has been so disastrous to the apothecary and so profitable to the undertaker:
    ‘Take of afarabocca, henbane, corpobalsamum, each two drams and a half: of cloves, opium, myrrh, cyperus, each two drams; of opobalsamum, Indian leaf, cinnamon, zedoary, ginger, coftus, coral, cassia, euphorbium, gum tragacanth, frankincense, styrax calamita, celtic, nard, spignel, hartwort, mustard, saxifrage, dill, anise, each one dram; of xylaloes, rheum ponticum, alipta, moschata, castor, spikenard, galangals, opoponax, anacardium, mastich, brimstone, peony, eringo, pulp of dates, red and white hermodactyls, roses, thyme, acorns, pennyroyal, gentian, the bark of the root of mandrake, germander, valerian, bishop’s weed, bay-berries, long and white pepper, xylobalsamum, carnabadium, macedonian, parsley-seeds, lovage, the seeds of rue, and sinon, of each a dram and half; of pure gold, pure silver, pearls not perforated, the blatta byzantina, the bone of the stag’s heart, of each the quantity of fourteen grains of wheat; of sapphire, emerald and jaspers stones, each one dram; of hazel-nut, two drams; of pellitory of Spain, shaving of ivory, calamus odoratus, each the quantity of twenty-nine grains of wheat; of honey or sugar a sufficient quantity. Boil down and skim off.’”

—Mark Twain, Those Extraordinary Twins, 1894.

“The twins were wet and tired, and they proceeded to undress without any preliminary remarks. The abundance of sleeve made the partnership-coat hard to get off, for it was like skinning a tarantula; but it came at last, after much tugging and perspiring. The mutual vest followed. Then the brothers stood up before the glass, and each took off his own cravat and collar. . . . Each cravat, as to color, was in perfect taste, so far as its owner’s complexion was concerned—a delicate pink, in the case of the blonde brother, a violent scarlet in the case of the brunette—but as a combination they broke all the laws of taste known to civilization. Nothing more fiendish and irreconcilable than those shrieking and blaspheming colors could have been contrived.”

—Mark Twain, Those Extraordinary Twins, 1894.

“First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.”

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908.

“For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.”

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908.

“The great synthesizer who alters the outlook of a generation, who suddenly produces a kaleidoscopic change in our vision of the world, is apt to be the most envied, feared, and hated man among his contemporaries. Almost by instinct they feel in him the seed of a new order; they sense, even as they anathematize him, the passing away of the sane, substantial world they have long inhabited. Such a man is a kind of lens or gathering point through which past thought gathers, is reorganized, and radiates outward again into new forms.”

—Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971. Sir Isaac Newton (see below) was such a man.

“Did you know that Apple’s original logo was Isaac Newton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia’s original logo was a fish?” Check out The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos, an exploration of the subject at Neatorama.

“The most important letter forms used today arose in four rather similar periods: In classical antiquity the roman capital alphabet developed, the Carolingian Renaissance gave us our minuscule characters, the Quattrocento created Old Face and the unity of capitals and lowercase small letters as well as the corresponding italic, and our Modern Face originated in neo-Classicism. These are obviously quite progressive periods in which a new class or group gained authority and influence in the cultural life of its country; they were periods in which education, books and reading continued to be supported by state institutions.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“[A]nother characteristic of Old Face [Old Style] is to be noted. All earlier scripts were single alphabet scripts. Only occasionally were larger letters from another script used as initials. Renaissance lettering paves the way for the two-alphabet script. The fact that our present alphabet goes back to two alphabets which date from different periods and are the outcome of different intellectual and technical conditions is essentially one of its drawbacks. The humanistic minuscule was originally a copy of the Carolingian minuscule, the versals a copy of the Roman capitals or Carolingian copies of them. The resulting dualism has never been overcome and is one of the most important formal problems in the entire history of lettering.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983. Title page by Arkadia Trojankew, Moscow, 1972.

“[C]ertain qualities are inherent in all printed material. A sans serif seems cool, austere, objective, sober; . . . display sans serif is more natural and less rational, futura, on the other hand, intellectual and distinguished, Gill sans is harmonious in expression. . . . Bodoni is characterized by its classical harmony, Walbaum by a certain respectability and Didot by esprit. Jenson Roman was and is valued for its distinguished simplicity, noble proportions, readability and strength as one of the most beautiful faces of the Renaissance. Garamond by comparison is attractive through its elegance and lightness, which in Garamond italic is transformed into a delightful gracefulness. Caslon roman is self-assured, self-confident and full of Baroque independence; it is more original than Baskerville which is similar in spirit; Baskerville is however more concerned with beauty and harmony. It is not only the classical types which evoke emotions, modern typefaces can have this effect also.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“With the intention of creating something eccentric, the Tuscan or Toscanienne types were . . . cut first in England. It is characterized by serifs forked in the middle some of them bent outwards in a sickle shape. Competition among the typefoundries was responsible for more and more new variants and so mixtures of Tuscan and Clarendon, Italian, bold Roman and sans serif sprang from an imagination lacking in artistic judgment. Sometimes the top half of the characters of Tuscan was simply joined to the bottom part of an Egyptian the result being a type which might possibly be called curious or interesting, unfortunately often it was just tasteless. . . .
    All the typefaces of the first decades of the 19th century which we have been discussing here, bold roman, Egyptian, Tuscan, sans serif were brought on to the market in many different decorative variations. Light, engraved, plastic, ornamental, shaded and many other variations were invented, mostly without artistic merit.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983. Ornamental versals by Schelter, Leipzig 1847.

“The praises of the discoverer of the ‘black art’ [Johann Gutenberg] continue to be sung right up to the present time. Mark Twain for instance says that the whole world acknowledges without hesitation that Gutenberg’s discovery was the greatest event known to man. . . .
    Goethe said in 1820 . . . : ‘The art of printing is an event from which part two of the history of the world and of art may be dated, and one which is totally different from part one, and therefore we can no longer draw conclusions about the second part from the first.’”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“Of what shall we say that the Beautiful consist? Perhaps of two things in particular: harmony which satisfies the spirit by enabling it to recognize that all individual parts of a work are subordinated to a complete idea; it also consists of proportions which please the eye or rather the imagination, for the imagination contains within itself certain definite ideas or images, and the more that which is perceived coincides with them, the greater the pleasure one takes in it.”

—Giambattista Bodoni, from his Manuale Tipografico; quoted by Albert Kapr in The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“The special feature of Gothic scripts is their verticality and the sense of reaching upwards is revealed most clearly in a comparison with Gothic architecture. Goethe said about this: ‘In its decoration German script is like Gothic buildings which draw the eye upwards and fill us with astonishment and admiration.’ The soaring tendency of Gothic cathedrals was intended to show believers their powerlessness in the face of the world beyond; the dark type surface of texture gives a foretaste of the sacred and the numinous in mysticism.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983. The type is Textura by Johannes Numeister, 1457.

“The distance between word and word should be as wide as an n, but the characters should not be placed together in such a way that the white space between is as large as the distance between the two verticals of the n.”

—Vincentino, 1522, on calligraphic letterspacing; quoted in The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, by Albert Kapr, 1983.

“When reading we perceive lettering as the flight of a bird or the gallop of a horse. We are aware of these as a pleasing graceful phenomenon and do not see the limbs of these animals and their instantaneous positions in time. In lettering it is the complete line which is the most important thing.”

—Peter Behrens, 1902; quoted in The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, by Albert Kapr, 1983.

“The first simple writing tool was the human hand from which all other tools evolved. . . . The hand instructs the eye and the eye in turn corrects the hand which writes. So aesthetic ideas about lettering style grow out of the writing process. Cuneiform was developed by pressing a wedge-shaped reed into clay tablets, Roman capitals were shaped by the spatula and chisel. Papyrus and stylus were replaced by parchment and quill which enabled the clear distinction to be made between hair stokes and heavy strokes which characterizes typefaces in use today. . . . Cast type [printing] slowed down the process of change in the basic letter-forms as literacy spread. . . . Roman lettering became more precise while Black Letter became more lively and masterly. The copperplate technique used for reproducing the writing manuals of the Baroque period encouraged the contrast between thick and thin strokes in roman lettering. . . .
     Copying religious texts was a sacred task and form of prayer for the monks of the Middle Ages; this was expressed in textura with its sacred aura. The serene freethinking of the humanists is reflected in Ranaissance italic. The type designers of the 20th century also had definite aims and aesthetic ideals.”

—Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“Black print on white or cream paper produces the best legibility. Negative type, that is, white type on a black background is 11% slower to read. Glossy, matt and coloured papers (red, green, pink and blue) reduce the legibility. Also lettering printed in different colours—red, green, white and blue print on white or coloured paper is a disadvantage.”

—Albert Kapr, summarizing previous research, The Art of Lettering; The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, 1983.

“Are there people in Paris who consist only of sumptuous dresses, and are there houses that are only portals, and is it true that on summer days the sky over the city is a fleeting blue embellished only by little white clouds glued onto it, all in the shape of hearts?”

—Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle, translated by Tania and James Stern. From Franz Kafka; The Complete Stories, 1971.

“‘“Thank God, moon, you are no longer moon, but perhaps it’s negligent of me to go on calling you so-called moon, moon. Why do your spirits fall when I call you ‘forgotten paper lantern of a strange color’?”’”

—Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle, translated by Tania and James Stern. From Franz Kafka; The Complete Stories, 1971.

“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed to spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would already be gone.”

—Franz Kafka, The Wish to Be a Red Indian, in its entirety, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. From Franz Kafka; The Complete Stories, 1971.

“I was just starting to doze off when something suddenly made me open my eyes again and stare up at the ceiling. I went on scrutinising the ceiling for some time, then sat up on the bed and looked around, the sense of recognition growing stronger by the second. The room I was now in, I realised, was the very room that had served as my bedroom during the two years my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house on the borders of England and Wales. I looked again around the room, then, lowering myself back down, stared once more at the ceiling. It had been recently re-plastered and re-painted, its dimensions had been enlarged, the cornices had been removed, the decorations around the light fitting had been entirely altered. But it was unmistakably the same ceiling I so often stared up at from my narrow creaking bed of those days.”

—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled, 1995.

“Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies. And what’s on next? A show about tornadoes. Who made such a harrowing program schedule full of seemingly random destruction? It was God’s will.”

—Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), 2007.

“Buddhism. Another go-figure religion. ‘Hey, why don’t we all put on robes and sit in a rock garden and just, like, be aware?’ Exactly. That’s the easiest rhetorical question I’ve ever asked.”

—Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), 2007.

“The biggest threat facing America today—next to socialized medicine, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the recumbent bicycle—is Gay Marriage.
    It’s like the Road Coats, Green Peace, and the Yellow Peril combined.
    I call it The Lavender Armageddon.”

—Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), 2007.

“The serifs are sharp and pointed; clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit.” From What font says ‘Change’?, an analysis of the typography of the top U.S. presidential candidates by Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith of The Font Bureau.