Word art

I've talked about words as art: as lovely fiction, as lyrics in a song. Here are words used in other artistic ways that I really like.

• Artsy fartsy: I'm excited to go see the Belle Lettres exhibit at Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis. 
• Conscript: I love this project Takeluma: a sound-symbolic, phonetic alphabet that can scrawl your words in a wall almost in real time. #nerdalert but also a neato installation.
• DIY: Worldle makes word clouds so you can make art. Here's what this blog looks like:
  
• Upcycled art: I'm sure you've seen these book autopsies by now. And of course there's the Fuck Yeah, Book Arts! Tumblr.
• Web design: I very much enjoyed these pretty slides on how to use @font-face and CSS3 to create "classic" typographical looks. (I guess I really like guys who are into typography because I have an internet crush on Sean McBride (@smcbride). #dreamboat)

• Letters: Good news. van Gogh's unabridged and annotated letters are available online. 

It may well seem to you that the sun is shining more brightly and that everything has taken on a new charm. That, at any rate, is the inevitable consequence of true love, I believe, and it is a wonderful thing.

21-28 March 1883 to Theo van Gogh 

Do yourself a favor and write someone a letter today. I wrote three!

Linkfest [1]

A collection of language-related things that caught my attention last week:

• Idiomizer 
• Here you can find an idiom and see its equivalent in other languages. "Deaf as a post" is 
• "deaf as a wall" in Spanish, 
• "deaf as a pot" in French, 
• "deaf as a bell" in Italian, and 
• "deaf as a quail" or "deaf as a stick" in Dutch.
• The Trouble with EM & EN (and Other Shady Characters) on the web
• Em-dash vs. en-dash: everyone should know when to use which. Doesn't mean I will.
• NASA's Handbook for Technical Writers & Editors
• I really liked reading this. #nerdalert #squee
• How NPR Became a Hotbed for Female Journalists
• Journalism is wordy, right? Check this:

... with only a few exceptions, male bylines outnumbered women’s by three to one. At NPR, meanwhile, women hold the top editorial position at five of the seven news programs, and make up nearly half the overall staff.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Implicature 
• I've been thinking a lot about Grice's Maxims lately, and this is a great intro/refresher. 

Typography 101

This lovely thing is Malika Favre's Pin-Up Alphabet made for Wallpaper for their Sex & Art issue. It makes this post about typography look like a sexy post about typography.

I stare at documents at work all day thinking murderous thoughts about the people who made them. (You send a tab table to be translated into 26 languages? Really? Don't have your administrative assistant do your DTP for a 300 page IFU in Word, for Pete's sake. Poor thing probably had to write the darn thing too.) 

So my interest in typography has been newly rekindled recently. I don't know what exactly I'm going to do with all of this newly acquired typographical knowledge, but it'll probably come after my next conlang attempt.

Here's a list linking to the best of the best stuff I've found so far.

• Typography Deconstructed: A comprehensive guide to the anatomy of type
• Pretty guide to the words you need to know to talk about typography
• A quick introduction to letterform anatomy & typography basics
• Snazzy guide to font classes and forms
• The Elements of Typographical Style Applied to the Web
• Bringhurst's classic in the context of CSS

• Five simple steps to better typography
• If the image above gets you hot... email me. I mean, you'll really like this series of articles.
• On web design/typography, Rethinking CSS Grids was a good read too. 
• Thinking with Type
• Lovely explanations re: everything typographical. Call-outs make my heart sing.
• A List Apart: Typography
• Web typography articles.
• This article on modular typography using the golden ratio gives me shivers. And here's Tim Brown's related talk at Build Conference. ... I have a crush on him.

Finally, here's a well-curated Twitter list about typography.