Books
Finished reading: All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel by Bryn Greenwood 📚 A remarkable book. Challenging, sweet, disturbing, romantic, and heartbreaking. I couldn’t put it down. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Finished reading: Lethal White by Robert Galbraith 📚
Finished reading: Vacationland by John Hodgman 📚
Finished reading: Hamilton: The Revolution 📚
📚_Theory of Bastards_, by Audrey Schulman. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ A book that’s hard to explain. Part love story, part science explainer, part character study, with a pinch of sci-if thrown in. So well written; a book that has stayed with me well after the last page.
Book: Black Jack Justice 📚
If you're a fan of old time radio, film noir, or pulp detective novels, and you don't already know about Decoder Ring Theatre and the Black Jack Justice podcast, well shame on you. Gregg Taylor's audio drama about the adventures of Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective, is as entertaining as they come, full of smart, funny dialog and all the usual murder, intrigue, and action you'd expect from a hard-boiled detective series.
Taylor's new paperback, Black Jack Justice, is the story of how Jack and Trixie first met, and the book won't disappoint either fans of the podcast or the uninitiated reader looking for some good old-fashioned escapist entertainment. Justice is a cracking read; the characters are well-defined, the banter is witty, and the tension ebbs and flows at a pace that keeps the reader engaged throughout. Taylor's writing isn't just an homage to pulp fiction, it shows him as a true peer of the masters of the genre.
(This post originally appeared on The Machine That Goes Ping.)
Book: thinking with type, 2nd Edition 📚
Size, weight, font selection, alignment, grids, spacing, hierarchy... these are tools for conveying information through text. Each tool imparts meaning in its own way, and a basic understanding of each tool's subtleties should be part of each information manager's repertoire.
In thinking with type, 2nd Edition, Ellen Lupton has crafted an excellent introduction to typography, sketching out the history of the art form and packing in a host of practical examples, definitions, rules to embrace and "type crimes" to avoid.
Lupton divides the content of her book into three main sections: Letter, Text, and Grid. In each, she gives some historical background, followed by practical rules for applying each element of typography. For instance, in the Letter section, we learn about the development of metal typefaces and their evolution from shapes that emulated the marks that people naturally made on a page, to shapes that were more clearly machine-produced, to those that were created in response to the constraints of digital displays. Lupton then teaches us how to identify parts of a font, how to think about size and scale, how to mix typefaces and how to work with fonts on a screen.
thinking with type is a very readable book, very well written, and beautifully rendered. I highly recommend it either as an introduction to typography, or as a reference work for the casual designer.
(This post originally appeared on The Machine That Goes Ping.)