Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Quiet, relaxed, traditional Garamond seeks attractive serif for flirty, fun, long walks and maybe more. What’s your type(face) quiz by the people at Pentagram. (password is ‘character’)

Illustrator Jessica Hagy has been making these Venn diagrams, tables and charts of various real-world ideas and thoughts. She’s interviewed over at the 99% blog.

From the interview:

There was not a grand plan for world domination via index cards. It was really a mundane set-up: Bored advertising writer reads that “every writer needs a blog” so she steals some office supplies and tosses some ideas into the digital ether, and they’re found and shared.

I actually doodle characters like monsters wearing top hats and dresses or slugs who shoot lasers out of their slimy antennae eyes more than I draw diagrams. The diagrams have become sort of my “thing,” and I like that they have strict confines in which to explore and play. Slugs with weapons: way more open ended.

Over at the Atlantic Wire, Michael Kinsley argues that newspaper articles are too damn long and padded with information. Also, the inverted pyramid is for suckers.

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it. There’s an old joke about the provincial newspaper that reports a nuclear attack on the nation’s largest city under the headline “Local Man Dies in NY Nuclear Holocaust.” Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)

Finally, give your computer desktop or iPhone a New Years makover with one of Kitsune Noir’s wallpapers. This one from Chicago’s Chad Kouri will be gracing my phone soon.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.