Nuggetty Goodness

Great design resource covering the basics of typography, with a strong focus on practicality and readability. Although written (as shown) for lawyers, it's relevant to anyone who creates/handles/processes high volumes of 'boring' documents over the course of a work day, since its main aim is to make sure your Boring Documents are as painless (and perhaps even pleasant) to read as possible.

Sample stuff - lots more goodies where it came from!

Good typography is measured on a utilitarian yardstick. Typography that is aesthetically pleasant, but that doesn’t reinforce the goals of the text, is a failure. Typography that reinforces the goals of the text, even if aestheti­cally unpleasant, is a success.

Now that particular paragraph is something I wish more of the baby designers I've dealt with understood.

Let’s construe the notion of “virtual economy” quite broadly: If you receive an experience by yourself through a machine that runs on digital technology, without doing or buying anything physical (other than press a few buttons), it’s virtual. To download a song and listen to it on your iPod is virtual; to go to a concert is real, to buy a CD and play it is real, to play your own instrument is real. The difference I want to highlight is in the physical nature of the economic transaction. The virtual transaction does not require the movement or alteration of anything physical. Not even physical money changes hands. The real transaction involves material being created, moved, consumed, all by human hands.

Using these concepts, there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway (as I argued in my second book) but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. In support, here’s a series of random judgments about the state of the real world.

TV viewing is down among 18-34 year old males, and movie attendance is flat. Meanwhile, more and more time is being spent online or playing videogames. If you want to get 80 hours of fun watching movies, you need $1000. You can get the same fun from a game for $50. Spending time online or playing videogames simply involves less expenditure in the real economy.

Human eyeballs see a lot fewer ads than they used to. As noted, some people are watching less TV. For most others, the TV they’re watching is increasingly DVR’d or Hulu’d, that is, stripped of ad content. On the internet, we avoid ads easily – they are usually in the periphery, and if not we can click them away, or surf to something else. Advertisers have made an industry on the presumption that ads make people buy things. If they are right, it follows that fewer ads would result in us buying less. Ads are less and less a part of our daily experience. HBO’s success with a show about evil advertisers is perhaps apt now, because we feel we finally have gotten the upper hand on these miscreants. The net result of our power over advertisers, according to their own model, would be a weakness in general real-world consumption.

Facebook is a great way for people to connect. In some FB games, you can buy someone else a beer. You can poke them, write on their wall, friend them. None of this causes anything in the real world to be moved or changed. There are 500m people on FB, hundreds of millions more on other, similar social networking sites. If you’re friending people on FB, you’re ever so slightly less likely to be sending them a real Hallmark card, ever so slightly less likely to write them a note on paper, ever so slightly less likely to give them a call. That’s probably not going to turn around, either. Our ability to socialize online puts a crimp in our general need to move stuff or change stuff in the real world.

People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.

One could go on. It is possible, slightly, that there’s a general weakness in consumer spending simply because, to get our social, emotional, informational, and needs met, we just need fewer movies, fewer beers, fewer trips, fewer shoes, fewer things in general. What if the world of human beings suddenly became converted to the idea of consuming less stuff? Why, there’d be a recession, of course. Less buying means fewer jobs and less investment, which means economic contraction. It would mean a general pessimism about the prospects of business.

Really interesting and balanced post on how the move to virtual goods and services is influencing economies, complete with a highly intelligent (and answered!) comments section.

One of the things that makes it so convincing is that Castronova isn't running around splooting blood like a headless chicken (!the sky is falling!), but rather emphasizing how little things can add up.

Unfortunately, due to restrictions on the importation of mythical processed meatstuff, we are unable to bring you Canned Unicorn Meat in the way the Sisters of Radiant Farms intended. When you open your can, you will find one tiny unicorn which has been appropriately sliced into its main cuts of meat. Simply use your Growth Ray to re-embiggen the unicorn before skinning it and processing its flesh. Or if you're lazy, just bring it to your local Mad Scientist-Butcher. He'll know what to do.

ThinkGeek has some of the best marketing copywriting around. Of course, the target audience also helps, but it does make me wish that over half my clients weren't in love with Corporatese.

Corporatese, pointlessly boring to read, and even more boringly pointless to write.

Ze nuggeet got 18/20 correct. >.> <.<

Apparently, because I am an Untrusting Golden Battered Nugget, I deemed two people fake, who were actually genuine! Ohnoes!

Of course, it's probably a slightly unfair comparison, considering I am a sketcher of people, but still. *preen* *madgiggles*

The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded. In exposing us to prose of the highest level, it encourages us to think in a way that isn't merely "better" but is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive. It makes us less boring, and less bore-able.

The poll is silly, but the quote is great. =)

When people ask me why I read, I tend to say that I read for entertainment - which isn't untrue. But entertainment encompasses so many things that the statement as interpreted might as well be. Learning is entertainment. Pleasure is entertainment. Seeing through new eyes is entertainment. Discovery is entertainment.

And this quote, well, it's a far more accurate answer than, 'I read for entertainment'.