If you don’t enjoy typography or type geekery discussion, please move along, there’s nothing to see here.
Since the Quills are no more, I am going to spend my “award show tracking energy” to keeping up with the Type Directors Club annual competition. I have to say that I am in 100% agreement with the Superfamily winners this year! Awesome. Though I’m not a fan of the Display category winner, but then display fonts never really rank that high with me. And I am really digging the lowercase ‘y’ of Fondo.
I am, however, going to have to find a way to justify purchasing Tiina, just so I can use the italic face. Mmmmm, mmmm… that is one great slant!
Over the past three years, Reed Business Information has pushed the Quills as publishing’s “Oscar night”, even having the literary award show televised. But today, RBI announced the plug has been pulled on the awards and the broadcast. So now we’ll all just have to rely on things like the Pulitzers, PEN awards, the Man Booker, etc. to tell us who is popular and who is not. Much like Jerome Weeks’ post today spells out.
Also, RBI has announced that they are for sale and looking for a buyer. So I’ll be happy to set-up a PayPal account if we all want to go in together and make an offer! I wonder if there would be much backlash if we moved the company headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama?
Well, today the NY Times ran a piece that tries to balance out the numbers and logic (or illogic) in Jobs’ thinking. I agree with most of the piece, except when they get to the numbers part. For some reason, “the numbers argument” never holds water for me. I mean just because hundreds of millions of books get printed doesn’t mean they’re any good or that people are reading all of them. That just seems like a bad metric. We need to measure the other end of the process.
But I like the thinking here about “reading is not a product”.
