This is a big moment for you. For a long time, you’ve stood in the margins, watching friends and coworkers play a mysterious game with their words—but no longer. You’ve decided you’re ready to start caring what your language looks like. It would be so easy to brush this off and act like it’s no big thing, but deep down, you know it took guts getting to this point. And for that, you deserve to let a little pride drip out of your inner tap. So go ahead and indulge yourself a little. You’ve earned it.

However, it’s also important to appreciate the gravity of the situation you’re in. Maybe you thought choosing a font was as simple as picking out a pair of socks. If that were the case, you failed to appreciate just how badly this could go for you. You’re about to enter a minefield, littered with the carcasses of past font choices gone wrong. People are going to be talking about this for a long time, and you’re either going to be a raging success or the flop that people, whispering, point out in the supermarket aisle. I wish it weren’t too late to convince you to abandon this decision, but now that you know it exists there’s no turning back.

The first thing you need to figure out is where you stand in the perennial dispute between serif and sans serif. This is your Montague-Capulet kind of situation, only where Romeo and Juliet are pretending to be into each other so they can one day poison the other person’s whole family. It is here where humanity parts into two ideologically opposed groups. Underlying this conflict is a history far too complex to explain before you make your decision, so you just need to ask yourself: would you rather wear a black turtleneck or an decorative neck scarf? This will tell you on which side of the conflict you land.

Next, you’ll want to consider serious things like aesthetics, audience, mood, legibility—blah, blah, blah. Look, it’s mostly a gut thing and remember, it was your guts that got you to this point, so don’t be afraid to trust them. Really, making the right call is mostly about avoiding the wrong ones. Here are some of the biggies:

– Avoid trite correlations, e.g. don’t choose Gotham just because you’re writing Batman fan-fiction and or wearing Batman pajamas.

– Certain fonts like Comic Sans and Papyrus have become the lepers of typography. Try not to touch them.*

– Like the popular kids at school, some fonts lose their style after a few years. Don’t let fashion intrude on your decision-making.

Let’s not sugarcoat it; this is huge decision and one that you haven’t come to lightly. But don’t worry, you’re only risking a life sentence of passive-aggressive judgment from your peers. So, relax. You’re going to be fine, just fine.

Get choosing.

*One precarious option I wouldn’t recommend to a first-timer like yourself—but that is still worth mentioning—is using your font choice to make an ironic comment on the popular tastes and distastes of a society. This might include choosing to use Comic Sans on the program for a design lecture, or branding your company as a pastiche of a certain font which, through historical overuse, has become the subject of insults and ridicule. Again, this is only for the advanced.

posted by: Andrew  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

Over at Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson offers an impressive—and, to be honest, convicting—defense of liking stupid things. “Not everything that exists in the time of Donald Trump has to be a metaphor for Donald Trump,” he writes, “and not every silly trinket produced by capitalism is evidence of our decline in intellectual vigor.”

He’s talking about recent criticism of the fidget spinner. And he’s just getting started:

“I’m particularly irritated by this kind of cultural criticism because it embodies one of the most unfortunate tendencies in left-ish political thinking: the need to spoil everybody’s fun by finding some kind of problem with everything. There is enough serious human misery in the world for the left to point out; there’s no need to problematize the fidget spinner as well.”

Then there’s this:

“Fun is important, and sometimes people have fun by playing tiddlywinks or spinning a top or finding one of the myriad of other trivial diversions that keep us from having to face the full horror of our mortal existence.”

Robinson’s piece is a necessary corrective to the spate of finger-wagging we’re seeing lately. You should read the entire thing. Right now.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and proclaim that this could very well be the coolest public sculpture project ever:

Of course, since it’s in Denmark, CK won’t let me report on the story on location—which means I have to make said proclamation based on the website and accompanying video. So, you know, caveat emptor and all that. But still…

(Hat tip: Courtney Sowards, who manages to find the most interesting things on the Internet. All on her own time, of course.)

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

This explains why I’m easily the friendliest, kindest, and most thoughtful and empathetic person at helveticka world headquarters.

Ugh: “People want to be able to curate their own content. People want to be engaged in the creation of it.”

Thomas Pynchon turns 80 today. Ted Gioia reflects on Pynchon’s masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow.

“To celebrate National Burger Month, from May 3 to May 24, aspiring poets can tag Whataburger on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with short poems (remember, poetry is compression) up to 70 words that convey their enthusiasm. In return, aspiring bards have the chance to win free Whataburger for a year and a $500 Ticketmaster gift card.”

The final word on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

This story is all kinds of stupid. But rather than delve into politics, let’s instead focus on that awful word in the second-to-last paragraph: disincentivize.

So…what the heck? Whatever happened to discourage? Or dissuade? Or deter? (“These are words with a little D this time.”) Do we really need such a monstrosity as disincentivize?

Neither my 1993 edition of the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary nor my 2000 American Heritage Dictionary has an entry for it. Both, however, have one for disincentive. The former defines it as “a source of discouragement, esp. in an economic or commercial matter”; the latter as “something that prevents or discourages action; a deterrent.” Meanwhile, the only instance in which disincentive appears in my thesaurus (Bartlett’s Roget’s, 1996), is as a synonym for deterrence.

Of course, the armies of “progress” march unabated. Witness dictionary.com, which defines disincentivize as “to discourage or deter by removing incentives.” But isn’t that at least a little redundant? I mean, the very act of discouragement is, be definition, removing an incentive, right?

So, basically, we’ve created a word that we didn’t need. And a damn ugly word to boot.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

In One Day in the Life of the English Language: A Microcosmic Usage Handbook (Princeton University Press, 2015), Frank L. Cioffi offers some sage advice: “Strive for sentences that don’t require your reader to reread to get the message, that don’t spark initial confusion at all.”

Just last week, I’d written something that made perfect sense to me yet caused a couple of folks at helveticka world headquarters to stumble. While it depends on the reader, of course, that’s an ominous sign—since clarity should be your first goal as a writer—and a pretty good indication that you might want to rework that sentence.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

If you’re someone who thinks that the very existence of President Donald J. Trump is proof of the coming apocalypse, may I point out that Nordstrom is selling pre-stained men’s jeans?

Seriously. Check out the description:

“Heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.”

As if that weren’t stupid enough, they’re asking $425. Per pair.

So who do you reckon would buy these? Someone who actually is afraid to “get down and dirty,” obviously—since a $5 pair of thrift-store denim and 10 minutes of real “hard-working action” is how jeans normally become “heavily distressed.”

Then of course, there are the poseurs. You know, the guys who dress like lumberjacks yet lack the upper body strength to lift a framing hammer, let alone a 12-pound splitting maul. Not to get all psychoanalytical, but there seems to an awful lot of blue-collar fetishizing going on these days.

Or maybe it’s just that Nordstrom is run by evil geniuses who understand the company’s audience: people with more money than sense.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Over at The Atlantic, Adam Chandler describes the scene at a Billy Joel concert:

A mother tries to cajole her reluctant young son to twist with her to “Only the Good Die Young.” A 45-year-old man in a Billy Joel-themed softball jersey, sitting third row and visible to all, hoists aloft a New Jersey vanity license plate that reads “Joel FN” and uses it to air-drum to “Pressure.” Three 20-somethings on a ladies’ night out shoot a Boomerang of themselves swaying to “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” A sexagenarian in business attire uses a lull during Joel’s Perestroika-era ditty “Leningrad” to crush some work emails on his BlackBerry Priv. A 19,000-strong congregation—carpenter jeans and Cartier watches, Yankee caps and yarmulkes, generationally diffuse and racially homogenous—all dance, terribly and euphorically, to “Uptown Girl.”

I was, for a time, a professional musician. My first paid writing gig was as a music critic. So you can imagine how insufferably arrogant and condescending I can be whenever the topic of music comes up. And when it concerns the relative merits of overrated pop stars, well…I can be a real ass. (I’m working on it. I swear.)

What’s my point? Just that Chandler has me re-thinking—and questioning—my visceral dislike of Billy Joel. Check this out:

What helps explain Billy Joel’s recent feats (and makes them all the more impressive) is the fact that he has managed to become a commercial juggernaut in two different eras of the music industry; first, when record sales determined everything and later, as tour earnings supplanted sales as the biggest lever of an artist’s financial success.…[O]f Joel’s 121 recorded songs over a quarter of them (33!) became Top 40 hits. Billy Joel has, believe it or not, sold more records in the United States than either Michael Jackson or Madonna.

He’s also sold out Madison Square Garden 40 times since 2014, despite the fact that he hasn’t released a new pop album in 24 years. Now, popularity is certainly not an indicator of talent or ability; nor is it a bellwether of musical or historical significance. But Joel shouldn’t be dismissed simply because he’s popular, either. Something’s going on here.

As for me, while I can’t exactly commit to buying any of his albums any time soon, I can try to not change channels the next time a Billy Joel song comes on the radio. Heck, I might even actually listen to it. Just…don’t tell anyone, mmmkay?

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment