ON MY SEVERAL BAD TYPOGRAPHICAL HABITS
Like you, I have several bad habits. Now that I’m on the internet, these habits will stick out like a sore thumb on Thursday after the washing was set out to dry. Doesn’t anybody ever worry about getting bugs in their clean laundry? Bugs love to come out on Thursday the Laundry Day. This is just asking for trouble. My laundry is done in an unfinished basement and I still worry about bugs. How do you people do it?
Of my several bad habits, a couple relate to Personal Typographical Choices. The first was putting end marks inside parentheses. (Like this one. I believe our postmodern culture has done with this issue, but I don’t know, I haven’t asked Postmodern Culture its opinion.)
 |
| Uppercase Art by the author |
The second was my tendency to capitalize Things which ought not to be capitalized. I can’t help it. I use typography to communicate things, and by utilizing the Uppercase Letter when I feel the need to, I’m communicating something. What exactly I’m communicating is of arguable value, but I’m writing out loud and sometimes I need a Capital Letter to modulate my voice. An uppercase letter is the microexpression twitch that gives the game away. (You microexpression twitchers will know what I’m talking about. End stop.)
A SIDE EFFECT OF ONE BAD HABIT IN PARTICULAR
An interesting side effect of this tendency was that as I worked on my Big Secret Aesthetics Project, I began to notice that I was consistently using “art” and “Art” as two different words. I used the former as a catch-all term: all creative output. The latter was reserved for art that had successfully (in my extremely fallible opinion) gone through several stages of life with me (see below) as well as for the General Sphere of Art. Some might consider the “lowercase” art designation to be an insult, but I don’t think it is. Not even the Old Masters create masterpieces 100% of the time. Sometimes they just make art. Shitty shitty art. (Rembrandt’s drawings, anyone?)
THE STAGES A WORK GOES THROUGH TO BECOME UPPERCASE
1. It catches my attention
2. It retains my attention
3. It reappears in my attention unbidden
NB: I do not consider the previous 3 items in the list to be value judgements since in my little world, any sustained attention is a good thing.
{ 0 comments... read them below or add one }
Post a Comment