This Monday’s Link Roundup will tickle the fancy of typography geeks. If you’re one who loves fonts, check out A Periodic Table Of Typefaces and 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography.
One of my favorite articles is Memories of Mom’s cooking. For those who are working with or caring for someone with dementia this is a must read.
- What It’s Like To Write A Woman’s Life. “Women’s History Month starts on Thursday. All through March, Tell Me More will dig into inspiring, bold and sometimes disturbing stories of notable women — from Cleopatra to Coco Channel. To launch the biography series, host Michel Martin talks with two essayists about why it’s important to tell women’s stories, and how that storytelling has evolved.”
- Why Memoir Matters. “… memoir can also be looked at as the most literary form of something most of us engage in, actively or passively, most of our lives and even after our deaths. I refer here to what academics call “life writing”…[it] refers to all the forms in which human lives get inscribed or represented, whether public or private, written or graphic, print or electronic, static or interactive. And the forms are constantly evolving and proliferating.”
- Character Witness. “A far cry from staid desk jockeys, biographers regularly court ecstasy, terror and obsession in illuminating their subjects.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
- Memories of Mom’s cooking. “It’s a cold, blustery day and I’m planning to cook a hearty beef stew with the help of my elderly mother. This may not sound remarkable, but it is when you consider she lives several hundred kilometres away in a complex care facility. With advanced vascular dementia, she spends much of her time roaming the halls in her wheelchair, asking the care aides if they’ve seen my father. He passed away two years ago.”
- For Typography Geeks, A Periodic Table Of Typefaces. “USA-based designer Cam Wilde of Squidspot created a Periodic Table for typeface junkies.The ‘Periodic Table of Typefaces’ is “the style of all the thousands of over-sized Period Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world,” according to Wilde. The Periodic Table features 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces of today.”
- How Not To Hurry. “…often we compete by trying to show how busy we are. “I have a thousand projects to do!”, “Oh yeah? I have 10,000!”. The winner is the person who has the most insane schedule, who rushes from one thing to the next with the energy of a hummingbird, because obviously that means he’s the most successful and important. Right? Maybe not.Maybe we’re playing the wrong game—we’ve been conditioned to believe that busier is better, but actually the speed of doing is not as important as what we focus on doing.”
- Book Design: 6 Variations on Drop-Cap Typography. “The tradition in book design of making the first letter in a paragraph larger than the rest of the type goes back pretty far. In fact, it predates printing entirely. This practice started with scribes…Today, this practice survives in the drop capitals we see at the beginning of chapters. But like everything else in book design, it’s best to be guided by the long traditions of bookmaking when deciding how to use them.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged biography, book design, cooking, dementia, family stories, Geeks, How to, memoir, memories, Michel Martin, not rushing, NPR, Periodic Table, recipes, slowing down, storytelling, Tips, typography, Women's History Month, women's stories
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup take a look at Outrageous adverts from the past that would never be allowed today. It’s jaw dropping. Being a Downton Abbey fan, I couldn’t resist The Downton Abbey Guide to Irresistible Narrative Marketing. The article is worth a read for its useful marketing insights. But for personal historians it’s also a good reminder of what we need to aim for in our storytelling.
- Playing Kitchen Detective. “There’s a new obsession at the intersection of genealogy and foodie culture—reconstructing beloved, long-lost family recipes. Fueled by nostalgia and thrift, legions of eaters are returning to the kitchen for some food detective work, searching for the half-remembered dishes they grew up sharing at the family dinner table.”
- A Brief History of Children’s Picture Books and the Art of Visual Storytelling. “In Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling, illustrator Martin Salisbury and children’s literature scholar Morag Styles trace the fascinating evolution of the picturebook as a storytelling medium and a cultural agent, and peer into the future to see where the medium might be going next, with case studies of seminal works, a survey of artistic techniques, and peeks inside the sketchbooks and creative process of prominent illustrators adding dimension to this thoughtful and visually engrossing journey.”
- Little Phone Booth Libraries. “There are 13,659 pay phones on NYC sidewalks, even though there are over 17 million cell phones,” reads a poster designed by New York architect John Locke. Seeing an opportunity for creative reuse and community building, Designboom writes, Locke is turning obsolete phone booths into mini libraries.”
- 30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers. “Forbes has joined a group of 30 clients using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. Here’s more about the program, used in one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”
- Outrageous adverts from the past that would never be allowed today. “They’re incredible by today’s standards, but once upon a time these adverts were perfectly acceptable. From an ad that claims smoking is healthy to one telling mothers they should give Coca-Cola to their babies, these shocking posters give a fascinating insight into a time gone by.”
- A Brief History of The Elements of Style and What Makes It Great. “The book has become a legend in its own right, its story part of our modern creative mythology — but, like a good fairy tale, it brims with more curious, unlikely, even whimsical details than a mere plot summary might suggest. Those are exactly what Mark Garvey, a 20-year publishing veteran and self-professed extreme Elements of Style enthusiast, explores in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged advertisements, children's picture books, computer-generated stories, Designboom, Downton Abbey, Elements of Style, genealogy, history, How to, Marketing, Martin Salisbury, narrative, Narrative Science, nostalgia, phone booth libraries, recipes, storytelling, The Elements of Style, Tips
