Miscellany № 4

As you might have guessed from my articles on the pilcrow, I have rather a soft spot for this particular mark of punctuation. And though I wasn’t brave enough to emulate Eric Gill’s use of the pilcrow to demarcate paragraphs here on Shady Characters, I read with interest about the recent efforts of two separate web developers to civilise the unruly state of paragraphing on the web.

First, Nathan C. Ford writes at length about the online habit of separating paragraphs with blank lines, decrying the disconnected “islands of thought” that result from this practice. Although acknowledging this may be appropriate for certain forms of text — news stories, for example, where each paragraph is dedicated to a separate fact — Ford goes on to practise what he preaches, providing a bookmarklet to instantly convert blank-line paragraphs to the more traditional indented system.

Next, though, I read with glee a tweet by one Justin Stach, who, in reply to Ford’s article, says simply: “I couldn’t resist making a pilcrow version.” Instead of indenting paragraphs, Stach’s “Pilcrow It!” bookmarklet runs them together and separates them with a single, proud red pilcrow. It works brilliantly on the majority of pages at Shady Characters, and I encourage you to give it a try!

On the subject of Eric Gill, John Boardley of I Love Typography mentions an exhibition of Gill’s typography at Tama Art University in Tokyo. If that’s a little far afield for you, the Special Collections department of the Library of the University of Amsterdam is currently showing The printed book: a visual history, an exhibition “devoted to printers’ manuals, illuminating the printing process, and also to type specimens and writing masters’ copybooks, placing letterforms in a broader context.” Neither exhibition, unfortunately, is previewed in detail on their respective websites, but if you can make it, both look to be well worth a visit.

Miscellany № 3

I came across the Twitter feed of a new, UK-based design agency recently, and I couldn’t let them go by without a mention: Interabang founders Adam Giles and Ian McLean have chosen a name close to my heart. I was able to chat with Adam over email about their reasoning, and he was good enough to let me post his words here:

As a graphic designer, the interrobang/interabang has always been on my radar as an unusual moment in the history of punctuation (and typography). When my partner Ian and I set up this company a little over a year ago we spent a long time thinking about a name that would mark us out as different whilst also hinting at the nature of what we do.

Superficially we love the sound of the word interabang, and we also suspected (correctly) it would be a great ice breaker when meeting people — we either get into a conversation about what an interabang is, or (on occasion) people know what one is, and enjoy telling us about how they came across one. This is partly why we don’t feature an actual interabang as part of our identity, as we wanted there to be a level of intrigue and ‘discovery’.

Conceptually we liked the idea of an interabang being two elements coming together to create something new (in the same way that my partner and I came together to start the company). It also suggests questions and answers, reminding us of the problem solving process we engage in as designers.

An 'interabang' iced onto a cake for design agency Interabang UK
An ‘interabang’ iced onto a cake for design agency Interabang UK.

Also, Adam explained their decision to use the less common ‘interabang’, rather than the more usual ‘interrobang’, and summed up neatly the benefits of choosing such an unusual (to non-Shady Characters readers, at least!) word for their name:

Lastly, we chose the alternative spelling as we were concerned that people coming to the word cold, might find it harsh or aggressive (its only one letter away from having ‘terror’ in it!).

As a company name interabang has worked really well for us — if you read the article from design week linked below it’s the first thing mention[ed] about us. We’ve also found that people really engage with it — clients make up all sorts of names for us, and we’ve had a stream of home made/found interabang symbols sent to us. The most recent was iced onto a cake [ed: see above]!

The Design Week profile mentioned above can be found here, and you can read more about the agency at their website. Shady Characters has, of course, already covered the history of the interrobang/interabang at length, and who knows — perhaps some of Interabang’s clients will turn here to learn more about the agency’s namesake.

Also on Shady Characters’ radar is this post at xperimetre (the blog of Philadelphia’s Dark Potion Printing) which proposes a new mark of punctuation called the “affirmation point”, or “checkpoint”. Echoing Hervé Bazin’s pictographic “love point” and “acclamation point”, the checkpoint is oddly compelling. I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary as such, but to my eyes at least the checkpoint lends itself to sensible typographic rendering in a manner quite unlike that other newly created mark of punctuation, the much-maligned SarcMark.

That’s all for this year. I’d like to say thank you to all Shady Characters readers — the site would have been a quiet place without your comments, and the book wouldn’t have been possible at all. Have a great holiday, and see you all again in the new year!

Miscellany № 2

Grammar.net

’s competition for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 has finally, absolutely and completely closed, and Shady Characters has parlayed 8th place into an actual title: “The Best Grammar Blog of 2011 for Punctuation Tips”. Thanks are in order one last time to all those who voted for Shady Characters!

You may remember that Boyd Adamson asked about the origin of the Apple Mac’s ‘⌘’ character in a comment on The Octothorpe, part 2. I wasn’t able to shed a great deal of light on it, but Shady Characters reader Jason Black has since pointed out an excellent article on Susan Kare, the graphic designer who introduced the ‘⌘’ symbol along with much of the rest of the Mac’s now-iconic visual language. Read it here: The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face.

Lastly, if you haven’t already seen it, Jonathan Hoefler’s (of Hoefler & Frere-Jones) excellent presentation of the nuances of web fonts is well worth a look for typophiles and technologists alike. Enjoy!

Miscellany

After a relaxing little interlude, it’s time for me to start on the Shady Characters book in earnest. While I do so, though, some readers have shared links that might be of interest.

On Twitter, Jason Black pointed out Benjamin Milde’s novel site Shapecatcher.com. Draw a letter, mark of punctuation or other symbol with your mouse and Shapecatcher will attempt to identify it from a set of about 10,000 Unicode characters. It’s Shazam for letterforms, and it made a decent fist of my hastily-drawn interrobang.

Over on Google+, Przemek Sakrajda mentions the British Library’s new exhibition on Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, running from 11th November to 13th March next year. I plan to visit if at all possible, but if you (or I) can’t make it, the BL’s Digitised Manuscripts and Gutenberg Bible sites both have plenty of medieval punctuation and typography to appreciate.

And speaking of Google+, Shady Characters finally has a dedicated G+ page. If you’re a Google+ user, add us to a circle to receive updates of new posts!