{"id":4912,"date":"2013-09-19T08:10:43","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T16:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4912"},"modified":"2013-09-19T15:55:13","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T23:55:13","slug":"designing-the-big-aha-commas-fonts-and-serifs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/19\/designing-the-big-aha-commas-fonts-and-serifs\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing THE BIG AHA. Commas, Fonts, Serifs."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been working on my books as usual. Rolling right along. Photo of a Santa Cruz roller rink below.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m done with the copy-editing and proofreading for The Big Aha <\/em>, and it\u2019s in good shape. I went through some soul-searching about the serial comma, <\/a>that is, which do I prefer\u201d\u009d \u201cGray fur, yellow teeth and a naked pink tail.\u201d\u009d or \u201cGray fur, yellow teeth, and a naked pink tail.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In principle, I\u2019d prefer always to use the serial comma, as then I don\u2019t have to think about it. But maybe sometimes I leave it out without noticing. So I might use it and not use it in the same document. And copy-editors like uniformity. So the copy editor suggested that I take out <\/em>all the serial commas in The Big Aha.<\/em>. And at first I went along with that, and then, later today, after putting up my first version of this post, I changed my mind.<\/p>\n

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\n[Patio at the legendary Phil\u2019s Fish Market in Moss Landing. We happened to get there at 10 am and it was empty. Had an awesome grilled salmon sandwich.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Backing up a little, yesterday, after I took them all the serial commas out, some of the more complicated lists became hard to read, so then I put serial commas for some of them. Like \u201cThe myoor was shaking, the plants were warbling, and the unborn gubs were cheeping from within the myoor\u2019s flesh.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s considered okay to do that, that is, to generally not use serial commas, but to put them in when it seems really necessary. Not that the readers generally notice either way.<\/p>\n

But then, this afternoon, dammit<\/em>, (and goaded somewhat by my correspondent Mark Dery) I decided I did <\/em>want my serial commas back, all of them, and I put them back in. Fortunately I had a backup version of my original MS and I could find the serial commas by searching for “, and” — I mean that turns up other commas too, but it does show you all the serial ones.<\/p>\n

What writers think about…<\/p>\n

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This photo was taken during a ride along the edge of the percolation salt ponds in the SF Bay near the San Jose Airport. Up at the north end of 1st Street in Alviso above San Jose. I was riding there with my 79-year-old friend Gunnar, who\u2019s generally fitter than I am. The water drains back and forth between the ponds with the tides and you get cool vortices.<\/p>\n

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Anyway, this week I\u2019ve been working on the book design for The Big Aha<\/em>. Picking a font is a process that I\u2019m still getting used to. I didn\u2019t want to use the ubiquitous Times Roman\u2014it\u2019s nice, but I want the book to look not quite so generic. I used Garamond on Turing & Burroughs<\/a><\/em>, and I was pretty happy with that until my cantankerous book dealer friend Gregory Gibson said, \u201cGaramond looks…squatty.\u201d\u009d That is, the vertical strokes, like in a t or an m, are shorter than in some other fonts, and the thick parts, like in the diagonal of an s, are a little fatter than normal.<\/p>\n

Here in realtime, they\u2019re tearing down a nearby neighbor\u2019s house. It sold, and the new owners want more of a mansion on the big lot. It\u2019s kind of sad and wistful to see an old house being shattered. And how easily they\u2019re destroyed! Mortality.<\/p>\n

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Back to the fonts. My friend Michael Blumlein recently published his story collection, What the Doctor Ordered<\/em><\/a>, with Centipede Press. The publisher is labeling it Horror, but I\u2019d put it closer to Literary Fantasy. I wrote an intro for the collection. It\u2019s a really nice-looking book, and I thought the font was cool, so I asked the publisher what he\u2019d used, and he said Electra.<\/p>\n

Now, Electra isn\u2019t one of the more common fonts that you\u2019d find already living on your computer, so I went and bought it online from Linotype.com, it\u2019s like $30 for the regular letters and $30 for the italics, and more if you want the bold faces, or even the \u201cdisplay\u201d\u009d versions that look good when blown up to huge sizes for signs. It\u2019s conceptually interesting to buy a font.<\/p>\n

After setting The Big Aha <\/em>book in Electra, I decided I didn\u2019t like the look of it. A little too spidery, with the letter elements overly thin, so that, at least to my eye, the letters felt a little gray or even broken. Maybe Centipede Press used a different version <\/em>of Electra, I don\u2019t know…but their book does look great.<\/p>\n

Anyway, just to be safe, I went to a classic font that I could find on my computer, Caslon, that is, the Adobe Caslon Pro font. I like this one a lot. For me the idea of a font is that it should feel comfortable and be totally easy to read. <\/p>\n

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I was at a little BoingBoing-organized conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Longtime SF character John Law was there with samples from his Doggie Diner collection. John was an early activist in the Billboard Liberation Front<\/a>\u2014tweaking public signs in meaningful ways.<\/p>\n

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Saw an awesome octopus at the Monterey Bay Aquarium this week. His mouth isn\u2019t open, but it\u2019s the pinhole sphincter opening at the center of the star of tentacles, where they all meet, not that you can make that out in this dim-light iPhone shot. Inside the mouth lurks the dreaded cephalopod beak! I think about those beaks all the time. The ultimate vagina dentata<\/em>. The octopus\u2019s \u201chead\u201d\u009d is a big watery sac, used for breathing and for siphon squirts.<\/p>\n

The actual \u201cbody\u201d\u009d isn\u2019t much bigger than a rabbit, it\u2019s a lump on top of the tentacles, and its hidden in the false head sac. For sex, the male passes the female a spermatophore<\/a> or \u201cnuptial gift,\u201d\u009d a packet of sperm, and she opens it days or weeks later, when she\u2019s ready to lay eggs, in a spot that\u2019s safe and with plenty of food. After the eggs hatch, the mother dies.<\/p>\n

Love, love, love the tentacles. So <\/em>serif. Which leads back to…<\/p>\n

A little more talk about fonts. I can\u2019t believe <\/em>that people ever set a book in a sans-serif font. The serifs\u2014those little blobs and curlicues at the corners of the letters\u2014are such a help to the reader. Like handholds on a rock wall. Two more font bugaboos: using a really small font, and using gray letters instead of black or, even worse, white letters on a gray background. I think sometimes people use small fonts to save paper and cut production costs? Are you kidding me? Like giving a TV dinner to someone in a restaurant. Or a miniscule photo of a sandwich.<\/p>\n

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Dig these sweeping architectural lines at the San Francisco Opera. Love this place. Sylvia and I saw Mefistofele <\/em> there this week. Not the greatest musical score, but a wonderful production, completely over the top. By no means what you\u2019d call \u201csans-serif.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Getting back to my rant about font design\u2014one bad thing that that can happen is, I think, that a book or (more often) a web page might be designed by someone who doesn\u2019t actually read.<\/em>. They want to be different and cool and hardcore and they don\u2019t actually like text. So\u2014they go with 9 point Arial beige type on a brown background.<\/p>\n

When doing a web page, such a person might compound their affront by putting in hard line breaks so the text doesn\u2019t flow into new box-shapes, and they fail to use a screen-size-limited page width, so if you try and enlarge the web page by zooming the view, the text block grows right off the edge of the screen and you have to scroll back and forth like chicken pecking up cracked corn…but you don\u2019t peck for long before you give up on reading the story. And the text-hating designer wins. But, hey, who reads<\/em>, right?<\/p>\n

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Recently Sylvia and I found this amazing huge Richard Serra sculpture behind the Cantor Museum at Stanford. It\u2019s like walking around inside a huge typographic letter, say an S or an 8. Before I experienced them in person, I used to think Serra\u2019s sculptures were dull. Like sans-serif fonts. But when you\u2019re inside one of them, it\u2019s a whole experience. Emotional. Fear, awe, joy, mathematical exaltation.<\/p>\n

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I saw some jellyfish at Monterey too. Sea nettles. Love these guys. Being there reminded me of visiting that aquarium with Bruce Sterling years ago, and we wrote our epic tale, \u201cBig Jelly.\u201d\u009d You can read it free online<\/a>. Readable design…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been working on my books as usual. Rolling right along. Photo of a Santa Cruz roller rink below. I\u2019m done with the copy-editing and proofreading for The Big Aha , and it\u2019s in good shape. I went through some soul-searching about the serial comma, that is, which do I prefer\u201d\u009d \u201cGray fur, yellow teeth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4912"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4919,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4912\/revisions\/4919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}