David Emery Online
Twenty
This blog turned twenty years old last week, and I have a couple of things to say about that. I had planned to post on the day, but instead I took my children to an aeroplane museum on the west coast of France — we were already in France, just to be clear, we didn’t hop on an EasyJet just to scamper round a hanger of French military paraphernalia. Anyway, there are several things that 22-year-old me would have found surprising about that excuse.
Twenty years is a long time. The second post on this blog was that Adobe was buying Macromedia, which was a big deal at the time and now a distant footnote. The fourth was about the launch of Google Maps in the UK. This blog predates YouTube by about a week. A couple of months after I started blogging, I inadvertently live blogged the 7/7 London terror attacks.
When I started this blog, I was a freelance web designer mostly writing about tech and music. This blog helped me get a job at a record label, which, well, has led to a lot. A lot of those early posts were about Apple, and now that’s...
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How to tell when your art is bad
Good (print) art has to pass these three tests;
The across the room test.
The 2-meters away test.
The up-close test.
If the art is interesting and engaging at all three distances then it has potential to be good art.
I love this, in the most part because trying to apply objective rules to judge “art” is inherently amusing, but also because it’s not, you know, wrong.
Via Russell Davies
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The hardest working font in Manhattan
In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
A beautiful deep dive into a font you have definitely seen, but likely never noticed.
The sheer craft that has gone into this article is remarkable. A reminder of the best that the web can be, and a timely palate cleanser in amongst everything else that is going on right now.
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There are no trains in Texas
Trains.FYI is a real-time map of passenger trains in North America.
Absolutely remarkable to me that when I opened this up, there were no trains at all in Texas. Or New Mexico. Or Nevada. Or Alabama. Or many, many vast stretches of land covering millions upon millions of people.
(Via Kottke)
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The Invisible Man
I begin parking at Walmart in November. The masses flood the lot to shop for the holidays. People drive fast in the lot, as aggressively as they do on the roads, whipping in and out of empty spaces while pedestrians walk in the low fluorescent glow. They make me nervous. People are economically squeezed, the stress of everyday survival and the fear of uncertain futures turning into hostility. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many have no emergency savings—they are one crisis from homelessness. A job loss or an unexpected illness and they are where I am. They are on edge, driving bigger and faster and louder cars—a society speeding along as it disintegrates.
A stunning piece of writing.
Uniquely American, at least in the details, if not the overall situation. A perfect read for the Thanksgiving holiday.
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Writ Small: "Today" by Julie Morstad
“How was your day?” was the first story I ever asked my kid to tell me.
This line hit me as remarkably profound.
And true — you can see the cogs of storytelling slowly start to mesh together as they grow up, narrative and plot appearing out of a steam of consciousness.
Well, when they don’t just say “it was ok”, which is remarkably often.
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Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?
The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.
A beautiful mediation on a concept that has been contained to science fiction for the longest time but, now, is quickly losing the “fiction”. While it is likely that AI and large language models may well take jobs away from people, it seems that philosophers have heady days ahead of them.
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The Inter typeface family
Inter is a workhorse of a typeface carefully crafted & designed for a wide range of applications, from detailed user interfaces to marketing & signage.
A wonderful free, open source typeface, just updated to version 4 with a range of additional alternate glyphs and styles.
So wonderful, in fact, that I’ve just switched it in to replace the default-choice Helvetica on this site. Much better. I particularly like the option that let you switch in slashed zeros—amongst many other little tweaks—to give it a little more character.
(No pun intended.)
Visit ➔What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies—even if the book sucks and demand is weak—and push them as aggressively as possible.
Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.
Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.
Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
—Ted Gioia
There’s a lot of interesting points in this piece, but the overriding theme for me is trust. Trust in the staff to make the right local decisions for their unique market and local conditions, and trust in the audience that they might want something different.
There’s also trust in the very concept of being a bookshop, and a focus on the answer to the question “why might someone go to a bookshop?” The answer, which seems obvious but clearly isn’t, is to buy books. Not to drink coffee, or to buy assorted trinkets, or to chase after a completely unrelated business line in the hope that it might magically bring more customers in.
Focus and trust.
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