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roughtype.com

42 pointselehack13 comments

I had this conversation at work last week. Google makes trivial data trivial to find, and yet mildly less trivial questions like "what is a good introductory textbook on typography" result in pages chock full of useless link spam. You struggle to find mention of anything predating 1998, before which a few useful things happened... even by Hal Varian standards.

What does "you struggle to find mention of anything before 1998" mean? Google an event which occurred before 1998 and you'll find plenty of information and analysis, much of which I wouldn't call trivial.

Primary sources for pre-internet events are much harder to find than they are for internet era events. You will find information and analysis about the fall of the Berlin wall, but you won't find the kind of immediate responses that you would for 9/11.

This is a solved problem, but it has been solved by companies that charge for their services.

Ugh, didn't mean to downvote, sorry.

i'm drawing a blank on how to find introductory textbook recommendations faster than google.

i just googled "typography introductory textbook" and found at list one list of 15.

of those the earliest publishing date was 1999, but if something worthwhile happened in the field of typography before then i suspect it will be reposted in newer books. plus reference to any recent issues in typography.

i just googled "typography introductory textbook" and found at list one list of 15.

Are any of those good? Which of them is best? And most interestingly, what list are you looking at, as my Google results are a decent looking Amazon link, an empty Amazon link, a "Personality Quiz", a blog post with a few books, this comment on Hacker News, something on economics, something on typography on the web, et cetera.

Given the results, you could guess that the first link on Amazon might be okay, but this is garbage compared to actual research. At least the random blog post mentions a couple of options, but who is this person, and why is there only one such blog post? This is a really old subject, with lots of material - hiding somewhere.

More importantly, with Google we play keyword bingo. Your search of "typography introductory textbook" returns more authentic results than "typography textbook", which returns publisher links and promotional pages almost exclusively.

tl;dr search engines reframe the types of questions we ask.

And prior to the Internet, the physical limits of information didn't equally determine the types of questions we asked?

but they seem blind to class-related phenomena such as the rapidly growing divide in wealth

It's still true there's have-now and have-laters. This is especially prevalent in technologies. Your smartphone will someday become common in third world countries.

but, in spite of that, all evidence seems to suggest that the divide between rich and poor is getting bigger and bigger.

If the rate of economic growth is increasing, even if the time gap is constant, you would expect that to happen. (Not saying that is what's happening, just wanted to point out that your two statements could be consistent.)

This might be of interest to you: http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

To a point, I agree with PG. It's perfectly ok with me to have superstars getting paid like, well, superstars. I certainly do not want everybody to be equally rich, or, much more likely, equally poor (let's call this "equality of arrival"). But I would like a more equal society at the starting line ("equality at the start"), and not only for reasons of justice, but because a system of haves and have-nots that in fact makes it much harder for the sons and daughters of the latter to make it is also depriving society of people who could make a contribution, and sometimes never get the chance to. As a result, society will end up being poorer. I do not at all think it is by chance, as a counter argument, that countries and societies where women, who make up 50% of the population, are on a more equal standing with men - think Scandinavia, or Holland, or Germany - are also among the richest, not to mention happiest and most peaceful, in the world.

I fail to see what relevance that claim has to the discussion at hand.

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