Typography: It's pretty damn important.

Typography is in everything we read. It's used in everything from billboards, TV commercials, websites, to your pet's bag of food. It's the art of designing type, understanding what looks good and what doesn't, and what looks best when marketing a product or even an idea. In short, typography is everything.

I came across Typophile.com, a community of people obsessed with type. It's got people designing the layouts of multilingual books, beer bottles, and more. It's a place where the term 'nitpicking' doesn't exist, because while it looks like a massive debate about minutiae, it's an intricate discussion about the designs that shape our world.

Since this is my blog and I talk about the things I find interesting, I'm pasting the introductory blog post I made on Typophile as a means of reminding myself to stick with the site. It's probably not very interesting to you that the way a certain letter curves at the end can make or break a design, but it's becoming more fascinating to me. Anyway, at the risk of overlapping what I said over on that site, down to business.

What's up folks. I came across this site recently and decided to jump aboard.

The idea of breaking down a typeface into its most minute aspects used to seem unnecessary. Coming from a web design background, I chose one of the 11 web-safe fonts and pushed ahead. When CSS came along and positioning became a lot more malleable a component of the design process, I began to see type in a different way. More recently, embedding just about any font into a website has become possible through various means including CSS and XML-injected Flash content. That's when I knew I should take this stuff more seriously.

So I'm here to browse conversations, and learn from what appear to be a community of some very learned individuals. I've already seen a few typography books mentioned as must-haves and will be picking them up sooner than later. So my hopes in being a part of this site is that it will become part of my daily routine, and I'll pick up some knowledge I otherwise can't afford to get in a classroom environment.

A couple of those books on my wish list are Otl Aicher's typographie and Joseph Blumenthal's Typographic Years. Knowing many of the greatest type designers did everything by hand, I feel pretty lucky my road to becoming a typographical Zen master is paved with computers.

So the next time you take a look at the name on the side of a building or peruse your grocery store's frozen food section, take a pause and think of how the decision to use that specific font... in that size... in that position, more than likely involved a hell of a lot of hours to come up with.

so I fix computers...

Part of what I do with my many years worth of geek know-how is fix computers. I can build them, take them apart, and pretty much troubleshoot whatever's wrong with them along all segments of the OSI Model. So I may as well make a few extra bucks at it, right?

Large troubleshooting companies such as Geek Squad annoy me because they employ people who truly have no clue what they're doing - they simply run a program called MRI that performs a memory and virus scan. Big deal.

Anyway, here's the print ad I conjured up. The image of the frustrated old man comes from a book of royalty-free images I found laying at the curb of someone's house in Chintatown. One man's trash...

Invaders! Possibly from Space... The Game!

What if life were more like a video game? Well, for any Futurama fans out there - and I know you're out there - some genius by the pseudonym of Shinobi has created a playable version of 'Invaders! Possibly from Space!' from Futurama S3E18: Anthology of Interest II, replete with show clips and Rush's Tom Sawyer! Here's a video:

Download it here. (RAR,17.2MB)

Once you've played it... you can't un-play it!

courtesy: GotFuturama