Colophon
Typographical
This website uses a few different fonts:
One is Filosofia, designed in 1996 by Zuzana Licko and published by Emigre. I’m a huge fan of Licko’s designs; they feel to me like avatars of an age. I also love the fact that Emigre funded its iconic magazine with the sale of digital fonts: one of the all-time great cross-subsidies.
Another is Trade Gothic Next, a 2008 revision by Akira Kobayashi and Tom Grace of Jackson Burke’s 1947 design. I love fonts of this style, called “grotesque”. It was years ago that I learned the Star Wars opening crawl is set in, of all things, News Gothic; that’s what cracked them open for me.
For headlines, I use Stephen Nixon’s wild Kyrios: “a curious, slightly psychedelic blackletter family”!
Fiction is, when appropriate, presented in my Perfect Edition template, which uses Vollkorn, the “free and healthy typeface for bread and butter use” designed by Friedrich Althausen and provided as a profound public good.
Technical
This website is managed using Middleman, a static site generator that’s simple and flexible and, most importantly, written in Ruby, which is the programming language I know best. My installation of Middleman is hot-rodded with all sorts of conveniences and customizations, including many typographical tune-ups.
I send emails using Mailchimp, which I operate through its API, choreographing messages with a Ruby script that I run on my laptop.
Style guide
I’m noting a few sitewide preferences here, mostly for myself:
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Titles of books, periodicals, movies, etc. in plain text rather than italics.
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When a sentence ends in an italicized phrase followed by extravagant punctuation, italicize the punctuation, too!
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Email, but e-book. Website, but on second reference, site, sometimes. Web page, strangely. Mini-site. Data center. Home page. Home screen. Signup form, but sign up: you sign up with the signup form.
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Multibook project, not multi-book.
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Reread, rewatch, redownload.
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Robo-taxi, I think.
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Coworker, not co-worker.
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Side by side, not side-by-side. Likewise, book by book. Day to day. A theme emerges.
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A couple things, not a couple of things. I think I changed my mind about this one.
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Codename, not code name.
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Penumbraverse, not Penumbra-verse.
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Tiptoeing, not tip-toeing.
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Towards, not toward —
which appears to be my instinct, anyway, so I’m leaving this judgment here to confirm it, next time I wonder about this. -
Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks for complete, standalone sentences; otherwise it goes outside, in the UK style.
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Phrases following a colon are almost never capitalized. Yes, even full sentences: who’s the boss here, anyway?
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Hony soyt qui mal pence, the Gawain spelling.
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Bestseller and bestselling, although of course it is the New York Times Best Sellers list —
note Sellers, rather than Seller. -
Generally, everybody rather than everyone.
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A policy: “the the belongs to me.” Rather than tell you my writing has appeared in The Atlantic, I’d say it has appeared in the Atlantic, clawing the article back from the brand name, claiming it for my own statement.
And finally, I’ll repeat a useful maxim:
October 2024, Oakland