On The Importance Of Commas
A grammar guffaw from the nice folks over at vi.sualize.us
Font Humor--Must Have
I wonder, could I wear this at the office?
Arial and Comic Sans versions also available at Not-My-Type.com
Font Humor--Goth Briefs?
From the nice folks over at BuzzFeed.
I recently read about the American pedigree of this early, sans serif font in "Not My Type." I thought it made nice headings. Using it made me feel all nationalistic--you know, "Buy American. We don't need no fancy Swiss fonts."
Now it makes me think of Abby from NCIS.
Mourning A Subversive Breed of Mice
Few things make me feel more self-satisfyingly ensconced among the cultured illuminati than the New York Times Book Review.
And yet even the Book Review has outdone itself this time.
Imagine my joy when, cup of locally roasted, fair trade, freshly ground-and-brewed organic coffee in hand, I turned to the essay by Alexandra Horowitz in the October 9 edition of the Book Review: an essay on Footnotes!
Although one professor has described footnotes as a "subversive breed of mice," the only thing that makes my heart go pitter pat more than a discussion of footnotes is an essay on footnotes in the New York Times Book Review.
Like any good footnote, the Essay makes reference to other works: books by Anthony Grafton and Chuck Zerby detailing the history of the footnote.* It even cites an example of the Mother Of All Footnotes from the "History of Northumberland"--a footnote with footnotes that is said to range on for 165 pages.
I need a moment. . . .
Talk amongst yourselves. . . .
I'm all verklempt.
After the break, a few notes of praise and observation on Alexandra Horowitz's Footnote Essay!
I know! Too good to be true!
Continue Reading...Typography: What's The Big Deal?
Well, I've had a pretty busy fall, but every time I get a few moments and have a few spare brain cells, I've been making my way through Just My Type, the book about fonts that I wrote about some time back.
Written as a series of stories or episodes, the book traces events from the first information age: the explosion of written communication and literacy.
If you think about it, books have gone from rare, one-off works of art to commodities that exist in the 1s and 0s of digital format. During that time:
- Written language shrugged off the necessity of handwritten copies,
- We adopted mechanically formed moveable type,
- We changed the form of that type and created letter shapes that no longer needed to copy the pen strokes of a scribe
- We improved those fonts to make them more beautiful, more legible or more readable
- We moved through different typesetting technologies up to modern word processing where you can make create whole documents that look any way you want with a few clicks of a mouse.
And still I get drafts every day written in double spaced, 12 point Times New Roman.
**Sigh**
I know what you're thinking. Fonts? Typography? What's the big deal? Move on Mr. Gray.
Before you roll your eyes and move to the next blog, take in this quote from the book:
The essence of the New Typography is Clarity. This puts it into opposition to the old typography whose aim was 'beauty' and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. The utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.
That's the big deal: clarity.
This quote was written by Jan Tschichold, the designer of Sabon, a clear and beautiful font.
But the most interesting thing?
It was written in 1928.
Do we have fewer "manifold demands on our attention" now, in 2011? Is clarity any less important?
Don't use accidental typography.
Be clear or be un-read.
Good Books About Small Things
The ability to buy books online means that I am easily parted from my money.
It is a regular occurrence in the office that a package with a smiley face will arrive of an afternoon, and my purchases are so frequent and impulsive that I often cannot anticipate what is inside.
This past week I tweeted about the arrival of this little gem, "Just My Type: A Book About Fonts" by Simon Garfield.
It is about so much more than fonts, as I soon discovered when I spent the first half of the high school football game last Friday with my nose buried in its pages.
Yeah, I can only nominally be called a Texan given my lack of devotion to Friday Night Lights.
The book is an entertaining history of how we got from texts handwritten by scribes, to moveable type that endeavored to look like handwriting, to mechanical type that was designed for clear communication, to digital typefaces.
Included in the yarn was the tale of what might be the worst typo of all time: the "Wicked Bible." Because of a typesetter's error, congregants in the British reformation, who had only recently received scripture in their native tongue, were actually commanded to commit adultery:
We are not immune from such whoppers, just because we no longer set moveable type. A Google search for the worst typos ever yielded this post about other embarrassing moments in publishing history. Spell checker never would have caught most of them.
The recipe undoubtedly called for "ground black pepper," not "ground black people." Likewise, Garrison Keillor's opus does not include "Prairie Ho's"--unless he's gone gangsta without my noticing.
Stay tuned for an upcoming article on how to become a better editor of your own work. Thankfully, as much damage as a bad brief can do, we are unlikely to send a rocket crashing into the sea through misplacing a hyphen.
I'm just a humble appellate lawyer, and writing the King's English is not rocket science. Is it?
Typography: Live And On Tour (Part Deux)
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A hearty thank you to the Dallas Bar Association Appellate Section for inviting Rob Gilbreath and me to wax on about Typography.
The food was great.
The company was even better.
The questions after the presentation were both welcome and interesting. Several stimulated good topics for a future post on the blog, so watch this space and stay tuned for more deep thoughts on not being ugly and unreadable.
As promised, you can find the powerpoint presentation, with its list of outside resources here.
I love discussing, thinking about, and speaking on this topic, so all your comments and thoughts are welcome. It was great putting the presentation together, and I hope I get to present it again really soon.
Typography: Live And On Tour
A little heads up to readers in the Dallas area. The Appellate Record will be on the road, live and in person at the Dallas Bar Association Appellate Law Section on June 16. The seminar will be at the Belo Mansion at high noon.
Robert Gilbreath and I will be presenting a program called "Don't Be Ugly" about how to enhance the persuasive power of your legal writing just through better typography and document design.
- We'll be using actual briefing examples from a number of real cases.
- We'll stack the Microsoft defaults and the briefing rules up against standards of good typography.
- We'll mock Times New Roman.
- We'll joust about footnotes.
It will be nerd-o-riffic. So be there or be square.
Or, squarer.
The Pause That Refreshes :Writing For Screen Readers (Part Deux)
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I am now going to astound and amaze you with some of the best English language writing ever:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honour. God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more. By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; It yearns me not if men my garments wear;Such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive. No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England. God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour As one man more methinks would share from me For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse; We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us.This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.He that outlives this day, and comes safe home Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.' Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Isn't that GREAT??!!! I especially love that "band of brothers" part in the middle.
What? Had a little trouble with it, did you? Just a few lines from a great speech and you mostly skipped over it, huh?
And yet how many times do we inflict a block quote or an unbroken page of our own prose (not as good as the St. Crispin's day speech) on some poor, hapless judge?
In the first post on writing for screen readers, Robert Dubose, author of the book, Legal Writing for the Rewired Brain, gave us counsel about the importance of headings. Today, two more usability tools to give the courts a break, i.e., The pause that refreshes.
Continue Reading...Ask The Typography Guru: Part Deux
So last time we asked Matthew Butterick, author of Typography For Lawyers, about fonts for e-filing.
I mean, logically, if your judge might be screen reading, you should use one of those screen-optimized Microsoft fonts right?
Not exactly. Butterick thinks outside the box, and he knows his tech. He knows that a good font for paper reading is going to look awesome in a pdf, and he knows why.
Rasterizers. It's all about the rasterizers.
More to the point, that screen font is going to look lousy if Judge Paper McFuddy Duddy prints your beautiful e-brief onto dead tree fiber.
But guess what? There's more. After the break we take the Butterick post-graduate seminar in PC, Mac, and rasterizationing.
Continue Reading...Ask The Typography Guru: What To Do About E-Filing?
Oh. Em. Gee. E-filing has finally come to the Texas courts of appeal!
I had heard a rumor and a report that it was here, but then it went away and now it's back again.
It must be true because it says so Don Cruse's Supreme Court of Texas Blog and Todd Smith's Texas Appellate Law Blog.
But this led me to ask myself a question. "Self," I said, "suppose all this e-filing means that courts of appeal will turn into giant computer banks, and all the judges and law clerks rely more on screen reading than on humble and old-fashioned paper? Then what?"
And my self said, "So what. Get a life."
But I persisted. "Should I be using a different type of font for these screen readers than I use for judges who like paper? I mean, I know that fonts like Georgia have been optimized for screen reading. Should I use those?"
And my self answered, "How should I know? I'm not the typography guru. That would be Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers, winner of the award for Awesomest Legal Book Ever. Ask him."
So that's just exactly what I did. After the break is part one of the official Butterick take on fonts for screen reading--and the answer will surprise you. It's something about smart rasterizers.
I didn't even know I had a rasterizer, let alone that it had an IQ.
Continue Reading...Extreme Makeover: Typography Edition--Part C "The Professional"
And now we come to part three in the exercise.
I originally wondered whether one could improve upon a good judicial opinion just by changing the typography.
Then I took a swing at it, making some fairly radical changes in the original Comptroller v. Attorney General written by Chief Justice Jefferson. This was the result
Now we get an idea what kind of changes someone who knows what they're doing would make.
Matthew Butterick, unlike me, has an undergraduate degree and work experience in the area of font design. Part of what set me off on this experiment was reading his new book, Typography for Lawyers, which is both useful and entertaining. It has reference-type sections that set out the rules and conventions of good typography, as well as historical and entertaining yarns about how we got where we are and why there is almost no escaping Times New Roman font.
In my view, every lawyer who writes enough to own the Bluebook needs a copy of this book too. (All the cool kids have one).
So when I decided I would try my hand at redesigning an opinion, I e-mailed Butterick to see if he would have a go. He consented. After the jump, you get Comptroller v. Attorney General both before and after Butterick.
Continue Reading...Extreme Makeover: Typography Edition--Part Deux, "The Golden Ratio"
When last we met, I threw out the question of how you might make a well-written opinion even more readable by changing only the typography. You had some great comments, many of which I had already been incorporating and several of which made me think even further.
Some of the guiding principles were that double spaced 12 point newspaper fonts are not as readable as smaller book fonts on shorter lines and line spacing in proportion to the font size.
But maybe more to the point, we don't create documents on typewriters any more. There is no need to restrict ourselves to documents that look like undergraduate term papers.
But now it is time for the first big reveal.
After the jump, we’ll see if an amateur trouble maker can make Chuck Norris--I mean Chief Justice Jefferson--more readable by changing only the court's typographic choices.
Continue Reading...
Extreme Makeover: Typography Edition
You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim
(Jim Croce)
Some of you readers will recall that we have had occasion to compare Texas' Chief Justice Jefferson to Chuck Norris. Just like one ought not tug on Superman's cape, a wise man would not tweak Chuck Norris' beard.
But no one has ever accused the Appellate Record of being wise. So we decided to take one of Chief Justice Jefferson's recent opinions and put it through an extreme typographical makeover. After the jump, you'll find out why.
Continue Reading...
Cliffhanger: More On The Font That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Professor Peter Friedman from Case Western Reserve University Law School, while liking my last Nerdlaw post, thought it a bit of a "cliffhanger."
After saying what font not to use, I did not go on to say what font should be used.
Who knew that fonts could be so thrilling?
Don't worry, The Appellate Record's official font recommendations are coming. But in the mean time, think of this as the Dickensian novel in serialized form.
Besides, Times New Roman is just too awful to resist another post on the Font That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
And prepare yourself, gentle reader. I am about to turn you on to nerdiana about fonts and typography of the highest order.
Meet Matthew Butterick, lawyer and Font Jedi -- a bona fide Harvard educated graphic designer. His website, Typography for Lawyers (where you can preorder a copy of his upcoming book by the same name) is my new document design happy place.
**Hat tip to Jason Wilson, the publisher, who commented on the first Nerdlaws post for pointing me to the resource.
In addition to providing an expert's recommendation on fonts and a link to the Seventh Circuit's recommendation on typography, Butterick provides the history of Times New Roman and how it became so ubiquitous.
Times has been with us since 1932, when the Times of London (the newspaper) hired font designer Stanley Morison to create a new text font, which was based on historical Dutch designs. Because the font was being used in a prominent daily paper, it quickly became very popular when it was released for general commercial use the following year.
* * *
As font technology has evolved—from lead type, to photo typesetting, to digital—Times has been one of the first fonts available in each new format, for the sake of backward compatibility. But this first-mover advantage in each format has only solidified Times’s hegemony as the ultimate default font.
Though much more qualified than I am, Butterick agrees, "If you have a choice about whether to use Times, please stop."
Given its position as the ultimate default font, the appearance of Times in a book, document, or advertisement connotes a certain apathy—it says “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times is to gaze into the void.
But don't despair. The spine tingling font suspense will not (can not) go on much longer. Next in the Nerdlaws series: Thou shalt use the right font. Then you can feel the magic for yourself.
Nerdlaw: Thou shalt not defile thy briefs with Microsoft's default settings
(An homage to the Radio Shack commercials with Lance Armstrong and his clueless assistant, Alphonse)
Me: (on my bike trainer in my office, of course) ALPHONSE!
Alphonse: Yes, Kendall.
Me: Why do people write using Microsoft Word's default settings?
Alphonse: They don't think--
Me: --That's RIGHT. They DON'T think. These are the guys who brought us Microsoft Vista and the Blue Screen of Death. Why would you ever let them decide how your brief looks?
Me: (continued) Computers can do all kinds of fonts and desktop publishing functions. We don't use the IBM Selectric any more.
More Me: From now on, we're all going to stop acting like cattle. Instead of going with the herd, we're all going to think for ourselves and make informed and aesthetic choices about what our documents ought to look like.
After the jump, more on default settings, Bill Gates, Judge Easterbrook, and the font that dare not speak its name.
Continue Reading...This Day In Legal History: Of Governments And Hammers
Tomorrow is September 25. So what, you ask?
Only three more months to finish that Christmas shopping and get all the holiday cards addressed and signed.
Actually, September 25 provides a more interesting confluence of events.
On that date 221 years ago, the First Congress of the United States of America proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution. Uncharacteristically for Congress, the legislative product got shorter as it went along.
Seventeen amendments were trimmed to 12 in the Senate, of which 10 were ratified by three quarters of the states.
Yes--those 10. The Bill of Rights--a document originally intended to create a "fed free" zone of liberty with words like, “Congress shall make no law . . . .”
(**An 11th, now known as the 27th Amendment prohibiting a Congress from raising its own pay, was finally ratified in 1992--hat tip to Judge Brister**)
Astounding by modern standards that Congress would ever draft a sentence beginning with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” But they did, because folks believed that the new federal government was a potential threat to liberty if its power were not expressly limited.
But there’s some irony here too because sometimes a strong federal government is the only effective guarantor of liberty. On this same date 53 years ago, federal power enabled the Little Rock Nine to finally enter Central High School.
Interesting that the local public schools in Little Rock developed their own desegregation plan even before Brown v. Board of Education--liberty not being the sole province of the federal government. Yet, the local government did not have the horsepower to carry it out all by itself.
Before the Little Rock Nine could finally start school, it took the orders of Federal District Judge Ronald Davies enforcing the plan. It also took President Eisenhower nationalizing the Arkansas National Guard--a body which had been used only days earlier by Arkansas’ governor to frustrate desegregation.
So, maybe government, especially a powerful, central government is bad.
Except when it is good.
Or perhaps its not as simple as a stump speech. Maybe government is like a hammer, a tool which is equally capable of smashing windows or sculpting marble, depending upon who holds it and how it is handled.
That May Be A $500 Bow Tie I'm Wearing
I will admit it. My sense of style is not for everyone. Atypical. Iconoclastic. Nerdy. Or just bad. I would accept any of those words as accurate descriptors.
But as I sit here in my Brooks Brothers seersucker suit and my Brooks Brothers regimental stripe bow tie, I am torn between feeling the outrage of a genetically predisposed defense lawyer and disappointment that my ship came in and I simply missed it. I was alerted to my lost opportunity by stories in the ABA Law Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Law360 and Reuters.
You see, my natty bow tie is fitted with the Adjustolox mechanism, allowing me to adjust a "one size" bow tie to fit my scrawny neck without the slippage that occurs with inferior mechanisms. Naturally, such a useful and novel invention as the Adjustolox mechanism is patented.
Or, was patented. You see, the patents expired in 1954 and 1955.
Which was also probably the last time that large numbers of men dressed like I do.
Alas for my beloved Brooks Brothers, because a bow-tie-wearing patent lawyer purchased some bow ties still marked with the expired patent numbers. He brought a "false marking" claim against the glorious font of men's business style.
Apparently the very future of The Republic is placed at risk if one wrongly claims a patent for the Adjustolox. Presumably the market is being improperly excluded from the useful arts and sciences of bow tie adjusting technology. As a result the feds can fine you $500 for each Adjustolox you sell with expired patent numbers--if you do so for the purpose of deceiving the public. See 35 U.S.C. § 292.
Let's see:
$500 x [gajillion ties sold] = No longer practicing law to earn a living.
If, however, you sell falsely labeled Adjustoloxae simply because no one has looked at a bow tie since 1955, it's all good.
But you still have to prevail against Raymond E. Stauffer, the bow-tie-festooned patent lawyer, because 35 U.S.C. § 292 allows "any person" to seek a $500-per-Adjustolox penalty and share 50% of the take with the gubmint.
That was the ruling in Stauffer v. Brooks Brothers, Inc., released Tuesday by the Federal Circuit. Congress can create its own "injury in fact" -- a statutory violation -- and then essentially deputize "any person" to pursue collection for that injury.
Of course, the Federal Circuit was not asked to rule upon the wisdom of such a statute. That is the purview of Congress alone. If it were otherwise, little that Congress commits to writing would survive.
But who knew that my retro wardrobe could be such a source of potential riches? No telling what revenue I could garner from investigating the patents on other aspects of my geezer lifestyle. No telling what else that I prize is marked with patents that expired 50 years ago.
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