Links for 2005-04-30

Tom, is it really the new black? If you want to strip your blog down to just text, then why don’t you just publish an rss feed and scrap plasticbag.org?
Either you embrace typography, or you don’t – living in a halfway-house pretending to be one thing or another doesn’t work. Be just text, or be something else.
As you said yourself, a weblog is an extension of self, and what makes it more than an RSS feed is the personality that you stamp on it in the way that it looks. Obviously, I don’t know you, so I can’t say whether one aesthetic is more you than another – but what you’re trying to do at the moment, I don’t think works

Well hang on a minute – if you look inside any novel you’ll see page after page of very simple layout and easy to read text. There is typographic work there in making it easy to read and appropriate to the content. That every page of a novel isn’t brightly coloured with thousands of indents and text-sizes is intentional – it’s designed to meet a need and to do it simply and elegantly. That’s what I’m trying to do here. If you don’t like it, then that’s fine. If you have typographical issues with what I’ve done, then you can point those out too and I will listen and nuance and adjust it if I agree with you. If you don’t think it represents my character or personality enough or correctly then I’m prepared to have that discussion too. But arguing that a stripped back aesthetic isn’t design and that only lush and complex uses of text constitutes typography is clearly balls.