Archive for the ‘nerdiness’ tag
The Ascent of the Nerd #
David Brooks again earns my admiration. From his well-executed history of nerdiness:
But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.
They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.
How To Make a Font #
Kris Sowersby’s explanation of how he makes a font is worth seeing. As someone increasingly interested in this kind of stuff, I found it an approachable introduction (that’s not to say that I intend to do it). On every geek’s favorite part of the process:
Everybody talks about it, but unless you’ve actually gone through the process of kerning a typeface then you have no real idea of what is involved. It’s dead boring, but essential! Kerning, put simply, is the art of adding or subtracting space between pairs of letters. This is the very last thing that I do in the design process—everything should be checked and finished before this happens.