Just Your Type
Type, design, writing and other funny stuff
I ended a sentence with a preposition? Oh, crap!
Is it okay to end a sentence with a preposition? How about ending one with five?
The $156 Million Typo
One guy, translating from paper to programming, made a typo—a big fat typo. A $156 million typo.
Glass houses: if you’re going to call out grammar…
Take it from me: if you’re giving advice about spelling and quality, maybe you should spring for a proofreader. This screen shot came from our local TV station…
Font vs typeface: you’re all right
National Public Radio shared an interesting story about the redesigning of Helvetica. By far, Helvetica is used more often than any other face, so why redesign? Technical reasons, mostly to do with changing times. It's a great story, but not for here. Whew, what a...
Is it ketchup or catsup?
Words matter. You want to get it right. So when it comes to ketchup versus catsup, which should you be using? Ketchup. See? See? I can get to the point. But I'm still going to ramble on about all the fun background bits. Like this, from our Department of Repetitive...
How to catch typos
I had to laugh: only one typo in the message, but dang, what an exquisite typo. They misspelled typo.
Is roman type really Roman?
You know what an italic font is. Bold type is simple enough to understand. Bold italic? Easy-peasy. But what if a font isn’t any of those?
Forward vs foreword
As book designers for independent authors, about one in twenty manuscripts we receive starts with a "Forward." That makes sense because at that point it's the only direction you can go in the book, unless you want to read the title page again. The problem is that it...
Underlines for emphasis? How about never.
When you want to say something big — no, big — no, REALLY BIG, BIGGER THAN BIG, THE BIGGEST OF THE BIGS — should you choose italics, ALL CAPS, or underlined text? First, consider none of those. Try letting the text speak for itself, rather than using formatting to...
Should punctuation be included in italics?
This problem came up in a book I was working on recently. The author italicized a lot of words, but didn't include any of his punctuation in the italicization. Put another way, his words were italic, but his punctuation was roman. It left a lot of visual crashes. As a...
Who's this guy?
"Mick" is Michael Campbell, a book designer, graphic artist and writer. His humor column, The Dumpster, closes every issue of Food & Spirits Magazine. Author of Are You Going To Eat That?, and the new 2017 book of seventy hilarious all new essays, Of Mice and Me.A singer songwriter too. New CD My Turn Now is available now!