Almost half a century has passed since Watergate first entered public consciousness. The name quickly became synonymous with political scandal and has since spawned a spate of ‘-gate’ suffixes for anything from minor parish council peccadillos to serious breaches of […]
Author: John MacDonald
General Manager of TriMedia Middle East and Reportage and corporate authorship specialist
Don’t judge a book by its cover – just take a close look at its face.
Hard to believe now, but there was a time when books were all written by hand, came in large and bulky volumes available only to the very few – and very rich. Imagine monks seated in their ‘scriptorium’, hunched over […]
Typeface of the week – Baskerville
For many people, the first reaction to Baskerville will be Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, probably the great detective’s most famous adventure. That was first published in 1902 and the Baskerville typeface dates from the mid-1700s and […]
No man will tether time nor tide, literally speaking.
Promise you! I’m literally going to cut my throat if I see that word again. Oh dear, I just have, Excuse me while I go and look for my grandpa’s cut-throat razor… Fortunately, I couldn’t find it and I’m still […]
Typeface of the week – Univers
Univers lives up to its name – it’s universal, probably the most used typeface in the world. The popularity is largely because it’s so bland, characterless, and inoffensive that it can safely be used for anything from baby food to […]
If one picture = 1,000 words, how many does a movie need?
Imagine a movie running in your head… just like reading a book when a mental projector illustrates the action as you turn the pages. (At least it does in my case.) The same principle applies in script-writing – or screenplay […]
Typeface of the week – Rockwell
Perhaps because it’s reminiscent of typewriter output, Rockwell creates a sense of urgency as a text-face – that you’re reading direct from the author’s page without the intermediate delay of a compositor having to assemble the words or key them […]
Taking the black beast by the horns
Although Black Ram whisky features prominently in my diet, a black beast is seldom far away. (Bête noire to the uninitiated). Sometimes these beasts run rampant and rival their bullish counterparts at the annual encierro in Spain’s Pamplona. Tonne, icon, […]
Typeface of the week – Cheltenham
An old typesetters’ saying was “You can’t beat Chelt”. Usually as reaction to having to work with a ‘new-fangled’ face like Excelsior or Century. They had a point. Cheltenham, aka Gloucester (check your atlas!) had its merits but for some […]
That Bourgeois is just my type, of course…
What has been seen by millions but few would be able to identify correctly in a police station lineup? In different context, this would probably be a good pub-quiz stumper, but our column’s title must be a dead giveaway. The […]