Since as long ago as 1496, readers have enjoyed books typeset in Bembo. The very name comes from the first book to use the face – a small volume of poems by the Italian cleric Pietro Bembo. The face […]
Author: John MacDonald
General Manager of TriMedia Middle East and Reportage and corporate authorship specialist
Typeface of the week – Gill Sans
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It was designed by Eric Gill and released in 1928 by the British branch of Monotype. The face itself had humble origins. In 1926, Gill was commissioned to paint a fascia for a […]
Hung, unhinged, and hanged…
Civilised people abolished capital punishment long ago, so let’s put the black cap aside for the moment. Words themselves are not guilty. That opprobrium belongs to the perpetrators who misuse and abuse them to string together offences such as ‘going […]
Be just and fear not
I’m becoming increasingly aware of “Just saying…” being tagged on at the end of online comments, emails, and contributions to letters pages. What does it mean? Surely what has been said is self-evident so why does the writer feel the […]
Crock and top role – as oldies vie for US presidency
‘Ageism’ has become as toxic as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and all the other dangerous -isms that are pitfalls for the unwary and politically incorrect. Perhaps that’s why a unique aspect of the US presidential election has gone largely unremarked. No […]
A rose by any other name… would smell of consultants
Brand consulting is a rich field for the triumph of style over substance. Like their management counterparts, many practitioners seem incurably wedded to overblown language that sounds impressive but is nothing more than meaningless platitudes. Countless expensive hours are spent […]
The sway, half-truths, and the rife
Awarding A-level school-leaving qualifications (or not) has been a hot topic of late, prompting memories of a favourite exam expression: ‘compare and contrast’. How would pupils react if asked to apply that to two newspaper reports? The first reads: “UK […]
Trying to catch the wind – and succeeding, all too well
Carbon emissions are invariably highlighted as the major culprit in climate change, but there is another contributor – possibly even more damaging – that has been overlooked almost completely. For decades, long before climate change became such a dominant global […]
Containing the waste line…
One of the best known quotations from the advertising and marketing business goes along the lines: “Half my expenditure is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Depending which side of the Atlantic you’re on, it’s attributed to US […]
Thy queendom come…
Long before women’s lib and feminism were invented – at least in the modern sense – I’ve been an ardent supporter. Probably one of the first males to come out unequivocally (almost) on their side. And I was then just […]