the difference between a typeface and font

Over at Fast Company Design, there's a great short article on the difference between a font and a typeface. 

“Back in the good old days of analog printing, every page was laboriously set out in frames with metal letters. … Printers needed thousands of physical metal blocks, each with the character it was meant to represent set out in relief (the type face). If you wanted to print Garamond, for example, you needed different blocks for every different size (10 point, 12 point, 14 point, and so on) and weight (bold, light, medium).

This is where we get the terms typeface and font. In the example above, Garamond would be the typeface: It described all of the thousands of metal blocks a printer might have on hand and which had been designed with the same basic design principles. But a font was something else entirely. A font described a subset of blocks in that very typeface—but each font embodied a particular size and weight. For example, bolded Garamond in 12 point was considered a different font than normal Garamond in 8 point, and italicized Times New Roman at 24 point would be considered a different font than italicized Times New Roman at 28 point.”

— What's The Difference Between A Font And A Typeface? — John Brownlee 

I'll admit to being one of those pedants whose teeth grind when the two get confused by people who should know better. I have a slug (a clumping of metal type) on my desk that I use to explain this to my interns and minions.

For the curious, some great typography books: 

• Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
• The Elements of Typographic Style
• Designing with Type

And just for fun, a game to test your kerning skills: KERNTYPE, a kerning game.

Wheel of productivity

I ran across a neat exercise for finding how you spend your time. 

Here's mine:

The typical Mon-Thurs for me. 

Yeah, that's pretty sobering. 

bookstores

Italo Calvino on walking into a bookstore: 

“So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop pas the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

what my meetings are like

Most of the committee meetings I have end up going something like this. You can see why I joke that gin is my spirit animal. 

work ethic

Someone recently asked me why I spent so much time and working so hard on my photography class this term, and it gave me pause. To them, it seemed as if I was working excessively hard, and they couldn't imagine spending so much time on anything, let alone something they were ostensibly doing for fun. It was difficult for them to imagine working at fun, and I thought that was an interesting difference between us. 

So how much work was I actually doing?

Working on class assignments took me about 15-20 hours a week; sometimes more, sometimes less. That included scheduling and coordinating the shot with whoever I've press-ganged into being in front of the camera; figuring out what I'm going to shoot and how best to shoot it; the actual time spent behind the camera shooting; editing the photos once I've taken them; and dropping the shots off to be printed at the lab, then mounting them. Then there's the three hours of brutal critique inside the classroom. It's a nontrivial amount of time. 

I work 50ish hours a week at the day job, and spend 12-15 hours in the car commuting to said day job. Weightlifting takes up another 7-9 hours, then add the 15-20 hours a week for homework. All told, that's 102-117 hours spent doing 'work,' out of the 168 hours in a week — over two-thirds. If you're someone used to putting in 40 hours a week at a desk, then coming home to spend an evening in front of the television, then going to bed to do it all over again the next day, I can see why it might seem excessive. It's a completely different way of living. And yet, I can't imagine how else you'd go through life. At least, not without being utterly miserable.

Last week was the final class of the term, in which we all discussed each other's work as a whole. That I'd put in both a lot of hard work and a lot of intensity into the work came up a few times, which was a surprise. I'd not really mentioned how much work I'd done, as it's not my style to staple my hand to my forehead and whine about a workload. But it managed to come through anyway.   

How does the adage go? Obsessed is the word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. 

Which isn't to say that everyone who chooses not to spend the same amount of time I do on work is lazy; other people have other priorities, and there's nothing wrong with that — for them. For me, it's another story entirely.