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THATS font-tastic!

5 April, 2008

Wello this week we delve into the miraculous world of font, script, jargen and blorgen. words which you should all be familiar with…or should you?

This guy is a genious! you know the feeling when you’ve touched on a work of genius well I had that when I read this.

It was so simple that I had never thought of it before. You should check these out.

Web Typography: Now there’s an oxymoron! —– http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/CMX/7262D/

Typographic Contrast and the web —– http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/CMX/D4FBD/

It should be clear now just how important type is. It almost feels like we are all going down the path of creating a new language. one that incorporates images within its text to express vignettes that allow us all to better understand something on the web. An author who created a novel with this idea intended was James Joyce.

For those who don’t know much about Joyce check this out -

-Go: www.youtube.com -Input: A Study of James Joyce Part 3 -Click: on the first option.

For those who know Joyce well go to this - Go: www.youtube.com -Input: Yes (James Joyce)-Click: on the first option.

After seeing (Both) these highly romanticised portrayals of Joyce your brain should now be filling with some uncontrollable desire to understand more. More about this Joyce character, and more about what this has to do with our topic.

Well Joyce was quite a bizarrely humorous man and very ahead of his time in terms of his books. His humorous nature can be likened to the nature of internet writers, they are usually quick witted using abbreviations at every turn with little care for what there readers can understand. Internet writers have the luxury of being like this because if a reader didn’t understand a word or sentence or phrase they can immediately respond just like people do on this blog (or should do anyway). In a novel the writer is more fearful, they are uneasy about doing what Joyce did because the reader cannot directly communicate with the author. Their work becomes timeless and the writer does not want to be timelessly hated.

In a way Joyce was wrong to write a novel like Finnegan’s Wake it is a novel and therefore autocratic in the sense that it is not open for questioning or debate. However, I think he is a necessary writer of the internet revolution and if he was alive today and not blind I think he would prefer the web as an alternative to novels. Joyce is a past reference of how one can be free of the constraints that literature has imposed for too long.

Viva la webolution!

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