Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Typography Helps You Communicate Better

The world would be a really ugly place with­out good typog­ra­phy. It already is in many offices, because most peo­ple have never heard of typog­ra­phy and never given a sec­ond thought about it. The world is awash in Times New Roman and Arial. As I type this con­tent that you’re read­ing, I’m look­ing at Times New Roman font in the “back­room” of this Word­Press blog plat­form and the only thing I can think of is “I hate this font, it’s been so over­done it’s the ugli­est shit around.”

Seri­ously.

I’m not a pro­fes­sional designer, but I have utmost respect for those who are trained and have a pas­sion for good doc­u­ment design. Graphic design­ers are often seen as just illus­tra­tors, but they also have train­ing in how to make a doc­u­ment look good, eye-catching, inter­est­ing, and yet read­able. Part of this is know­ing more about fonts. Just fonts. Noth­ing to do with how it’s laid out on the page, but just what freakin’ font you’re using on your documents.

Back in June, I had a few new crew mem­bers come on board at work, and at one point I men­tioned about pay­ing atten­tion to the typog­ra­phy. “What’s that?”

I have a feel­ing the major­ity of peo­ple in the major­ity of offices around the world would give you a quizzi­cal look and ask, “Typog­ra­phy?  What’s that?”

It’s a shame, really, and one that I think is born out of the way uni­ver­si­ties train the vast major­ity of stu­dents. That is to say, every sin­gle stu­dent who isn’t in an arts or design pro­gram. Aca­d­e­mic papers are sup­posed to be the most visu­ally bor­ing pieces of shit you’ve ever seen. The intent is so that the per­son mark­ing your paper con­cen­trates only on the con­tent. There­fore, they spec­ify some­thing like “Times New Roman, 12pt font, 1.5 spac­ing, 1″ mar­gins all around,” and every paper com­ing from the class should look the same if you didn’t actu­ally read the content.

That’s all fine and dandy for acad­e­mia, which is a world all unto itself. But that’s stu­pid, short-sighted, and neg­li­gent when it comes to prepar­ing stu­dents for any­thing other than an aca­d­e­mic future. To be fair, I can’t totally blame the instruc­tors — after all, they them­selves chose to spend much of their lives in acad­e­mia. How­ever, for any insti­tu­tion that has any pre­ten­sions of prepar­ing their stu­dents for the real, non-academic world, they need to change that and give their stu­dents just one course in effec­tive doc­u­ment design. That would include a good chunk of con­tent on typography.

Why?

Because in the real world out­side of acad­e­mia, effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion isn’t just about the con­tent. It’s also about the deliv­ery and the pre­sen­ta­tion. Stephen Hawk­ing is an incred­i­bly smart man, and he has done good work in physics — per­haps chang­ing the way mil­lions of peo­ple under­stand the phys­i­cal uni­verse — but I don’t think he’d get very far as a pro­fes­sional speaker. It has noth­ing to do with the con­tent, but every­thing to do with the pack­ag­ing and deliv­ery of the content.

Most of us pride our­selves on our intel­lec­tual objec­tiv­ity, but the brain is not intrin­si­cally objec­tive. There are ways to present mate­r­ial that grab your atten­tion bet­ter. There are ways to make it eas­ier for you to keep read­ing con­tent. There are ways to bring your atten­tion to key points. There are ways to sub­con­sciously affect how you feel about the mate­r­ial you’re reading.

That’s what doc­u­ment design and good typog­ra­phy are all about: grab­bing the reader’s atten­tion, and con­vey­ing a mes­sage over and above the explicit con­tent of the words. It’s about mar­ket­ing (in its truest, and pos­i­tive sense) and meta-meaning. It’s about the things that make one doc­u­ment and one writer stand out and be remem­bered. It’s about mak­ing sure that the ideas you are try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate actu­ally make it through the men­tal fric­tion and fil­ters on the reader’s end to be received, reg­is­tered, and remembered.

Take a look at the way mag­a­zine arti­cles are designed. Take a look at how books are designed. Beyond the lay­out, which is of course very impor­tant, look at the fonts they use.

Fonts affect leg­i­bil­ity. Fonts have char­ac­ter. Fonts com­mu­ni­cate by being the way they are, irre­spec­tive of the words you use the fonts to create.

Intel­li­gent, delib­er­ate use of fonts and phys­i­cal struc­ture of your text con­tent — in other words, typog­ra­phy — will enhance your com­mu­ni­ca­tion effec­tive­ness. Take the time to learn about sans serif ver­sus serif, about kern­ing, line spac­ing and hier­ar­chy. They all affect how your doc­u­ment will be received — which, in com­bi­na­tion with the qual­ity of your con­tent, is what deter­mines whether you com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively or not.

If you hadn’t heard of typog­ra­phy before, now you have. If you already knew about typog­ra­phy, good for you. But if all you know about it is that the word “typog­ra­phy” exists, go and edu­cate your­self a lit­tle about it. It will pay div­i­dends in your life.

That is, unless you’re an aca­d­e­mic by pro­fes­sion. In that case, you might be ostra­cized by your peers for actu­ally try­ing to be dif­fer­ent in order to com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively. Go back in line and shuf­fle along like a good peon.

In case you’re won­der­ing, yes, I do wish this blog tem­plate I’m using had bet­ter typo­graphic design.

I See Homeless People. Do You?

It’s Christmas-time, a time for joy, hap­pi­ness, love and fel­low­ship. It’s a time that many asso­ciate with see­ing smiles of joy and hearts filled with grat­i­tude. Is the great­est joy and grat­i­tude to be found in the smiles and hearts of lit­tle chil­dren as they open their gifts? Maybe. But I know for cer­tain that if you take a few moments of your time to see, acknowl­edge, and con­nect with a home­less per­son, you will see true grat­i­tude — one unfet­tered by greed, how­ever innocent.

I don’t stop to talk to every home­less per­son I come across. I’ll even admit that I don’t feel com­pas­sion for every home­less per­son that I come across. But some­times I do stop and con­nect with some­one who needs help and, more than that, needs to be rec­og­nized as a per­son of worth.

Just tonight, as I walked to Union Sta­tion (a sub­way sta­tion in Toronto), I saw a man sit­ting at the side of the hall­way, snif­fling as though he’d been cry­ing. He looked up, we made eye con­tact, and acknowl­edged one another. He didn’t ask me for money. I didn’t pass by with a “Sorry, man” or worse, just ignore him. I stopped, kneeled and spoke with him for 5 minutes.

5 min­utes of your time can make a real dif­fer­ence in another human being’s life. It is the gift of recog­ni­tion, of respect, and at its most basic level, of love.

The man told me about his his­tory with can­dor, as we are all wont to do some­times when trou­bled and talk­ing to strangers whom we may never see again.

He told me that he has been home­less for 12 years. He has over­come a drug addic­tion, but admit­ted that he was still alco­holic. He told me about being shoo’d away from every­where by secu­rity guards, and about the dan­gers of home­less shel­ters — where rape is an ever-present dan­ger, where your shoes and socks can be stolen, and even your under­wear right off you in the night. He told me he had been molested by his father from age 6 til 16, and he admit­ted, yes some­times he liked it and went back for more.

I was speak­ing to a per­son. I was speak­ing to a real human being with a past and a his­tory. I was speak­ing to a man with a heart, with emo­tion, with fears, and with long­ing. He spoke of his depres­sion, and yet I sensed in him dig­nity and strength, hard-won wis­dom and understanding.

But I was heart­ened to hear that I was not the only per­son that evening to see him, acknowl­edge him, and con­nect with him. Another man had just spo­ken with him and was going to see if he could get him some food and help him. My con­ver­sa­tion with the home­less man came to a close when the other man returned.

He was the same man I had passed in the hall­way just a few moments ago, who had held a door open for me.

Every time I have taken a few moments of my time to acknowl­edge and con­nect with a home­less per­son, I have come from it with new knowl­edge and new per­spec­tive. Each time I have given the gift of respect, I have seen real grat­i­tude and real hon­esty in the per­son to whom I spoke.

It’s easy to ignore the home­less. It’s easy to never even see them in the first place. But if you open your eyes, you will see them. If you open your heart, you will dis­cover some­one with worth. You will dis­cover a real human being. Try it some­time. And if you do it dur­ing Christ­mas sea­son, you’ll see real grat­i­tude and be enlarged by the expe­ri­ence, beyond what giv­ing a mate­r­ial gift alone could ever accomplish.

I see home­less peo­ple. You can, too.

& its Agencies Start Using Today’s Communication Media?">When will Government & its Agencies Start Using Today’s Communication Media?

Gov­ern­ment min­istries and agen­cies are not known for their respon­sive­ness and com­mu­ni­ca­tion effi­ciency.  Hide­bound bureau­cra­cies, par­tic­u­larly those run by politi­cians at the top, are loathe to say the wrong thing.  “Bet­ter to say noth­ing than to say the wrong thing!” is the de facto policy.

That will prob­a­bly never change as long as we the vot­ing pub­lic con­tinue to vocif­er­ously pun­ish elected offi­cials and their staff even when the mis­takes they make are hon­est, well-intentioned ones that any of us might make.

Still, there is room for improve­ment even within that con­straint.  No mat­ter how long it has taken you to craft your mes­sage, how do you get it out quickly?  That is of pri­mary impor­tance when it comes to emer­gency management.

Maybe that’s why it has been the police, fire, and other emergency-related ser­vices that have been first to use Twit­ter to com­mu­ni­cate with the gen­eral pub­lic.  Now, in Canada, the Pub­lic Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is get­ting with it.

PHAC has its own Twit­ter feed in order to get the word out as fast as pos­si­ble.  But what about those peo­ple who don’t use Twit­ter?  How else can they use the Inter­net to broad­cast their infor­ma­tion?  They’ve now got a wid­get devel­oped for peo­ple to put on their web­sites – it will dis­play the Agency’s updates and announce­ments auto­mat­i­cally, just like the Twit­ter feed on the right side of my own web­site here.  That’s a big step.

PHAC also has a mobile ver­sion of their web­site to enable fast, easy brows­ing via mobile phones, smart­phones, and Black­ber­ries.  That’s a big step, too.  Even a lot of pri­vate enter­prises haven’t yet wis­ened up and cre­ated mobile ver­sions of their websites.

To be hon­est, Food­lan­dOn­tario from the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) also has a Twit­ter feed going.  It’s not just the emergency-related ser­vices that are get­ting the mes­sage and get­ting with the times.  But nobody’s life is at stake when it comes to what fresh pro­duce to buy.  PHAC’s man­date involves the public’s health and safety.  That makes PHAC’s use of today’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools much more important.

PHAC gets it.  Police and fire ser­vices get it.  Heck, even Food­lan­dOn­tario gets it.  When will the other gov­ern­ment agen­cies, min­istries, and ser­vices get it?

The best way to make sure you get the infor­ma­tion you want, the way you want it?  Write to your MP or MPP (or Con­gress­man or Sen­a­tor).  If you con­vince them that it’s some­thing impor­tant to do, they’ll make sure it gets done.

Now, it won’t change how quickly the infor­ma­tion is cre­ated, but at least if you and I can get our gov­ern­ments to com­mu­ni­cate what they do cre­ate as effec­tively as pos­si­ble, that’ll be a big step forward.

French is Not the Only Endangered Language in Canada

Dis­tinct soci­ety! Dis­tinct soci­ety! Oh, won’t those whiny Que­be­cois ever shut up?

That is hon­estly what I had been think­ing for years. Yet, like an expe­ri­ence out of the movie Dis­trict 9, I find myself now emi­nently able to relate to their plight. I looked around and recently real­ized that my own cul­ture and lan­guage are in jeopardy.

Many North Amer­i­cans may not real­ize that there is no sin­gu­lar Chi­nese cul­ture or spo­ken Chi­nese lan­guage.  But there may soon be.

I speak Can­tonese. I grew up in a Can­tonese home and for me, until recently, “Chi­nese” = Can­tonese. Here, in the hereto­fore self-selected North Amer­i­can Chi­nese envi­ron­ment, that used to be true. But it never was in China itself, and now as Chi­nese nation­als emi­grate around the world, the Can­tonese lan­guage is being threat­ened, and the cul­ture that I know as Chi­nese is being rapidly moved aside.

For this post, I will con­cen­trate on the lan­guage. I will leave the mat­ter of cul­ture for another time, because it is not Can­tonese cul­ture per se that is assailed, but Hong Kong Can­tonese cul­ture. That is a thornier, more con­tentious, and riskier topic — I am not yet ready to write in pub­lic about that.

With regards to lan­guage, Man­darin is the only offi­cial spo­ken lan­guage in China, and Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese is the way bil­lions of Chi­nese in China since Mao’s rule have been taught how to write.

Can­tonese as a spo­ken lan­guage is but a sideshow in China, much as Que­be­cois French has, for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses, been rel­e­gated to the side­lines in Canada.  But surely there are enclaves where the lan­guage remains strong, right? Not really. I trav­eled back to Can­ton (now prop­erly called Guan­dong) Province in China — home of the Can­tonese lan­guage — and yet Man­darin pre­vailed there.  The Can­tonese in Can­ton are being out­num­bered by emi­grants from other provinces.

Here in North Amer­ica, in Toronto with a vibrant Chi­nese com­mu­nity and a strong Can­tonese pop­u­la­tion, I hear Can­tonese with friends and fam­ily but when I go to Chi­nese super­mar­kets I hear Man­darin on the PA system.

I even read an arti­cle not too long ago that there are Can­tonese in China mak­ing real efforts to keep the lan­guage from dying in its native land. It is an uphill bat­tle, and not one with a sure outcome.

It was not until I real­ized that the super­mar­kets — pos­si­bly the most lin­guis­ti­cally demo­c­ra­tic of places, since every­one has to buy food to eat — had become Mandarin-based that I real­ized my own lan­guage is in jeopardy.

With regards to the writ­ten lan­guage, Mao’s Com­mu­nist Party devel­oped and stan­dard­ized Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese. Chi­nese peo­ple out­side of Com­mu­nist China con­tinue to use Tra­di­tional Chi­nese. But as immi­grants from China itself con­tinue to come over to North Amer­ica — some­thing that in and of itself is nei­ther good nor bad — while the pool of Chi­nese immi­grants from else­where has dried up, even the writ­ten lan­guage is in peril.

“Tra­di­tional Chi­nese will be superceded by Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese here in Canada in 5, maybe 10 years.”

I heard that just the other day, and I fear it will hap­pen. Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese is not a nat­ural evo­lu­tion of the lan­guage — it is a delib­er­ately, arti­fi­cially mod­i­fied ver­sion of the writ­ten lan­guage. It is, to many Can­tonese here in North Amer­ica, an abom­i­na­tion and an unwel­come cre­ation of the Com­mu­nist Party. Yet, the way the num­bers will play out, Sim­pli­fied will likely become the stan­dard the world over. Even Tai­wan has begun to tran­si­tion to Sim­pli­fied, bow­ing under the pres­sure of it’s enor­mous neighbor.

The lan­guage that I have grown up with, that I have always known as Chi­nese, is endan­gered and threat­ened. That it will even­tu­ally become irrel­e­vant on the main stage, even amongst North Amer­i­can Chi­nese, is no longer in ques­tion. The ques­tion is whether it will be wiped out.

At least I now under­stand much bet­ter where the Que­be­cois are com­ing from. But for the Can­tonese, there won’t be any pub­lic cries of dis­tinct soci­ety — the Chi­nese lan­guage in any form is not an offi­cial lan­guage here, and Can­tonese doesn’t get spe­cial recog­ni­tion even in its own homeland.

I am Cana­dian, and my lan­guage is in peril. But I’m Can­tonese, not Que­be­cois. How inter­est­ing that the same sto­ries are played out in only slightly dif­fer­ent ways.  Even more inter­est­ing how my per­spec­tive on the Que­be­cois cries for recog­ni­tion and appre­ci­a­tion changed almost overnight.

Avatar: Prime Example of the Power of Art

James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, is a supremely-executed movie.  The spe­cial effects are, in a very real sense, no longer “spe­cial”.  They are spec­tac­u­lar, but they are so well ren­dered, and so seam­lessly melded with live-action, that they become accepted by the audi­ence as being the basic real­ity for the story.  Much of the cur­rent media cov­er­age sur­rounds the dig­i­tal world and dig­i­tal effects used to cre­ate the film.  Yet, I would argue, that is not at all the rea­son why this film is notable or why this film has real power.

Art has a spe­cial place in this world, not sim­ply for its aes­thetic and enter­tain­ment value, but also for its abil­ity to enable us to see new per­spec­tives and for its abil­ity to lit­er­ally change the way we see the world.  Avatar is a movie that exem­pli­fies this power.

No, the movie is not per­fect.  The story could cer­tainly be stronger.  What the movie has going for it, though, are the fol­low­ing strengths:

1. There are clear mes­sages being pro­moted by the story
2. The story is told in an emotionally-moving fashion
3. The story takes place in a fic­tional, science-fiction universe
4. The movie has unbe­liev­ably strong draw for a mas­sive audi­ence of all ages

Let’s take this step by step.

First, no story, no art would have any real value with­out an under­ly­ing mes­sage.  Art always inten­tion­ally com­mu­ni­cates some­thing – a point of view, an argu­ment, some­thing.  In this case with Avatar, there are sev­eral messages:

• Will­ful and wan­ton destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment is wrong
• The dis­place­ment (by force or oth­er­wise) of indige­nous peo­ple for eco­nomic rea­sons is wrong
• Cor­po­rate greed blinds peo­ple to the ethics of what they are doing

Whether you believe these to be true or not is beside the point.  Cameron believes them to be true, because these are the mes­sages in the film, and this is his film, his story.

Next, the story is told in an emotionally-moving fash­ion.  Cameron is a good story-teller. That, ulti­mately, is what makes him good, and why his movies draw in so many view­ers – whether it was Alien, Aliens, True Lies, or Titanic, Cameron has always told his sto­ries well.  By cre­at­ing a good story and pre­sent­ing it to us art­fully, he shapes, pokes and prods our emo­tions – and emo­tions are the key to cre­at­ing last­ing mem­o­ries and the key to chang­ing how we think.

The story takes place in a fic­tional world.  Good science-fiction has always been social com­men­tary.  Avatar is no excep­tion.  By plac­ing the events and peo­ple of the story in a fic­tional world, we the view­ers of the story become less defen­sive.  What­ever the mes­sage is about, it isn’t osten­si­bly about us, about our world, about what we do.  But of course it really is about us, our world, and what we do.  The magic of make-believe is that we are more likely to con­sider the argu­ments with­out being reflex­ively defensive.

Cameron uses stun­ning dig­i­tal effects to cre­ate his fic­ti­tious world and to tell his story.  The movie sim­ply could not be made with­out the tech­nol­ogy and the skill to use it wisely.  But the addi­tional draw, over and above Cameron’s innate sto­ry­telling abil­ity and his rep­u­ta­tion, is the sheer cool­ness fac­tor of it all.  I have seen grown men get excited and giddy from see­ing the com­puter gen­er­ated envi­ron­ment on tele­vi­sion ads.  The computer-generated world pulls in a lot of peo­ple, young and old.

When you put all four strengths together, you end up with a movie that will have last­ing effect.  It is art with power.  You won’t see it right away.  I pre­dict that the great­est impact this film will have on our future is through its impact on the chil­dren who see this film.  Yes, many adults will be moved by the film.  It will have an impact on us.  But it is through the chil­dren, who will absorb the world, the story, and its mes­sages beyond what we adults will, who are going to be most changed by the film.

Avatar has a mes­sage.  Avatar moves us.  Avatar is art at its best, with the power to change us.