Left to right, not up and down

I'm starting to wonder if the next big trend in web publishing is to package content in a left-to-right, scrolling style, instead of the traditional scroll-down type display you normally see when reading stuff on the web. Here's a good example of that at CanopyCanopyCanopy. I've noticed that one of my favorite moto blogs, Hell for Leather, does something similar with certain of their features.

Just say no

I got a memo in my inbox today at work from the human resources department. I opened it up and noticed.................. the entire letter was written in Comic Sans. Not just a heading or a contact number at the top of the page. The entire page was in Comic Sans, the retarded stepchild of typography. I know I touched on this before, but bear with me people: Comic Sans is ugly. Just because it has those faux-wacky squiggles and is included in the Microsoft system fonts does not mean it should be used for company-wide memos.

Why job ads are horrible

It's been a big week for Mrs. T-L and I. We found out we'll eventually be moving to Atlanta, Georgia. As much as we love it here in New England, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came up for her and we're now planning to move there sometime in the late summer.

I've already started looking for work down there, and as much fun as it can be imagining myself in different jobs, I sometimes wonder what people are thinking when they come up with some of these job listings.

For instance, I was looking at listing today for an editor position at a trade journal. The company publishes a paper products magazine. So not only do they want someone to do painstaking editing and journalism work, but they expect the applicant to be "familiar with the forest products industry" as well! Now, I don't know any lumberjacks personally, but my guess is that they're a lot frickin better at cutting down trees than paginating a centerspread in Quark XPress and then exporting it to a high-res PDF. The worst offenders of this type are medical journals/magazines/etc. If I have a medical degree or experience as a doctor, why on earth would I take a job as a lowly copy editor? I honestly think some of these corporate publication types really don't understand that journalists are paid to be generalists -- we can't be experts in every little topic under the sun, but we know when to ask more questions and what needs to be verified.

And there's this: A little while ago I happened to look at a job listing from a local TV news station. The job was for a news editor. I think the last line is just depressing: "News background a plus."

Welcome to Font hell

Everyone knows by now that using Comic Sans makes you look like an insane person, but that awful spawn of Microsoft isn't only offender of typographic sins. Check out one blogger's list of the worst offenders: America's Most Fonted. (I particularly enjoyed how she listed which celebrities probably use each of them.)

The Great Not-Necessarily-American Wiki Novel

Taking a page out of the Wikipedia playbook, Penguin Publishing has set up its very own wiki novel called, fittingly, "A Million Penguins." The idea is to allow anyone and everyone a chance to contribute to a novel. The project just started last week, but it appears to already be up to chapter 15 -- although they're short chapters thus far into it. So far, characters include Ismail the Unicorn, Linus Torvalds, Mr. Pitor Pibb, Bill Gates and someone called Mr. Bombastic. Stay tuned. This could either end up being very cool or a complete disaster... which probably makes it a worthwhile experiment.