Monthly Archives: January 2017

01.21.17
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We can measure a crowd — even at an inauguration

If President Trump wants to cast doubt, he might pick a target that is less easily measured than crowd size. We can count people. People take up space. Here’s a rule of thumb, explained by Professor Steve Doig of Arizona Statue University.

A loose crowd, one where each person is an arm’s length from the body of his or her nearest neighbors, needs 10 square feet per person. A more tightly packed crowd fills 4.5 square feet per person. A truly scary mob of mosh-pit density would get about 2.5 square feet per person.

Read more about it via How big will inaugural crowd be? Do the math – politics – Inauguration | NBC News.

 

01.17.17
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Golly Molly, let’s type

Old-school printers owned a collection of lead letters and numbers. They set the type for stories and headlines from that font. Limits can be freeing. Printers didn’t stand around every day wondering what typeface was best. They used what they had. I sometimes am overwhelmed by the choices before me. Designer Pablo Stanley, via The Type Snob, offers advice for choosing typefaces that are readable. That’s the point of text — to convey ideas. I even learned to make a real dash on the Mac — option shift hyphen. I know better than to use two em dashes in a row. But I had to practice.