This reasoning of mine made me grow annoyed at ANY use of smart quotes.

Taste is a consensus judgment and completely culturally relative. Good taste and bad taste are only useful in as much as they’re class signifiers; beyond that, judgments seem pretty much arbitrary.

Oh, designers love to appeal to utility and function, but trust me, those appeals are largely bogus.

You designers need to start fucking the rules. It’s like fucking with language. Think about what you’re saying with design.

I’ve loved Georgia from the moment I first saw it, and wish people would use it more. But so few people can tell the difference between one font and the next. I explain endlessly to my employees the difference between serif and sans-serif, and why you should use one for blocks of text and the other for titles. They look at me like I’m insane.

I also hate text that has been both right and left justified — like this blog. What gives? Isn’t this ne kulturny for professional designers?

To make typography more democratic does not mean to dumb it down. The best service we can provide to “the masses” and to the ongoing typographic culture is to expand access to typographic thinking without diminishing quality. Impossible? Perhaps. Yet this is the standard towards which we must strive.

“I honestly haven’t seen any proposed viable solutions to what we perceive as an “ignorant masses” or “craft being ravaged by technology” problem.”

A possible answer:

In the continual online battle between form and function I see a small glimer of hope in sIFR..
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr

My hope is based on the ability of the search engines to read this type as “type” rather than “artwork.”

“The knee-jerk reaction of some people whenever they see Flash is that it must be inaccessible because it’s Flash. What we’ve done with sIFR, however, is turn that model completely on its head. Your (X)HTML document is still the exact same document it was before sIFR kicked in. Your code is untouched and sIFR is completely abstracted to the javascript layer; therefore, your accessibility, your search engine friendliness, and your semantics are the same as they were before the day you decided you like nice fonts.”

It’s my guess that this is perhaps one of the more compelling reasons Adobe purchased Macromedia (Flash software).

A story: In the late 1980’s I desired to be a developer for Steve Job’s NeXT Computer company. The application was tediously long, but the last page had a 3.5 x 2 inch rectangle labeled “Staple business card here.” Knowing of Mr. Job’s reputed design sense, I flashed that the previous pages meant little and the design and typography of the business card meant much. Confident in the design “chops” of my card, I was not surprised to be admitted into the core fraternity of NeXT developers.

Fast forward to the design ambiance of today’s Apple stores, the various incarnations of the Apple iPod, and the elegant new MacBook. The good news: there are beacons in the design world; the bad news: every new generation of designers still must “apprentice.” To that end, I heartily recommend this revised version of a decades-old classic book entitled Editing by Design by Jan V. Wright.

Enjoy!

Perhaps I am oversimplifying the issue in order to avoid delving too deep into it. Graphic design is after all one of those most subjective fields, lodged between art and practicality, with theories about simplicity versus complexity that can easily overwhelm. It’s a long and confusing maze between Rand and Carson. Design is not like straight forward practical professions, where a particular prescription can take care of a certain condition, or where replacing a defective chip can get the television set working again.

While I agree to a large extent with what seems to be a designer concensus today — that fonts shipping with operating systems are made distasteful by overuse, that most computer users can bear reading a book or two about information design or typography, I honestly haven’t seen any proposed viable solutions to what we perceive as an “ignorant masses” or “craft being ravaged by technology” problem. I have read many designer and experienced software user essays and manifestos, and to my mind they all amounted to little more than internal field quarrels about how we work, who our clients are, and the varying levels of aesthetic or compensation standards we have. One train of thought I haven’t seen is one reaching the conclusion that in this day and age of computers in every school and home, it seems elementary that basic design should be standard education issue. Perhaps this is a worthy lobby — at least one I would support with all my heart.

We can also start with our own children and their schools. My ten year old son is already quite aware of design as an important means of expression, and sometimes he surprises me with the things he notices while we conduct our daily routine.

One of the ways we demonstrate our professionalism is our ability to design and set type that is so easily read that no one ever notices the type.

Dumb quotes, double hyphens, proportionally reduced small caps, and many other things are rarely noticed by uneducated readers — but I am convinced they have an unsettling feeling that they are reading a non-professional piece of work.

The bad type just makes mine look better. But sometimes it is a good thing. Like poorly done, hand-scrawled garage sale signs: sometimes the poor type makes the reader feel that they have gotten in on something cheap. That can be a good thing, clearly communicating one of the benefits of the client’s offerings.

my 2cents — David