Did I read the New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought…. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context.
This is the same shittily-designed, shittily-typeset magazine whose shitty design and typesetting the elite can’t see through. Even Michael Bierut has been swindled. Meanwhile, all they’re using is stock Adobe Caslon with fake small caps.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2010.01.06 16:44. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2010/01/06/oppressive-font/
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First of all, this personal Weblog is on hiatus in 2020. (SeeBest postings)
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