Kyle Cooper in Paul Rand: Modernist Design by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo (no relation):

I heard Paul Rand’s voice approximately 18 months before I met him. That is to say, I heard Hugh Dubberly doing an impersonation of Peter Levine doing an impersonation of Paul Rand…. “You are doing that raised-pinky design,” Peter [said], in what I now know to be a slightly-more-accurate Rand dialect. […]

We wondered aloud if he had ever collaborated with another designer. “I would, but Jan Tschichold is dead,” he told us. We quickly familiarized ourselves with Jan Tschichold’s work, which was refined, and found a picture of him where his pinky was, in fact, raised.

So it seemed that it was OK to be decorative, and it was OK to be rigid; you just needed to do it brilliantly. It was clear to me that Rand was right in saying “An idea is only as good as its execution” and “Form is an idea.” Bad form, then, is a bad idea.

The man leading the life and times of a positoid writes, in an E-mail response:

What on earth’s name would make you think that I would want to ever respond to you?

Indeed, what on earth would?

I am quoted in an article by Andrew LaVallee (we talked about different pronunciations of his name) entitled “Deaf Web users fear being left behind as TV shows stream onto the Internet.” The piece describes the demand by deaf people for captions on online and handheld video and how pretty much nobody is meeting that demand.

Two corrections:

• I never made any statement resembling the following actual paraphrase from the article: “What’s more, digital videos are often viewed in small windows on a computer or on devices like the iPod that have relatively tiny screens, where captions could be difficult to read.” I told LaVallee, and wrote on Screenfont, that other people use that claim as a pretext not to provide captioning; that caption fonts are the same relative size on small screens as on large; and that the whole idea was bogus. (And, minutes after I pointed out the error, it was fixed! How’s that for working at Internet speed?)
• There is too much of an emphasis on closed captioning, which is, as I am quoted as saying, “fabulously” difficult to do, what with the competing file formats. However, I explained that it’s perfectly possible to bypass the whole problem by providing separate uncaptioned and open-captioned feeds. Replicating the TV model is unnecessary and, I see from the article, is exactly what everyone is doing. No wonder we don’t have any captioning yet.

Sometimes there’s “classic” type right under your nose. Or overhead.

We had one of those Toronto moments the other night as we drove down the last vestiges of the Rosedale Valley Rd., almost at Bayview. Crossing the street in the distance was a figure recognizable at a glance as an animal but – thrillingly – not a raccoon or a cat. He trotted casually across, then up the roadway embankment. We beheld a mature fox with an improbably long dark tufted tail.

It was another of those profound reminders of the presence of nature. We live in a Tier B city, but we have a few things you do not, like blasé foxes that cross the road unimpeded. He’s my third.

From an era in which landau roofs and opera lamps meant a car was klassy.

And should insecurities remain nonetheless, we topped things off with gold lamé script.

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)

I spent the last two days in the sleepy, underpopulated Adobe Canada branch office. We were using their conference room, located at the very summit of the Carpet Factory, to conduct a face-to-face meeting of the PDF/Universal Access Committee, better known as PDF/UA (wiki).

Greg Pisocky, Adobe; Ferass Elrayes (or El-Rayes, depending), NetCentric; Neil Soiffer, Design Science; Karen McCall (obscured); Loretta Guarino Reid, Adobe; Duff Johnson (chair), Document Solutions

Duff had proposed that PDF/UA hold its meeting here in part so that I could actually attend. It was also convienient for another member, a 905er. I induced the group to stay at the Gladstone Hotel, with its artist-designed rooms – a smash success, according to their reports. We enjoyed torrential rain on the first day. We further enjoyed typical West Queen West hospitality, like being refused entry at the Beaconsfield, being forced to wait 40 minutes for a table at the Drake (admittedly, they had just had a fire), and an accusation by our waitress that we hadn’t leave a tip.

We are indeed trying to write a specification for accessible PDF, a phrase that has not been an oxymoron for three full years irrespective of what Bruce Maguire might tell you. A few things about accessible PDF are already known, but we are labouring to write down exactly what is required.

If this seems reminiscent of another accessibility working group, it is, although I would draw your attention to a few differences:

• Our chair, Duff Johnson, is urbane and erudite. (When you talk to him, prompt him with the keyword “Trinidad.”) He enjoys the full confidence of the group.
• We have over 90 people on the mailing list and eight or nine on the fortnightly telephone calls, conducted via a toll-free number. (Still inaccessible to a deaf person, obviously.)
• Everyone on the calls and at the meeting is competent. Some are surpassingly competent.
• We are moving slowly, as these things always do, but we are speeding up and we know what we’re doing. We got more accomplished during the f2f than we had expected. We exceeded the agenda.
• We argue only occasionally and we generally enjoy ourselves.

Ours is a happy ship. Is yours?