The Precious Fragmentation Reading List is a collected selection of articles meant for light, end-of-week reading by technology and publishing enthusiasts. Enjoy.

• Type Study: Pairing typefaces
  Let me rip off the bandaid quickly: there are no clear formulas for pairing
  typefaces. There are no absolute rights and wrongs. But, this is good news.
  Without formulas, you can create beautiful surprises so your websites won’t
  look exactly like the one you have open in your browser three tabs over.
  Don’t worry, there are some techniques that will help make this process
  less daunting. Let’s walk through four methods for pairing typefaces. I’ll
  share some tips, define some terms, and suggest some Typekit pairings along
  the way.
• Computers = Trucks
  I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big
  thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of
  course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has
  happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages,
  people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but
  Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit. And writers
  assumed that nothing interesting or lasting would come from this new
  medium of television. And, I think, people assume right now that
  nothing important will be created from a 10” touch screen without a
  keyboard (let alone a tiny 3.5” screen).
• The Perfected Self
  B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.
• The CS6 Desktop Brand System
  For many years, Adobe’s splash screens were illustrative and intricate and, for their time, were pretty impressive pieces of digital artwork. They taunted you, suggesting that if only you were skilled enough at Photoshop or Illustrator then you, too, could create something like this.

“Let me rip off the bandaid quickly: there are no clear formulas for pairing
typefaces. There are no absolute rights and wrongs. But, this is good news.
Without formulas, you can create beautiful surprises so your websites won’t
look exactly like the one you have open in your browser three tabs over.
Don’t worry, there are some techniques that will help make this process
less daunting. Let’s walk through four methods for pairing typefaces. I’ll
share some tips, define some terms, and suggest some Typekit pairings along
the way.”

—Type Study: Pairing typefaces

“I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big
thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of
course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has
happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages,
people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but
Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit. And writers
assumed that nothing interesting or lasting would come from this new
medium of television. And, I think, people assume right now that
nothing important will be created from a 10” touch screen without a
keyboard (let alone a tiny 3.5” screen).”

—Computers = Trucks

“B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.”

—The Perfected Self

“For many years, Adobe’s splash screens were illustrative and intricate and, for their time, were pretty impressive pieces of digital artwork. They taunted you, suggesting that if only you were skilled enough at Photoshop or Illustrator then you, too, could create something like this.”

—The CS6 Desktop Brand System

The Precious Fragmentation Reading List is a collected selection of articles meant for light, end-of-week reading by technology and publishing enthusiasts. Enjoy.

• Protesting All Fiction Writers!
  The publishing industry, on the other hand, has little faith in and less
  regard for the True Outsider because it is difficult enough to make money
  on sure-thing insiders. It is a real challenge to come up with more than a
  tiny handful of self-printed novels of serious artistic intent published in
  the last hundred years that achieved even the mildest sort of cult status.
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012
  This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to
  wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the
  problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and
  content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the
  equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using
  them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our
  visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our
  sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers
  might soon not be designing for anyone.)

“The publishing industry, on the other hand, has little faith in and less
regard for the True Outsider because it is difficult enough to make money
on sure-thing insiders. It is a real challenge to come up with more than a
tiny handful of self-printed novels of serious artistic intent published in
the last hundred years that achieved even the mildest sort of cult status.”

—Protesting All Fiction Writers!

“This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to
wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the
problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and
content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the
equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using
them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our
visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our
sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers
might soon not be designing for anyone.)”

—Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012

The Precious Fragmentation Reading List is a collected selection of articles meant for light, end-of-week reading by technology and publishing enthusiasts. Enjoy.

• Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps
  I never believed that apps would unwind my industry’s disruption; but
  I felt some readers would want a beautifully designed digital replica
  of Technology Review on their mobile devices, and I bet that our
  developers could create a better mobile experience within
  applications. So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for
  use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people
  could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the
  platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative
  accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first
  year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of
  single-issue sales. Easy, I thought. Like almost all publishers, I was
  badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.
• What’s the best way to use new technology to build and sustain an audience?
  Ultimately it boils down to one thing: make your content as easy to access
  and read as possible. Not as fun, or unique, or feature-rich as possible.
  As easy.
• Life is About Lynn Crosbie
  What I’m saying is, you don’t really need me to interview or get a sound
  bite from Lynn Crosbie. You just need to read her book. It’s taken her a
  long time to write it because it took her a long time to live it.
• LAND LOCKED
  Monkey Business is here in my hands, printed. Solid. A brick. I understand it. It’s real. But from our corpus perspective, it’s deflated. It doesn’t have legs. The author’s words start and end on the page. I can’t point. It’s not “close” like digital text. It isn’t adjacent to anything. All I can do is create a simulacrum here, on my website. And legally I’m only allowed to simulacrumize a few things.
• Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing.
  But there’s something even more perplexing about Amazon selling The Hunger
  Games and other huge bestsellers for free. The Kindle lending program
  upends the conventional wisdom about Bezos’ business goals for e-readers.
  Most people think that Amazon is selling Kindle devices at cost in order to
  make a profit on the sales of books and movies. But if Amazon is also
  giving away a lot of media for free—4 of the Top 10 books in the Kindle
  Store can be had for free under the Kindle lending program—then what is its
  business model for Kindle?
• The Joys and Sorrows of Being an Almost-Gamer » Ash Furrow

“I never believed that apps would unwind my industry’s disruption; but
I felt some readers would want a beautifully designed digital replica
of Technology Review on their mobile devices, and I bet that our
developers could create a better mobile experience within
applications. So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for
use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people
could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the
platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative
accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first
year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of
single-issue sales. Easy, I thought. Like almost all publishers, I was
badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.”

—Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps