ONE Kind of Blog Post That Makes Me Mad

[elfs]

In all of the on-line guides to "improve your blogging and increase your audience," there is the "list of kinds of blog entries." This list says that there are X kinds of entries, and using them will help drive traffic to your site: The Leading Question, The Scare Tactic, The "I will make your rich/sexy/healthy" Entry, The How-To, and finally The List.

Yes, the list recommends itself.

And normally, I like lists. Since I do web development and design, lists are good for me: "15 sexy footers," "10 trends in graphic design for 2009," "12 javascript techniques every developer should know," "6 CMS frameworks that real web developers use."

You know what lists I hate? There are two kinds:

"3000 Fonts Every Designer Should Own!"

Okay, that's just obviously stupid. A designer should have a stable of maybe 300 fonts he or she really likes, and suitcases of styles for specific genres, but 3000 fonts is more than anyone can be asked to carry around in his or her head. There's no point to that kind of list: either we already have the font sets we enjoy, or we don't have time to filter through 3000 fonts to pick out ones we need for any immanent projects.

But even more blazingly stupid, in a similar way, is this one:

"95 resources to make you more efficient and productive!"

That's the height of ridiculous: reading 95 separate articles just to find the three or four techniques that might appeal to you to make you more productive is a waste of your productive hours. A thoughtful blogger would have pared this down to "Four techniques for maintaining your productive day," and under each technique, "Three tools for maintaining this technique," with commentary for each. A blind list, especially of 95 different articles, tells me that the writer probably hasn't read them all and is just trying to drive traffic.

I can consume 10 to 20 graphical examples, and when it comes to development techniques a well-written headline will help me filter through 15 or so to find the two I don't know yet. But lists are supposed to help reader acheive some goal, and these super-long, super-fat lists without descriptions or guidance from the writer are just a waste of time.

Comments

[blaisepascal]

Helvetica, Comic Sans, and Courier. Who needs more?

(Out of the 35 standard PostScript fonts, I have a fondness for New Century Schoolbook, personally.)

[solarbird]

Oh no. Leave Helvetica out of this. Helvetica may have been overused beyond the point of rational analysis popular tolerance, but despite this, but it's a clean, well-designed font, and does not belong in this list.

[blaisepascal]

OK, how about Times New Roman?

I was trying to come up with old, overused, or ugly serif, sans serif, and monospace fonts, and my mind blanked on a serif font for the collection.

[solarbird]

Times New Roman is overused, but is also a reasonably-well-designed face. It's not my favourite (it's no Garamond Antiqua, for example) but it's competent at print resolution.

Bad idea for the web, tho'.

[maellenkleth]

Book Antiqua, Century Schoolbook -- both seem to work okay on the Web. But Papyrus on the other hand? Staggeringly overused to the point of emesis.

[lovingboth]

Everyone has their favourites, but New Century Schoolbook screams 'American, not very good' to me. I've seen far, far too many American publications use it, looking as if they were designed decades ago.

But hey, I still like Avant Garde Gothic and Palatino a lot.

Some day I will get around to doing a 'Free the PostScript 35!' t-shirt.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I use Palatino in all my PDFs and Lulu documents.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Three hundred fonts seem excessive, unless your designer supplies ransom-note writers. Perhaps build up to that many after many years of practice, but I'd hate for a beginning designer to look at that statement and think she needs to start with that number.

[solarbird]

The type specialists I know say that it 300 is far too many - a typography article I was reading a few years ago even picked 300 as the laughable number - and that to be really, really good with a face, you have to understand it in ways that only come from using it regularly and that your really understood fonts list will be eight to ten, tops.

Typography designer geeks are a little weird. (I should know, I came close to being one. I've even built a few complete typefaces. They weren't good, but the process was highly illuminating.)

appropriate lulz

[solarbird]

Today's PvP:

That's so like trying to find a restaurant with translators

[shunra.livejournal.com]

...if the multilingual menu doesn't meet with their approval, they go elsewhere.

You can get real hungry, real fast that way.

Re: That's so like trying to find a restaurant with translators

[solarbird]

I actually got into a big argument with one of my graphic design professors at UW over Copperplate. I think I won. ^_^

Re: appropriate lulz

[maellenkleth]

o_O I see that was covered-off already. Glad that I am not completely out in left field.