We had a conversation about typography over dinner the other night.

Which is odd! And and a little bit uncomfortable! Design and typography are 75% taste, and when taste comes up at dinner, people can get defensive.

Maybe because a lot of designers are condescending blowbags in plaid skinny pants who make too big a deal about font choices and not enough of a deal about communication.

But this post is not about the awful Emporer’s New Clothes nature of graphic design. It’s about dinner on Sunday and punctuation.

Dave heard Terry Gross interview Farhad Manjoo on Fresh Air. Manjoo, the technology writer at Slate, recently wrote a piece called Space Invaders which begins:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

In the column, he goes on to talk about the difference between monospaced (typewriter) fonts and proportionally spaced (computer) fonts, and how the written language evolved into and again out of the custom of using two spaces between sentences. I won’t go into it here; you can read it for yourself in Slate his article.

Manjoo is a one-space man, adamantly. Digital fonts have the correct amount of space after a period built into the period itself. You don’t have to add an extra space. If you do, you risk creating patchy-looking areas of type and interrupting the flow thought.

In her interview, though, Terry Gross gently but firmly disagreed with him. She learned from her mom, a secretary, that you put two spaces after a period. She also thinks using two spaces makes the text easier to read.

So my fam wanted to know, which is right?

Neither. Both. Depends.

The goal of professional typesetting is to create uniform areas of value from the type on the page. In other words, when you look at a page from a distance, the blocks of type should appear fairly homogenous. One paragraph should not be filled with white spaces while while another is jammed together and darker than the rest.

If you’re a graphic designer using professional typesetting software such as Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress to design a book or brochure or ad, you need to achieve that goal. People are paying you. So you leave out the extra space.

Most writing in the wild does not need to look professionally typeset. If you’re an attorney writing a brief, put in the extra space. Especially if all the other guys’ briefs have the extra space, and especially especially if the judge’s decisions have the extra space. Let someone else’s brief imply, “Your honor, you’re doing it wrong.”

If you’re a person who has never given this issue any thought in the past, don’t start worrying about it now. Pick a method and stick with it. Try to keep your writing consistent by not mixing one-space sentence endings with two-space sentence endings. You don’t want to seem flighty.

And relax. If you’re going to worry about your writing, worry about whether what you have to say is worth the trouble.

Huge black type is the the new trendy-trend in web design. I’m seeing it everywhere.

At Brazen Careerist:

And at Wonkette:

And at The Fix, a newish website with all the news about addiction and recovery:

I’m curious about this trend, because it’s anti-fashion. Web design has trended toward the fancy and illustrative over the years. Check out The Best of the Best of CoolHomePages.com.

I’m not sure whether these sites are in fact the best of the best of the coolest home pages in the world. That seems like a bit of extreme SEO-motivated hyperbole. But still, it illustrates my point – that the average web designer knocks himself out to create increasingly gorgeous little fantasy worlds, filled with bacon and butterflies, for visitors. In pastels. So the huge black type sites seem really undesigned.

Also, loud. Huge black type startles me. Yow! On a computer, everything seems more intense. Black is blacker and white is whiter. A point size that would look kind of large on a newspaper seems to take up all the breathing room of a browser.

So what’s up with that? Common sense tells me it’s a money issue. Less design=less expense.

I like it, though. Site developers are putting content first, and they’re thinking about usability.

But I miss the old Wonkette. She was adorable.

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

The best part of many movies and TV shows? The title sequence. Many times, the title sequence is such an exquisite little piece of artwork that I remember it long after I’ve forgotten the movie – Juno, Dawn of the Dead, True Blood.

Other times, the title sequence is a fabulous amuse-bouche preceding an outstanding main course – Six Feet Under, Catch Me If You Can.

I found The Art of the Title Sequence this week (thanks, Cranky!), a website/homage to the movie-before-the-movie. I can’t stop watching.

The editors of the site produced A Short History of Title Design, the above video, as a part of the title design competition at SXSW. It is definitely worth watching. Enjoy.

Google engineers and researchers create fun side projects in their spare time, and they make them available at Google Labs.

My current favorite is Google Ngram, a data visualization tool that graphs the occurrence of particular words and phrases in Google Books.

The above panel charts the occurrence of the word “beer” (the red line) and the phrase “graphic design” (the blue line) in all of Google Books’ English-language sources between 1970 and 2010.

The winner is clear.

This is my mom, Loretta Lauer Foley, with my sister and me, circa about 1964ish. I think we lived in Denver then, but we didn’t stay there long. My dad was in the oil business and Humble (which later was Enco and later still was Exxon) moved us around a lot.

My sister Peggy has a funny look on her face in this picture, but she turned out ok. Very cute, actually, and she’s a CPA as well.

And my mom! She is the prettiest thing ever. Still is. Everything she touches turns out nice, beautiful, put-together. She had a huge influence on me as a designer because she created a home and a world where things were beautiful and done well.

See the ceramic vase on the mantle? She had a couple of these pieces when I was a kid. A few years ago she sent me the ashtray from the set because I mentioned how much I love vintage ashtrays, which are relics of a lost civilization, of my childhood.

I did a bit of Google research on the piece she sent me and found out about the artist who made it, Sascha Brastoff. He was the Jonathan Adler of the 1950s, a hot item. If there were a Design Sponge in 1960, there would have been more than one post about Sascha.

His pieces are collectibles these days, for those of us who are Mid-Century Modern fans. I’ve picked up a few on Ebay. They still look great. Some stuff never goes out of style.

As a designer, I’m always reaching for something that won’t go out of style. I want to create brochures and websites that will not be ridiculous in five years.

That’s a problematic goal, because graphic design is 80% fashion. It’s largely the art (or more accurately, practice) of dangling shiny things in front of the faces of teenagers to trick them into dropping their money.

So where do timelessness and elegance and balance come in? I have yet to figure that out, but I will keep you posted.

And at least, thanks to Loretta, I’ll know it when I see it.

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