That is awesome. Also, that is insane. I think it might be the Esperanto of fonts…

Thinking about this more, it is unlikely that letters evolved to their optimum shapes. However, there's a 2nd, possibly bigger, problem—that the phonetics are also poorly matched to their letter representations.

To do this right, you'd need to identify the basic building blocks of phonemes and represent them visually. And that would be built upon yet another premise, namely that English phonemes make sense.

So I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.<br />
I guess I want fewer aspirational Apples and more Pixar wannabes.<br />
Bless the toolmakers. I’m definitely not complaining here, just thinking out loud, and wondering about this kind of person, the way you might wonder about a world-class tennis player or a wandering ascetic: How can you do that? What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? It is honestly inscrutable to me.<br />
But I also wonder if there are some toolmakers out there right now who feel some of the same doubt. Carried along by the current of conventional (startup) wisdom and, of course, the promise of a great scalable payout…"

RT @dougw: Living in SF Means...

nice collection of writing tips

"I think and hope that's what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do."

"What is special about the number 8,549,176,320? As Mr. Gardner explained in “The Incredible Dr. Matrix” (1976), the number is the 10 natural integers arranged in English alphabetical order."

Collection of blog advice. Most of this is well known, but this collects a lot into one place.

"This series of vignettes is based on a talk I gave on October 27, 2009, at UCLA, as part of the Mobile Media Lecture Series, organized by Casey Reas. It’s mostly about the current state of the digital world (as I see it), and some thoughts about what that world's future could be."

"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary."

"Remarkable guide to shaping a culture of conversation via discussion boards" via HRheingold on Twitter

on freezing to death

watch Paul Graham type an essay

"an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog."

now that's an answer!

" web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences."

"Cooperative multi-user text editing over the internet. Every co-author can edit the shared document at any time, from any place, and at the same time! ... Multiple text cursors visible on the screen. Every user has their own color. Every cursor movement and text changes are simultaneously visible on the screen by all users."

According to court records, Deck and Herson toured the United States from March to May, wiping out errors on government and private signs. On March 28, while at Desert View Watchtower on the South Rim, they used a white-out product and a permanent marker to deface a sign painted more than 60 years ago by artist Mary Colter

records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter.

Awesome... "toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

List of resources for improving your landing page copy. "A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action."

Nice list! "Underlines cut right through the descenders in your typeface, making it harder to read. Instead of text-decoration: underline, use "border-bottom: solid 1px #00f;" to draw a line below your text instead of through it."

neat tool, helpful for finding rhymes and other wordy things

resource for writing poetry

Just in time as Sullivan turns 3 soon... Fun post (thanks gnat). Who would have thought Raul would be as equally good a writer as photographer?

reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher’s guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson pl

based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist.

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits

For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was "transformative," and students' writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

King got the advice to cut down his texts by 10 percent from an old rejection-letter and has abided by this advice for decades.

a collection of words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.

A "Flat Classroom" writing workshop between students of Korea International School (KIS) in Seoul, South Korea, Punahou High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Search questions asked of the AP Styleguide.

How to change the way the world sees you, one thank-you note at a time

Two-word numbers should be expressed in figures.

Excellent resource for grammar rules and lessons

alphabets through the years

55 essential articles I’ve come across that have positively influenced my blog decision-making and will undoubtedly help you too.

English and, I assume, other languages, are full of rules that no one teaches - not to native speakers anyway - but that everyone learns.

These basics of creative communication are consistent across art forms: painting, music, dance, acting, poetry, design, and all other artistic endeavors. I divide them into two categories: vocabulary and grammar.

Some common solecisms

"Good site copy is concise, short, to the point with absolutely no jargon, but it doesn’t start off like this."

lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Works from around the world

[According to Wales] over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." (and whether that is true)

Quicktext is an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird. It adds a menu under the subject from which you easily can insert standard texts that you have defined.

Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages.

kay. After all, there’s always a truth that can be extracted. Let’s say you hate the slippers. How to say thanks? Find the one thing about them that’s nice and discuss it – but don’t get carried away. ‘They are such a lovely shade of blue’ w

The job of the executive summary is to sell, not to describe.

We have built a database of some of the questions sent in to the Oxford Word and Language Service team, so it is likely that if your question is a fairly broad one on grammar, usage, or words then it will be answered here. Simply choose a category and the

Bullfighter is the epoch-defining software that works with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to help you find and eliminate jargon in your documents.

This handout details seven easy steps to becoming a comma super hero.

What writing tips would you whisper to those who aren't aspiring professionals, but would like to write better?

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page

The winning entries in our 16th annual mini short story contest