Having designed a fair amount of publications over the years —books, magazines, tabloids — we know a thing or three about fonts. Not just display fonts — someone once dared us to find a legitimate use for Comic Sans — but much more importantly, text fonts, the stuff you actually read. Especially if you’re reading at length.

It’s not a question of “readability” as such, but of — pardon the pun — character. Set a given piece in twelve different fonts, and it’ll read in twelve different voices. Some fonts resist their material. Some will make you read too fast for the purpose, or too slow. (We recently set a technogeek thriller in Times New Roman, because that was the only font that made sense for a page-turner. Newspaper fonts are designed for skimming, and that book demanded to be skimmed.)

What you’re looking for — especially if you’re setting a book — is a font that becomes “invisible” to the text, a font that lets you read without thinking about reading. It’s a craft, not a science. It takes judgment, and a good eye.

And it’s why a lot of books suck. They weren’t born bad. They were set that way.

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Shitfaced Steve, Election Fraud Artist Drops Out of Arizona House Race

Republican icon Steve May, confessed drunk driver and election fraud artist from Arizona, dropped his pathetic write-in candidacy for the District 17 Arizona State House seat, after being vilified for recruiting homeless people to stand as straw Green Party candidates in an attempt to Naderize the Democratic vote this fall, in a way only a demented drunk could imagine would be effective.

Have another beer, Steve! Have eleven! They’re small!

Steve, besides being a drunk driver, is a complete and total asshole who exploits the homeless, enabling him to give statements like this, unbothered by any pangs of conscience that would drive any sane non-Republican to swift and conclusive suicide:

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You don’t know him, but Don Unsworth is dead: “In lieu of flowers the family respectfully asks that donations be sent to the American Cancer Society, or to the campaign of anybody who is running against President Barack Obama in 2012.” [WIS-TV]

So, how are things going in that minor primary we haven’t been paying attention to?

The chairman of the Delaware Republican Party received a death threat last week over his support for Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del) over Tea Party challenger Christine O’Donnell in the state’s upcoming Senate primary, a party official confirmed to the Huffington Post.

The threat, issued in the form of an email, told chairman Tom Ross that he deserves “a bullet in the head” for backing “political ass-kissing RINO’s” [Republicans in name only].

“It is one thing to have your country screwed over by socialists, it is far worse to be backstabbed by people pretending to be your friends,” the email read. “We will either rid the GOP of pieces of shit like you, or we will start a new ‘Common Sense Conservative’ party and render you all useless.”

Common Sense Conservative, Common Sense Conservative… Where have we heard that before?

Oh, and by the way, if you’re going to email a death threat, we’re not sure whether it’s common sense to sign it with your name and address.

Tom Ross, Delaware GOP Chair, Threatened With ‘Bullet In The Head’ [HuffPo]

“Charlie Crist, the current governor of Florida and Independent candidate for US Senate, is prepared to issue a ringing endorsement of gay rights in a document slated to be released as early as this week, according to a copy of a position paper provided in advance Sunday to RawStory.com.”

We had little time for reflection this weekend, which is probably a good thing, given the 9/11 porn out there. But we did notice that Newt Gingrich was stepping up his game:

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells us.

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve… He was authentically dishonest.”

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You may or may not recall that I have a love of architecture. You do not know that, after a horrible job experience in DC and before my move to Manhattan, I had a Lost Period and spent 3 months driving to various Frank Lloyd Wright sites. In April of 2000, I made a pilgrimage to Racine, WI to see the Johnson Wax building, perhaps his most impressive commercial building.

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