Typography – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Typography’ Category
Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman
June 16, 2025
The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Posted in Design, Language and food, Morning names, Music, Names, Professional names, Typography | Leave a Comment »
He shot the serif
October 6, 2018
Today’s Wayno/Bizarro collab:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A play on the
NO SHOES / NO SHIRT / NO SERVICE
sign in some restaurants. Here enforced by a maître d’ who’s a (serifed) uppercase B. Suitably serifed uppercase diners fill the seats, while a shirted and shod but sans-serif uppercase T realizes he won’t be served.
Posted in Etymology, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Typography | Leave a Comment »
Figurative language to the rescue
September 24, 2016
The One Big Happy in my comics feed this morning (apparently from August 23rd):
(#1)
Here, Ruthie doesn’t know (or has forgotten) the precise lexical item turban, so she uses figurative language to get a descriptive term. To understand this, you need to know about Jiffy Pop, of course.
Posted in Figurative language, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Typography | 1 Comment »
Odds and ends 8/16/13
August 16, 2013
Some more short takes, on a notable person, avoidance of non-taboo words, wordless instructions, typefaces, and a libfix.
Posted in Captioning, Facial expression and gesture, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, People, Taboo language and slurs, Typography | 1 Comment »