Check out this video prepared by the Women’s Media Center. If you haven’t had lunch yet, hold off. Also, don’t miss the petition further down the page.

I remember being shocked back during the coverage of the disputed Gore-Bush election results in Florida, when a commentator at MSNBC (I think it was Matthews) referred to Katherine Harris as “Cruella DeVil.”

via Salon Broadsheet.

Not at all the same thing as “thought foxes“, but an intriguing moniker nonetheless.

I am reading The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd, basically at the behest of Jeffrey Zeldman, who unfailingly gives good suggestions on what to read (and what to see, and to link to).

I found the ending disappointing, but the observations on design and design-school instruction are priceless.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

—Eliel Saarinen,
quoted by his son Eero,
in Time magazine, June 2, 1977

…she’s quotable:

“Writing about design is like dancing about architecture.”

–Jennifer Ziegler, author of Alpha Dog
and How Not to Be Popular.

Ever wonder where we get the ampersand character from?

Via Daring Fireball, a link to a lovely article from the typographical masters at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Such info appeals to my type-nerd sensibilities, and reminds me of the sterling advice from Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, notably quoted in Ellen Lupton’s outstanding Thinking with Type, and parsed in detail in a session with Mark Boulton at the 2007 SXSW conference. That is, “In heads and titles always use the best ampersand available.”

Seriously, open up a word processor and type some ampersands in different fonts. Check out the bold and italic versions. It isn’t all that tricky to create a CSS class that will ensure that the most attractive symbol on your visitor’s system gets used.

Why be so finicky about a character that essentially arose out of shorthand? Because that is what design is all about, sweating the details and caring about things like ampersands. The statement itself could become a shorthand for a broader philosophy about taking pains to do the best work we can.