If you're demonstrating, carry a sign you can read

I’ve gone off on illegible demonstration signs and General Assembly banners before (see the old article for other resource links) but reading the headline immigration story at UUA.org today reminds me how miserable the state of this essential democratic handicraft is. Scrawling a Sharpie on poster board doesn’t cut it. On the other hand, perhaps people are learning to dress for demonstrations again. Deo gratia!
So I’m pointing back to lessons Speedball has for download. Obviously it is to pimp their wares, but that’s fine. I used to go to that site quite a bit and it has been greatly improved. Read up on hand lettering — like those signs you used to see in grocery stores; am I showing my age? — and screen printing. Good PDF downloads of classic guides. Grab them.

Ya’ ain’t going to learn those skills watching HGTV.

Lessons from Speedball Arts Supply Company 

Alternative banner pole for GA?

Environmentally speaking, PVC is not a good product, but nevertheless each year at General Assembly hundreds of banner carriers process in the opening ceremony carrying banner poles made of PVC pipe. Since they’re cheap and easy to make (but quite bulky) I have to think that relatively few make it home for reuse. And it seems green issues are being taken seriously at GA this year.

Plus, I think they’re pretty ugly, and a heavy (say, quilted) banner can be unwieldy given the banner pole’s cantilevered yet slippery jointed design. Heck, even a draft in the plenary hall can make banners yaw wildly. Does anyone know of an alternative, either made or bought? It shouldn’t be terribly expensive and should be reusable and able to fit in a piece of checked luggage.Please comment.

Current banner pole directions (PDF format)

More typefaces to consider

This is for you, PeaceBang.

I use the typefaces released under a liberal license by Bitstream, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, almost every day. These include the Bitstream Vera family (look past the Mono series for church pubs) and Bitstream Charter. All are robust enough to stand up to laser printer and photocopying, which would shatter the details more delicate faces.
They don’t include the true small caps and oldstyle numerals, but I liked Charter so much that I bought a supplemental set of these for $25.

Wikipedia article on Bitstream Vera, showing examples

Gnome project page about Bitstream Vera with background infomation, download links, and the license

Images of Bitstream Charter with links to where you would buy it

But download it for free here.

I also wrote about Gentium two years ago, and it might even be better.

Two delightful typefaces for your church newsletter

When it comes to techy stuff, I have the attention span of a hummingbird.

After begging off the advanced typesetting TeX, LaTeX, etc. software systems in January, a comment by Dan Harper has me trying to learn it all over again. This time I’m actually reading the tutorials and doing the exercises rather than doing the Myers-Brigg hyper-N thing (which I usually do successfully.)

There’s some general weirdness about TeX and typefaces that I won’t get into, but when scouting out some that I might want to use with my New Project, I found two that have versions suitable for installing for use in your ordinary word processors or what have you.

Both come from the Polish GUST project, which though natively adapted to that language, is OK for English. (Some German fonts seem a tad monumental when setting English.)

The first is Antykwa Torunska, (“Antiqua of Torun“) It has nice open counters (the “holes” in certain letters), chunky slab serifs that keep it from being too formal, and style that appeals to the traditional and modern in different ways. It comes in several different weights, have Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, plus true small caps and text figures (a.k.a. oldstyle numerals). Oh, and it is free and under a liberal license.

The other is Iwona, a tapered sans serif. Not as thrilling, but the extra weights, alphabets, and those rarer-than-hen’s-teeth true small caps and text figures in a free font makes it work a look. (This project has other faces, none are interesting.)

Bruderhof books

2010: Use this link for the Leaving Muenster blog post — goodness, it was a great blog and I do miss it — and this one for the Bruderhof books. The following I’ll keep as I originally wrote it.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the Bruderhof sites being taken down. Graham Old, of Leaving Muenster, isn’t criticizing their decision, but notes the loss of the downloadable books, their crowning accomplishment.

And he has them online to download (bless his bandwidth) until he hears from the Bruderhof if he can continue to do so. If the thumb goes up, I’ll do my part and have a couple of the books available here, too.

Even if you’re not interested in the Bruderhof or their literature, you might like to see this alternate mode of publishing. Note that some are all are also available in dead-tree format. (I own a copy of God’s Revolution, for instance.)

Bruderhof E-books available

Publish and perish

The combination of a small professional college and the allure of the printed word has a strange effect on Unitarian Universalists: a writer can adopt a good reputation (or bury a bad one) by getting books published. It is a dire shame there are so many sloppy works out there, by which I include substance and style. A sloppy production job cheapens a good idea. I’m thinking of a perfectly adequate liturgical work published by one of the UU professional organizations so riddled with typos — was it proofed at all? — that halfway through skimming it I picked up a pencil and added typographical marks.

Which leads me back to Will Shetterly’s post about self-published works that started me thinking about this. At Day Job, I work with the production (less) and sale (more) of books in a not-for-profit organization, and know first-hand that producing and promoting good books takes more time and money than most imagine. A good but plainly unprofitable work will not get published by an established press. Sometimes the market is too saturated, or there’s no clear audience. If a press won’t take the work on, pity the self-publisher who tries.

That said, there is a place for works too marginal to be profitable, and I wonder if online versions or PDF versions won’t increasingly fill the gap. That said, most of the work that would do into the production of a good book would also have to be put into a good PDF, save the actual act of printing and mailing printed copies. Shared proofreading and editing, honest feedback, and a cultivated eye for plain-if-honest style would go a good way to making self-published works bearable. Asking the hard questions with candor — does anyone care? or need this? — would save later hurt feelings. Finding one’s audience before the effort is made is even more important. Small publishers often ask authors for the names of two hundred or more likely customers before they even accept the manuscript for review.

Thus some resolve: I’m thinking of creating a couple of PDF books of important Universalist documents, but I’ll see if there’s interest here first.

Fighting Lombards!?

Adam refers to the “fighting Lombards” of Meadville/Lombard, his M.Div. alma mater. I conclude the allusion is to the Germanic nation rather than the former students of the college, formerly of Galesburg, Ill., which gives M/L its Universalist heritage. I’m thinking intermural sports teams? (Though I think the Episcopal seminaries have the best intermural championship name.)
Go Team
The comment reminded me of one of my favorite typefaces, Lombardic, by Manfred Klein. I used it for my defunct blog, New Church Mission, and it is great looking for many traditional church projects.

Download the TrueType file.