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Quote of the Day: ‘All Emphasis Is No Emphasis’
The most important rule about emphasis is that all emphasis is no emphasis. Separate elements should not compete for primary attention. Where several items get equal billing, emphasis is cancelled out. In a poorly designed layout, the elements fight for attention–Google it
Almost five decades ago, the future Mr. She and I embarked on a friendly relationship. At the time, I was a graduate student in the MA program in Duquesne University’s English Department. He was a Professor. (I’m still trying to figure out how I can sue for, and make millions off, his privileged, patriarchal, power-imbalanced, and oppressive victimization of yours truly, while still managing to finesse the reality of our forty-year ensuing happy marriage. Stay tuned.)
We bonded over a mutual interest in, and love of, print production. I’d been the editor of both my high school yearbook and magazine. He’d been the same, through both high school and college. And we were both rather good at what we loved to do.
Over the couple of years of our collegial collaboration, we produced many groundbreaking brochures, flyers, mailings, and other pieces of propaganda that directly led to increased interest and enrollment in departmental programs, and registration for outside seminars and conferences. We did well, under pretty straitened circumstances and with what would now be regarded as laughably inadequate technology but which was, thanks to Mr. She’s efforts in securing funding for same, pretty edgy for the time.
It’s an interest I’ve maintained through the ensuing decades, both in professional terms, and voluntary ways. And I’m proud of the results.
One of the things Mr. She taught me, many years ago–perhaps during an effusion on my part of the phenomenon I’ve since criticized, even here, as “Fonts Gone Mad,”–is that “all emphasis is no emphasis.” Thus:
I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to the visual. It also happens with the auditory–what we hear in our heads as we read. Thus, when we on Ricochet read one post after another by certain authors, all delivered at the same volume, all–no matter the subject–shouted at DEFCON 1, eventually we just give up and start to disregard them as a whole and in their entirety.
This result–which often relates to a matter of presentation rather than one of content–is a pity. I don’t like it, but–tired of the din in my ears–I accept it. And I ignore it and move on.
And I just want to say how very much I appreciate the vast majority of my fellow members who temper and adjust the volume as is necessary and appropriate to their post and the content therein. I like nothing more than to be kept guessing as to the author (yeah, I rarely look at “who wrote it” before I start to read, because I don’t care to block on that basis. But–by gum–it gets pretty tiresome, when I’m only one or two sentences in, and I can already tell whose ax is on the grindstone. To my mind, that’s not a feature, that’s a substantial bug. One which speaks to the author’s lack of interest in, and even contempt for, conversation with those who might disagree.)
The late, great, Boss Mongo used to say, “are you picking up what I’m putting down?”
Well?
I am reminded of a guy who worked now and again for my stepdad. There was no need for him to have business cards, but he thought it would be cool so he bought some on his own. Misspelled the name of the business, had four or five different typefaces, and chose colors that were low contrast, making the cards hard to read in dim light. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.
You must love the “coexist” bumper stickers.