All About Ransom Note Typography

Once, in a galaxy far, far away…

Wait, that's not right. I'm channeling Star Wars.

Lemme start again.

Space, the final frontier…

Oh dear. Now I'm just embarrassed.


A very long time ago, possibly before you were born, I (that'd be me, Jon, your friendly proprietor in these parts), wanted to be a type designer. Specifically, I wanted to be Hermann Zapf or Matthew Carter, but seeing as how those positions had already been filled admirably by those very men, and, lacking any real talent in the area of drawing, design or aesthetics, I decided not to become a type designer.

However, the dream was always there in the back of my mind, and I even had a name of for my fledgling font foundry, namely: Ransom Note Typography.

The name comes from the early days of the Mac, PageMaker and desktop publishing. People suddenly had the ability to have a zillion fonts on one page and that is exactly what they did. Back in the late 80s, you saw a lot of pieces designed by people who'd been given a Mac, a laser printer and told to "go to town" and "design" us a newsletter. So there was a lot of bad type out there. It's possible I may have been guilty once or twice of committing typographic aberrations. Maybe. I'm not admitting anything. Anyway, the vomitous riot of typefaces on a page is generally called "Ransom Note Typography," because an overabundance of fonts on a page can begin to resemble a ransom note. (Grody to the max as all the valley girls used to say.)

These days I work for a design firm and my job title is Production Artist and System Administrator. Nebulous titles at best, frankly. But I end up spending a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop, which is time well spent and Adobe Illustrator, which is time I could better spend ripping my face off. Someday I'll go into a very long tirade about why I'd rather choke down an uncooked goat than use Illustrator all day long, but not now.

I am married to a delightful woman named Reha, who would rather not be found here in these pages, but she can't quite figure out a way to get rid of me or completely stop me from writing and including her occasionally. Though she does exert some editorial control whenever her name comes up. Contrary to what you might read in some entries where I spout off about having 16, 13, or 19 children; we have four children, two boys and two girls. They are all almost exactly 4 years apart. The spacing of our children and how they got to be almost exactly four years apart is an even longer story that I won't go into now, except to say this: I'm kind of neurotic. As of this writing they range from 17 down to 4 years old. We don't plan on having any more children, though Reha is tempted and threatens to adopt twins, because she is full of crazy.

I was born in Mississippi, moved around a bit as a youth and eventually graduated from High School in Florence, Mississippi. For a very long time I loathed Mississippi and all things southern, but I've pretty much gotten over all that. Growing up (even when it doesn't happen until your 30s) can do wonders for your attitude, I've found. I do not have a southern accent. Though I can tell the difference between a Texas and Alabama accent and have been known to speak "hick" for an entire afternoon, just to make others around me nervous.

I used to have a "/~jon", hand-coded, frames-based monstrosity of a website back in the mid-90s. For approximately 45 seconds, it even had a MIDI background sound, until I realized that was possibly the most annoying thing ever. You can imagine how nice I think it is that myspace has resurrected that practice. I also used the <blink> tag, but I assure you, I was only being ironic. Anyway, that site was lost in the "Great Purge of '97" when I switched ISPs and realized that the 3.5" SCSI optical disk I had been using to store both the site and a bunch of other crap was completely hosed. And the ISP nuked my files mere seconds after I canceled my account and wanted to charge me an exorbitant amount to pull my meager text files off their back up tapes. I made a calculated gamble that the world really wouldn't miss that stuff and what do you know? The masses didn't revolt and the earth kept spinning on its axis.

I try and publish here most weekdays. Though I think I probably average four times a week. I rarely write anything on the weekends. Usually there is at least one post of significant length during the week. Mostly, I keep things light and airy and full of sunshine and puppies, but occasionally I have to break down and talk about my kids. (Cue rim-shot!) In all seriousness, if you are here for serious commentary, you have stumbled into the wrong patch of the IntarWeb. Every so often I spew invective at crazy people on the right of the political spectrum, but that's pretty rare. And I've been known to delve deep into Macintosh arcania and though this sort of behavior is very nerdly and geeky and in character for me, I tend to think other folks do that sort of thing better than me.

I use various Macs to write and produce the site and I use Parallels to test the Dark Side's browsers. All the usual software suspects creep around my Applications folder: Photoshop, TextMate, CSSEdit and CyberDuck. The site is hosted on an Apple Xserve and uses ExpressionEngine for CMS duties. Packet routing and handling duties are from XMission. I also discovered sIFR and have reveled in it of late. The headline font is NeutrafaceDisplay-Medium and it makes me happy and calm with its rather odd "x-height." My wardrobe is courtesy of the 1974 JCPenny catalog. Double-knit shall return one day, I promise!

Feel free to peruse the archives and gaze in wonder at my ability to fill feet and feet of your screen's available space with my drivel. You also might want to delve into the favorite entries over there on the right. Smack the contact section and drop me a line if you are so inclined as well. Unless you are scary, evil or my seventh grade English teacher, you will likely get a response.

Above all, thank you for visiting, reading and indulging my narcissism. My psychoses appreciate it.

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.


 

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

 

©2005-2010 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved.