“Tiny” Agate, R. I.

Dear Tiny: Good question from a Rhode Islander. Most people don’t know it, but, like newspapers,  Rhode Island used to be much larger. In fact, it was so large, its founders considered naming it Rhode Continent. Sadly, revenues began to lag and the state had to cut back, losing most of its size to neighbor states and Canada.

Anyway, to your question. Most experts think that eventually newspapers will achieve the size of singularity, or the infinitely dense and infinitely small single point that many theorize was the size of the universe before the Big Bang.

Experts (and by that term I mean me) have calculated that newspapers will be the size of a paperback book by 2012, a playing card by 2014 and a postage stamp by 2015. Older readers will be mollified with a free magnifying glass with each subscription.

The Society for News Design will create a new category: stamp-size front pages with a circulation of at least seven. The haiku will become the favored format for investigative reporters.

The good news is that the smaller formats will allow newspaper companies to hire back 14 newsworkers of the more than 32,000 who have lost jobs in the past few years. And, of course, all those angels dancing on the head of a pin will have something to read.

Thanks for asking and happy layouts,
Dr. Design

If Dr. Design doesn’t give you the newspaper design answer you need, try contacting me at News Design School.

She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.

“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times.  She lit another.

“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.

“Thanks, bub.”

My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.

“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?”  She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.

“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”

“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.

“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.

“No. I don’t.”

“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”

I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?

(To be continued…)

Jason, Texas: Why do some typefaces have them little feet kind of things on’em and some don’t?

Dr. Design: Well, Tex, those typeface-ical varmints hanging off the end of the letters are called serifs, after the Persian Shah of Omar Serif, who introduced them to the Greeks around 1000 B.C. The Greeks are credited with inventing serifs and then the Romans stole the idea (along with much else from Greek intellectual life).  That’s why we often refer to serif faces as “Roman” type. All that was left for the Greeks was gibberish type used as a placeholder, but they took it because the Italians were putting together a serious bid for what we know now as Greeked type. Italy then had to settle for italics, type that couldn’t even stand up straight, and quite frankly, is a bit effiminate.

That’s when the French got ticked off about being left out of typeface design, and using a special guillotine, Marie Antoinetted the serifs right off. Their general lack of imagination led to letters with same-width strokes, and of course no serifs. That’s why type with the serifs tragically removed by French typeface butchers uses the term “sans serif,” which translates roughly to “Sacrebleu! Zay are gone!”

Tex, hope that helps.

E-mail questions to Dr. Design at doc@newsdesignschool.com.