Book Report 1

While en-route from Midland to Naples yesterday I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch. Koch is Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, now the largest privately held company in the world. The book is his management model that caused such success in the last 40 years. He recommends "market based management", using principles that societies need to prosper and implementing them into the organization, a mini-society. These are things like property rights, decision rights, incentives, subjective value and more. It was a good read and a book I will continue to refer back to over the years. I would only recommend it to those in management or leadership positions.

Helvetica, Trebuchet, Times New Roman...

Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless.

In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or ... disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more.

There's great power in a typeface, but what's always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start?

Very interesting write-up here.