Picas and Points Introspective Picas and Points Posted on: 30 January 2019 While one of us brandished a ruler festooned with picas to measure a design recently, it occurred to us that picas are likely alien to most people, though we use them throughout most of our work. Both picas and points are units of measurement that are peculiar to and invented for graphic design. Given the ubiquity of word processors, most people are probably familiar with points from the context of font sizes. One point is equal to 1/72nd of an inch, or 0.3528 millimetres. Such a tiny unit of measurement is particularly useful in typography, which requires very meticulous adjustment. Picas are a duodecimal unit of measurement, which means that they consist of 12 parts; one pica is equal to 12 points, which amounts to 1/6th of an inch or 4.2333 millimetres. A measurement in picas is written with a lowercase P distinguishing between whole picas and the remaining points. 1p6, for instance, describes 1.5 picas, or 18 points. Posted on: 30 January 2019
The Ford Family 17 July 2017 Another treasure from our show and tell sessions, Bill recently showed us a copy of a Volkswagon advertisement from 1965 that featured his family (the yellowed nature of which inspired the previous blog posting), revolving around a pun on their last name.
Portrait of the Designer as a Young Monster 28 June 2019 As we descended on the kitchen table for this week’s team-building exercise, we found a metre-long array of brightly-coloured containers of modelling dough splayed across the table, beckoning us like an aesthetic smorgasbord. Edith had scarcely finished instructing us to produce miniature “monster” versions of ourselves with the curious substance hidden within before the canisters were already half-empty, the polychromatic contents being vigorously shaped into our beastly counterparts.