hotrod's rhythm n' grammar
Longtime readers might have noticed another small change around these parts over the weekend. We can't recall, exactly, what possessed us over a year ago to eschew the general and long-established standards of prose, but we suspect it was that perceived "relaxed, informal attitude" which seduced us. They're quite the temptresses, those lower-case letters; a man must be cautious.
At any rate, we distinctly recall an IM query on a particularly slow workday from Dabysan about this very issue a few months after we had set up shop. By that time, our "voice" had been established, but we were willing to reconsider our position on capital letters if Vox was willing to reconsider its position on justifying to margins. Since our very first days, this has been our single biggest complaint about Vox. That we are unable to justify to both the right and the left margin at the same time is inexcusable. Justifying to both margins is such a standard feature of, ugh, "word processing," that not including it as an option is not dissimilar to an automobile manufacturer not offering a CD player with the stereo system. Sure, the vehicle works - I guess - but it's so incomprehensibly stupid that it isn't standard issue. This omission is a glaring oversight for what purports to be an online publishing platform, but mostly we just hate that raggedy right margin. And yinz all know how particular we marine biologists can be about aesthetics and design.
We used to complain about this at every opportunity. If yinz check the comments on their release notes from about this time last year through the fall, we believe the record will show us all but begging for a simple justify feature. But we can tell when we have been beaten. We're done. We're tired and we can't carry on this fight any longer. Resistance is futile, as they say. We mean - seriously, why on Earth would Team Vox spend time responding to legitimate user feedback when they can give us a whole bunch of useless shit we didn't ask for like a less intuitive Neighborhood page or a clumsy Vox dashboard or relative timestamps or the fucking Tudors? But what the fuck do we know? We are only a Vox Beta tester from just about the moment they began Beta testing. So yeah, sit back and enjoy your new hotrod.vox.com: now with CAPITAL LETTERS.
[And for the uninitiated, click on the beefy arm at the end of the cartoon to which we linked above - admittedly not one of the best - for more helpful grammar tips. It is to our eternal shame that we were unable to grasp once and for all the subtle differences between "its" and "it's" without Strongbad's guidance.]
Comments
Ragged Right is where it's at. It gives your readers and words some space to breathe, it doesn't keep them all locked in and regimented in their stringent box.
And what's more, I'm not buying this argument that Vox should be given a pass on failing to provide a very basic formatting feature because it's a little bit harder to accomplish. I suppose I could say: "Well sure, I'd like to study the effect of changing currents due to global warming on endangered sea turtles. But the turtles are hard to find because they're, like, rare and stuff. So I'm just gonna stare at these guppies instead." But you won't hear me say that. Sometime you've just got to suck it up and do your fucking job, even if it isn't always easy.
Also, Emma, I love Helvetica Bold. I actually love the simple beauty of Helvetica whether plain or bold.
1/ Their design isn't that much better than most PCs.
2/ Their computing power isn't any better than most PCs.
ergo:
3/ There's no reason their products should cost twice as much as most PCs.
Not that it matters, but in my (limited) coursework on the topic of designing printed materials, full justified text was almost always considered a no-no except in certain types of publications. Blogs did not, however, exist at that time. And it's a proven fact that writing in ALL CAPS is very difficult for readers to read/comprehend, and is ill-advised. I realize that is beside the point, if, in fact, there is a point.