Anyone who visits the Pod Academy website, will know that we believe podcasting is a great way to broadcast academic research to a wide audience. Every week thousands of people around the world download our podcasts.
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Know Your Audience and Your Schedule In the first of a three-part series, Digital Editor Cheryl Brumley encourages potential academic podcasters to be realistic about their time, and to consider what their audience might want to hear. A great introduction to those thinking about how podcasting their research.
………………………………………………………………….
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Microphones and Recorders In the second post on academic podcasting, Digital Editor Cheryl Brumley explores the technical side of the medium, arguing the range of recording equipment available makes it easy for the entry-level podcaster to gain surer footing and for the confident podcaster to go further.
………………………………………………………………….
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Post-Production and Audio Platforms In this final post on academic podcasting, Digital Editor Cheryl Brumley talks about post-production and beyond. She gives tips for the novice sound editor, discusses the variety of sound platforms available online. She also gives a list of podcasts to inform and inspire you.
“I feel like I am walking on the edge of a cliff and at any
moment I will fall off”.
A series of unique reports highlighting research by 8 communities living in areas of high deprivation in Northern Ireland reveal rising debt, families in crisis, homes being repossessed and a hidden epidemic of anxiety and depression. Their collective findings suggest a heavy social, health and economic cost for Northern Ireland in years to come.
The reports are published by PSE (Poverty and Social Exclusion), a research collaboration between several UK universities mapping poverty and social exclusion in the UK. PSE is funded by the ESRC.
The quote at the start of this blog is from the second of the Hard Times reports, which looks particularly at the psychological and social costs of increasing poverty in Northern Ireland. It finds
Events like Christmas which were once celebratory are now a burden for many.
Few people are able to save for a rainy day.
Money worries, anxiety and fears over changes to Social Securityprovision are profoundly impacting on people’s physical and mental health.
These stresses are also placing great pressure on family life and on relationships.
People desperately need more emoional and pracical support at a local level.
The Third Peter Townsend Memorial Conference, organised by PSE, will be held on 19-20 June at Conway Hall. It is free to attend. Sign up here.
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
That sentence contains all nine ways of pronouncing the letters ‘ough’ in English. It is a seemingly chaotic language. Indeed playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that the word ‘ghoti’ should be pronounced ‘fish’ (gh = f, o as in women, ti as in nation). So what tips can we offer anyone trying to spell in English?
Children who compete in spelling bees often dazzle with their ability to spell complex words. In this year’s televised Scripps National Spelling Bee, two American teenagers were so good they were crowned joint champions, correctly spelling the words “stichomythia” and “feuilleton” to clinch the title.
Contestants in a spelling bee are allowed to ask about the pronunciation, the meaning, and the language of origin of a word. All these are key to a good grasp of spelling.
English is a chaotic and highly irregular writing system, according to some observers. In this view, we can’t do much more than memorise the spellings of words.
But studies of the English writing system itself and of spellers paint a more encouraging picture. English isn’t totally chaotic. There are things that spellers can do to increase their chances of spelling a word correctly.
Break it down
Breaking a word up into individual phonemes (units of sound) and selecting a letter or letter group for each unit is a good strategy for spelling many words. In some languages, such as Finnish, almost all phonemes have just one possible spelling and this strategy works very well. In English, however, many phonemes have more than one possible spelling.
What children are taught at school are usually context-free rules that link phonemes and letters. For example, children are taught that the “f” sound is spelled with f, as in fish, or that the “short o” sound is spelled with o, as in pond.
Put it into context
If spellers relied only on such context-free links between phonemes and letters, they would misspell many sounds, including the “f” of staff and the “o” of wand. Taking the neighbouring sounds and letters into account can often improve performance in such cases.
In English, there is a general rule that the “f” sound has a special two-letter spelling, ff, when it comes after a single-letter vowel. Similarly, “l” has the ll spelling in such cases and “k” has the ckspelling. Even when this rule is not explicitly taught, my research has shown that people pick it up through their exposure to written words. They use the context in which a sound like “f” occurs when deciding how to spell it, favouring f in some environments and ff in others.
As another example, people become sensitive to the fact that “o” tends to be spelled differently when it comes after the “w” sound, as in wand, than when it comes after other sounds, as in pond. Children with higher levels of spelling skill take better advantageof the context of consonants than children with lower levels of spelling skill.
Meaning matters
Spelling in English is not just a matter of attending to sounds. It also requires attention to meaning. For example, the “t” as the end of words is usually spelled as ed when it is a word ending that conveys the past tense. In other cases, it is usually spelled as t. There can be added confusion due to the differences between American and British spelling.
A six-year-old who writes Jak jumpt for Jack jumped doesn’t yet know this. Within a year or two, however, children have begun to learn about the meaning units within words and how these sometimes influence spelling. That knowledge can help them to spell a word like health correctly, with the ea that is found in healrather than the e that would be expected purely on the basis of sound.
English has borrowed words from many languages, and knowing the origin of a word can sometimes help in choosing among possible spellings of its sounds. The “k” at the end of words is normally spelled as ck when it is preceded by a single vowel, as in chick. When the word is French in origin, however, this sound is more likely to be spelled as c, as in chic.
Not everyone can be a spelling bee champion, but these techniques can help everyone to become a better speller.
People are very good at moving in time to a beat. When you listen to your favourite song, you will probably find yourself nodding your head or tapping your foot along almost instinctively.
And when you’re doing it in a club, that piles pressure on your DJ. That DJ has to mix two songs together to maintain a common beat between the tracks if they want to keep the audience dancing. If they do a bad job of the mix, the two beat lines from each song won’t blend into each other. The most likely result of such a faux pas would be an instantly empty dance floor.
This post by Mark Elliot, a Research Fellow in the Sensory Motor Neuroscience (SyMoN) lab first appeared on The Conversation website
We’ve been investigating how closely matched two beat lines need to be for people to start moving in time to them as if they form a common beat. In other words, how accurate does a DJ need to be to make a seamless transition between songs?
We asked people to tap their finger in time to two metronomes played simultaneously. The separation between the two metronomes and the consistency (the predictability of the rhythms) was varied across the experiment.
We found that if the metronomes were very consistent, they had to be closely matched in time for them to be considered a common beat. But if the beats of the individual metronomes were inconsistent and less predictable, the separation between the beats could be larger while still being considered to form a single common beat.
Since a DJ will typically play tunes with a strongly defined beat, our research shows that in fact they have a very small margin of error to make the two beat lines sound as one to the dancing crowd.
The skill of DJing is probably more complex than people realise. Many of them might be high profile and living a super-star lifestyle but the professional DJ is an as-yet largely under-researched species. Along with the University of Leeds, we’re now investigating the timing skills of professional DJs who have only received informal training (as is generally the case) and comparing them to formally trained classical musicians.
Mathematical moshing
The models resulting from this research are also being applied to other areas, including crowd movements. In football stadiums the crowd will often become excited and start to bounce up and down together.
When the crowd moves together like this it can create problems with structural vibration so it’s useful to understand how and when a crowd is likely to start moving in synchrony.
The conditions under which this occurs are oddly similar to the beat matching of songs. A crowd moving together has developed a common beat between them. In this case however, rather than just sound, they are also combining vision and touch from the people surrounding them. We are working towards understanding how the brain combines all this conflicting and unreliable sensory information to develop a common beat to which everyone moves.
Information like this can then be used to inform the construction of stadiums and bridges. This should result in better structural designs with less wobble when the crowd get excited.
So next time you scoff at the superstar DJ being paid a fortune to play a few songs, give them a little credit. These results show that we continuously adjust our judgements of events in our environment according to the statistics of the sensory information we get from those events. Making two beats into one, maintaining your audience as you go, is a fine art.
Controversy continues to envelop Richard Scudamore, the long-standing Chief Executive of the English Premier League, nearly two weeks after sexist emails he exchanged with business associates were leaked by a former personal assistant. His future at the helm of the league remains in doubt despite the decision of its constituent clubs, and more latterly the Football Association (FA), to take no further disciplinary action following his public apology.
Why has the Scudamore affair caused so much controversy? For the most part the media has been split along familiar lines. On one side are those who argue that Scudamore’s apology is sufficient recompense for his “private” indiscretions and that the clamouring for further disciplinary action is not only unwarranted, but illustrative of the vengeful, hypocritical stance of the “professionally outraged”. There are others, such as the Women in Football network, who claim that such “everyday” sexism reflects a dysfunctional working culture that is “a long way from equality”.
The danger of reducing the debate to familiar tabloid terrain on the boundaries of political correctness is that it neglects the deeper tensions at play. The Premier League’s handling of the affair demonstrates its inability to regulate itself effectively. The internal investigation was conducted by Peter McCormick, the league chairman and only other member of the two-man board in addition to Scudamore. The decision to involve the league’s audit and remuneration committee, a body made up of another four white, middle-aged men with no remit for equality and diversity issues, to add a veneer of legitimacy to the decision appears to have been a redundant exercise. As David Conn highlights, the four appointees are not independent non-executive directors, but there on the exclusive patronage of Scudamore.
Despite the relative modernity of the Premier League – it was created as a breakaway from the rest of Football League in 1992 – it displays many of the characteristic traits and pathologies of other more traditional institutions in British social, political and economic life. It is characterised by oligarchic, informal and secretive governance practices – what David Marquand called “club government”. In this club world, members trust each other to observe “the spirit of the club rules”; the notion that the principles underlying the rules should be clearly defined and publicly proclaimed is profoundly alien.
It is ironic that the Premier League has come to reflect these features of traditional British institutions given its avowed rejection of the FA as a model of governance. In place of the FA’s stuffy “blazer brigade” of county association old boys was to be the brave new dawn of the Premier League, which was to be professionalised, strategic and commercially astute. On one level the Premier League been an unmitigated success; the huge revenue streams negotiated for member clubs is the main motivation for the rear-guard defence of Scudamore in the face of the recent backlash.
In stark contrast, however, to its self-portrayal as a modern, corporate entity the Premier League is entrenched in a governance culture that can be traced back to the 19th century, where sport and the other emerging professions of law, medicine and engineering were a haven for self-regulation.
The fact that Scudamore and his associates felt able – sexist discrimination aside for a moment – to engage in those conversations in their professional capacity reveals that they view the workplace as a private sphere, separate from the other stakeholders in football and the rest of society. Their behaviour reveals more than the tendency of white, middle-aged men with a penchant for golf and shooting to make boorish, sexist remarks. For this elite there seems to be little distinction made between the office, the gold club or the shooting range – they are all enclaves of the same interconnecting club world. The notion that these conversations were “private” has been reasserted in the Premier League’s statement, which denounces the actions of Scudamore’s former PA despite the fact they were sent from an official email address.
The problem for organisations entrenched in this 19th century model is that they are being increasingly challenged in an era of open source information. The public’s demand for greater transparency is breaking down the closed world of the interlocking elites – whether it is parliament (and the expenses scandal), the press (and hacking), or the police (and manipulation of crime statistics). Increased access to information allows the public to better scrutinise the internal operations of these institutions. In the most closed and secretive domains, insiders who refuse to comply with the “spirit” of the club rules are leaking or whistleblowing in the public interest.
These tensions create a double-edged sword for democracy. In one sense the increased scrutiny of key institutions is a good sign – it suggests a maturing democracy with an engaged and increasingly informed electorate. But it is also creates a dilemma for powerful institutions. The first instinct of the elites is to mount a defiant defence of the club’s informal rules, alongside some expression of regret and contrition and a promise that it will be never be repeated. But this strategy is becoming increasingly unsustainable in the face of public criticism and calls for more open governance.
Without thorough institutional reform that addresses the fundamental principles of organisations, such as the Premier League and the FA, tensions over issues like the sexist emails will only become more frequent. A failure to create more open and democratic governance structures will breed resentment and disenchantment, which will damage the legitimacy of these institutions to oversee important areas of social and economic life
In 2015, the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – broad targets for eradicating poverty and disease and improving worldwide rates of primary education, maternal health and gender equality- will be replaced with newly agreed goals.
The MDG approach was a new one for development policy, seeking to focus the attention and efforts of the international community on a clear set of shared targets – but inevitably there were criticisms that some crucial areas had been overlooked. One overlooked area was Higher Education.
Now, as the world discusses what should replace the MDGs, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) is campaigning for recognition of the fundamental importance of Higher Education for development.
A vibrant Higher Education sector is crucial for many reasons, as Jay Kuber of the ACU explains in this podcast. Firstly, universities undertake research that can inform government policy making; secondly, through their teaching, they also produce the educated men and women needed to run businesses, public services, engineering and agriculture; and thirdly, by building partnerships with local communities, they also make a major contribution to sustainable development on a local and regional level.
The ACU campaign – The world beyond 2015: Is Higher Education ready? – poses the following questions:
Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education?
How are universities already addressing local, national and international issues?
How can universities prepare to respond ot the Post-2015 agenda?
What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives?
How can universities champion thier contributions to wider society?
How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?
If you want to know more, or you want to join the ACU’s campaign to raise awareness of how higher education can and should respond to global challenges beyond 2015, go to their website: www.acu.ac.uk/beyond-2015 and follow them on Twitter @HEbeyond2015.
With the football World Cup almost upon us, it is worth reflecting on the power of sport in diplomacy. In 2009 Victor Cha, the former director of Asian affairs for the White House, argued that sport matters because it can provide opportunities for interventions; can help countries to win friends; and can be less aloof than some forms of diplomacy.
The UN has recognised that this is not just a question of self-interest. In the 20 years between October 1993 and November 2013 the UN General Assembly passed 23 resolutions advocating a greater role for sport within international development and peacekeeping efforts.
The UN designated April 6 as the official international day of sport for development and peace. When the assembly made the announcement back in August 2013, it encouraged member states to recognise the role of sport in peace-building and conflict resolution.
For these reasons, numerous countries have made international sport a high priority. One good example is Norway. The Norway Cup has taken place every year since 1972 and is one of the world’s largest football tournaments for children aged 12 to 19. There are around 30,000 participants, 52 nations, 1200 volunteers and in 2012 3800 matches across 62 pitches.
The aim of the tournament is to create bonds between children and nations – and win friends for Norway through sport. The Norwegian minister of international development has talked ofthe role this project plays in promoting internationalism and co-operation between Norway and for example, Brazil, Kenya and Palestine.
Norway also funds sport and development scholarships for international students to attend Norwegian universities where you can learn about sports policy, management and international development.
Chinese assistance
In the same context, China demonstrated its support for Africain the build-up to the 2010 football world cup in South Africa by providing additional resources, knowledge and capability around infrastructure projects.
Equally the episodic cricket diplomacy between India and Pakistan demonstrates how a shared common interest in cricket has from time to time helped to cool relations despite decades of bitterness.
Many countries have set targets for the percentage of GDP that they are prepared to spend on overseas development assistance.Canada has set it at 0.7% and is suggesting that 1% of this money should be allocated to international development work through sport.
So what about Scotland and the UK? There is certainly some recognition of the merits of such approaches on these shores. The House of Lords report, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World, published earlier this year supports a similar line of thinking:
Sport has an almost universal appeal that crosses languages and cultural barriers, which makes it in the British Council’s eyes, ‘the most accessible and exportable of the UK’s soft powers’.
The UK has had its moments, notably the International Inspiration Programme, which invested in sports development projects in over 100 countries on the back of the 2012 Olympics. This was a laudable effort, but it happened on the back of one major sporting event. This is not in the same category as making a chunk of the international development budget permanently available to sport.
Times have changed as Scotland prepares for an independence referendum that looks set to attract a large proportion of yes voters. Sport has not featured heavily during campaigning so far, though that may well change when the Commonwealth Gamescomes to Glasgow in July and it has It has a great claim to being the world home of golf, even though the Dutch and Chinese might disagree.
Either way, Scotland’s reliance on the sports field for its sense of self is undiminished, it will be interesting to see if it emerges in campaigning around the independence referendum.
We now know that rising global ocean surface temperatures directly influence UK winter rainfall. How do we know? Because thousands of members of the public participated in the biggest ever climate modelling exercise: they offered up spare processing capacity on their home computers to run the calculations via the Climate Prediction citizen science climate modelling programme.
The results affirm the strong and growing scientific consensus that is developing as we come to understand more and more of the physical origins and consequences of climate change,. Prof Simon Redfern, Friederike Otto, Prof Myles Allen and Prof Thomas Stocker the authors of the post below (which first appeared on The Conversation website) say that those who choose to ignore them, or contradict them, will still be directly affected by them.
…………………
Britain’s warm, wet winter brought floods and misery to many living across southern England, with large parts of Somerset lying underwater for months. When in January rainfall was double the expected average over wide areas, many people made cautious links between such extreme weather and global climate change. There were nay-sayers at the time but it now seems that there is evidence for those links.
Speaking at the European Geosciences Union annual meetinghere in Vienna, Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, presented his take on the issue. At the gathering of more than 12,000 geoscientists, Allen reported an ambitious computer experiment that his team has undertaken over the last two months to test whether the winter floods could be attributed to climate change. And it seems that they can be linked.
The floods of January 2014 certainly were extreme. According to Oxford’s records of daily rainfall, they were unprecedented in 250 years. The records at the UK Met Office from the 20th century also show that this winter was, historically, uniquely bad.
Flooded rivers wash huge amounts of sediment into estuaries around southern Britain in February.NEODAAS/University of Dundee
Click to enlarge
The IPCC report does suggest that extreme weather events should be expected as the world warms but the prediction is couched in cautious terms and the risk is assessed as “medium” confidence.
At the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford, researchers Nathalie Schaller and Friederike Otto analysed results from almost 40,000 climate model calculations to test the impact of climate change on Britain’s winter rains. Their calculations modelled the weather across the country on a 50km grid. They compared the results of 12,842 simulations based on the current global sea surface temperatures, with 25,893 results computed on the assumption that global warming had never occurred – that fossil fuel burning had not raised CO2 to today’s levels and ocean surfaces were cooler.
Such a huge number of calculations was needed to tease out the statistical differences between the two scenarios. It was only possible through the participation of thousands of members of the public in the work’s biggest ever climate modelling exercise: they offered up spare processing capacity on their home computers to run the calculations via the Climate Prediction citizen science climate modelling programme.
The difference between observed winter (blue) and climate change-free simulated winter (green) shows increased seasonal rainfall and greater likelihood of extreme rainfall.
Click to enlarge
The results showed a subtle bias towards more extreme weather in today’s warming world. Events that would have been expected once in 100 years before global warming can now be anticipated to occur once in 80 years. In essence, the probability of extreme winter floods appears to have increased by 25% on pre-industrial levels.
Allen pointed out that this is the first quantitative evaluation of the influence of global warming on Britain’s 2014 floods. Thomas Stocker, a professor of climate and environmental physics at the University of Bern and chairman of the IPCC working group charged with assessing the physical origins of climate change, said that the Oxford group’s results had “shown movement in one direction only – toward greater risk”.
Although the results from the models cannot yet give definite measures of the probability of a flood, they do provide an insight into how those risks have changed and continue to change – information that is of great interest to insurance underwriters, among others.
Otto said: “Past greenhouse gas emission and other forms of pollution have loaded the weather dice”, adding that she and others were still working on investigating the implications of the results, for river flows, flooding and ultimately the threat to property and lives.
Some will, no doubt, question the result on the basis that it is “simply” a statistical test. The results from the two modelling scenarios are, at first sight, very similar. But the fact remains that they are distinct, showing that rising global ocean surface temperatures directly influence UK winter rainfall.
The results affirm the strong and growing scientific consensus developing from the understanding of the physical origins and consequences of climate change, as outlined in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Working Group 1 report last September. Those that choose to ignore them, or contradict them, will (I predict) still be directly affected by them. And we will be hit where it hurts most – in our wallets. How likely is it that the insurance industry will ignore such results?
UK healthcare professionals will now be able to read cutting-edge research for free as a result of an an agreement between Jisc, the UK charity that promotes the use of digital technologies in academic research, and scientific journal publishers.
A year-long pilot will allow staff working across the NHS in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland free trial access to some of the most respected medical and scientific journals so they can read for themselves the latest trials and research. This is good news for evidence-based healthcare and will give healthcare professionals the opportunity to weigh up the latest developments in the study of disease.
Lorraine Estelle, executive director content and discovery and divisional CEO Jisc Collections said: “Jisc is committed to opening up research so that academics and clinicians can read the latest studies and develop a broader understanding of disease and treatment. This work is supported by the government-commissioned Finch report into research availability which recommended that more research journals be available to healthcare professionals.”
Chair Dr Paul Ayris said on behalf of the steering group: “Practitioners in the NHS will benefit from the content that is being made available in this pilot, based on the recommendations of the Finch report. Access to high quality information is key to good clinical practice and patients can only benefit from the well-informed clinical community that will result from this work.”
After the trial period of a year the steering group will determine how to take forward future opportunities for NHS staff to access research journals. NHS practitioners should contact their trust or Health Board librarian for information on the trial.
The Comic Sans typeface has been used in everything from Papal documents to physics presentations. It is perhaps the most loved, and most loathed, typeface on the planet! Now a new version has appeared, promising to lend credibility to the comic line of typefaces.
Comic Neue, designed by Craig Rozynski, is like Comic Sans but has been designed with some key differences that are supposed to make it less unsightly.
We don’t normally talk about typography and often only notice typefaces when they are atypical or inhibit our ability to read. Comic Sans is different. It divides opinion among those who don’t usually identify as typeface enthusiasts. And in its wake, Comic Neue is causing a stir too.
Rozynski says on his website that the typeface “aspires to be the casual script choice for everyone including the typographically savvy”. Do we really need another comic script though? Was Comic Sans really that bad in the first place?
The unloved typeface
If you have been near a computer in the past 20 years, you have likely encountered Comic Sans, the “fun” typeface with rounded edges that appears to be written with a felt-tipped pen.
If you are an amateur designer, it’s the go-to typeface for just about any occasion that requires a relaxed approach. If you are an experienced designer, it’s the last typeface you’d ever use, unless you want to be ridiculed without mercy.
The typeface, now approaching its 20th anniversary, was originally designed by Vincent Connare for Microsoft Bob, Microsoft’s 1995 interface for various iterations of Windows.
Microsoft Bob came with a dog that would interact with the user. In the initial version of Bob, the dog offered assistance in speech bubbles using Times New Roman. Connare decided that comic dogs probably wouldn’t “speak” that way, and went to work designing something more interesting. He used the hand-drawn characters found in popular comic books like The Dark Knight Returns and the Watchmen series as inspiration for what would later become Comic Sans.
Since then, the typeface has been used for everything from physics presentations to papal documents and its popularity is only matched by the disdain some people have for it. People feel so strongly about the typeface that there is even a websitedevoted to banning Comic Sans entirely. It is this ridicule that prompted Craig Rozynski to redesign the typeface into the new Comic Neue.
Friendly font
Comic Neue is a sans serif typeface designed to appear casual and friendly. There are numerous different characteristics of the typeface that convey this tone. Generally speaking, the more a typeface resembles handwritten text, the more it is perceived as casual.
Click to enlarge
Each letter, or character, in a typeface is comprised of a series of straight and curved lines called strokes. While some typefaces change the width of a stroke drastically, each stroke of Comic Neue is the same width throughout. This creates what designers call a mono-weight typeface. These mono-weight strokes mirror the strokes you would get with a pen or pencil. The end of each Comic Neue stroke also comes to a rounded point, which again mirrors handwriting.
Certain characters, such as the lowercase a and g also tell us a great deal about the tone of a typeface. These specific letters have two different variations, known as single and double story.
Single story letters have one enclosed or mostly enclosed space, called a counter. Double story letters have two counters. Single story letters, like those found in Comic Neue, are considered more casual and friendly.
All of these casual attributes can be found in both Comic Sans and Comic Neue. What separates Comic Neue from Comic Sans, however, is the perfection found within each character. Where Comic Sans strokes are often crooked, Comic Neue strokes are exact. The vertical strokes are perfectly vertical and the counters are uniformly rounded. These small changes, combined with a thinner stroke throughout, convey a slightly more professional tone.
Your neue best friend?
Comic Sans is arguably the most misused typeface in history. It incites laughter in some people and rage in others. While the changes made to it to create Comic Neue do contribute to a more professional tone, there is no way to tell if the typeface will be more socially accepted.
The reputation of the comic typefaces may well be irreversibly tainted forever. Some might argue that is a good thing. The internet enables access to a seemingly endless selection of “comic” typefaces: Janda Manatee; Smart Kid; Action Man;Cartwheel; Rudiment; or even the rather unwieldly-named Year Supply of Fairy Cakes. But few of these have ever made it into the mainstream.
Yet other much maligned typefaces are regularly used. Papyrus, a font which many hate as much as Comic Sans, remains a mainstay for many designers.
So can legitimacy be granted to a family of fonts that, by their very nature, are designed for fun? The remains to be seen. In the meantime, Comic Neue offers us one more opportunity to decide if we really need a comic font for that all-important business document.*
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Know Your Audience and Your Schedule
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Microphones and Recorders
The Simple Guide to Academic Podcasting: Post-Production and Audio Platforms
Subscribe with…