it’s All Around Podcast 002: The Big Box, a response
This is a response to The Diary of a Cartoonist Episode 144, in which Scott Johnson muses on the common controversy surrounding WalMart. I recommend you listen to his podcast (~10 minutes long) before you listen to this response.
For me, the issue isn't about the free market vs. regulation or capitalism vs socialism, it's about human behavior. The rise of WalMart is perhaps the clearest example of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time.
The presence of WalMart, especially in already underprivileged areas, extracts wealth out of communities and destroys all sorts of jobs while offering only sub living wage, short term labor.
Ultimately, people are driven to act against their best interests because they are either lack education or aren't paying attention.
In the end WalMart is here to stay, along with many other monopolistic victors of capitalism. But, as individuals, we shouldn't justify their existence on this fact alone.
Let me know what you think
Relaxing with some fonts
Hey everyone. I'm on vacation in FL, it's night time, I sat down for some aimless websurfing / massaging the rough edges of some of my projects. After getting a couple of timely things done, I followed the path of least resistance and found myself surfing for typesets and fonts. I like to think of myself as an all around web guy who is strongly skewed toward the tech angle, but my little experience in design has lead to me a tremendous respect and fascination with those who can pull off what is impossible for me with seeming ease and grace. Fonts and typesets are dead center on this. I have a special love for exploring the vast landscapes of typesets and reading what font bloggers have to say about them because they are a tool I don't know how to use. Their examples are like walking into a woodshop and watching the carpenter use a dove-tail guide for the first time. Here are a bunch of fonts that look nice but kind of similar. Apply this one the the heading in this size, this one to the body text at this opacity and BAM. Emminently readable and beautiful prose.
I found the most interesting personality here: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
He works part time for typekit (http://typekit.com/), which seems to be a great typesetting product. One line of code on your pages allows you to use a dashboard to control your fonts. The actual fonts themselves are stored on Typekit's servers, for which they guarantee 100% uptime.