“Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style” has sold more than 10 million copies since its initial publication in April 1959.

Newsday highlights the 50^th anniversary of the classic text on English grammar and writing style.

This is the book on the subject.

The best book of writing advice I’ve ever read. I read it cover-to-cover about once a year.

– John Gruber

I considered offering my copy out for loan. However, I would not be happy without a copy in my possession. It is a small book, and you owe yourself an edition of it.

It saddens me that writing style seems a fading art. This book is not read enough.



Dreams

An export reckons that people who use their visual imagination during the day — artists, designers, architects, photographers, film directors and the like — rarely have spectacular mind-blowing dreams. These, paradoxically, tend to be bestowed on those whose daily work is more predictably routine.

— The art of looking sideways, p67

Ideas

Statistics state that in London you’re never more than seventy feet away from a rat. I often feel the same about finding a solution to a problem. You can’t come up with the answer but know that it’s hanging around somewhere.

Everything is connected to everything else and searching for solutions often requires being alert to spot the unlikely connections …

— The art of looking sideways, p76

Intelligence

Indeed ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

— The art of looking sideways, p118

Paradigms

‘There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, more uncertain in success, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things’, wrote Machiavelli, ‘because the innovator will have for enemies all who have done well under the old conditions, and only luke-warm defenders who do well under the new.’

— The art of looking sideways, p110

The art of looking sideways is Alan Fletcher’s ode to design, creativity, life and everything in between. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, I’m only partially through the book as it is quite dense in information. This is a book that I find myself dipping into for inspiration. A book that is likely to be close to hand for as long as I can read.

Design is not a thing you do. It’s a way of life.

— Alan Fletcher

James Duncan Davidson writes a bit about fixed width fonts on Mac OS X:

• The case for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, a font distributed with Gnome.
• Quicklook and Fonts.
• and, A sorting problem with fonts.

I’ve long been a fan of Monaco with anti-aliasing for my Terminal font, but I’m now sold on Panic Sans. John Gruber mentioned it in his link blog, it comes with Coda and is based on Bitstream Vera Sans with better punctuation.

Sold.

If you’re interested in typography, odds are you’ve already read The Elements of Typographic Style.

If you’re not interested in typography, design, fonts, or any related area, skip the book. However, you may still find the turn of phrase in the following quote to be interesting.

… setting type is a collaborative exercise, like acting from a script or playing from a score. The editing of type, like the editing of music, and the tuning of fonts, like the tuning of instruments, never ends.

There are those who dream of a perfect world in which copyrighted text is translated into copyrighted glyphs through copyrighted rules with no more human intervention than it takes to feed a tape to a machine, while money flows in perpetuity to everyone involved. There are also those that think that putting chairs and air-conditioners in hell will make it just as good as heaven. Actually, working with type is an earthly task, much less like sitting down and turning on TV than like walking on your hands across an ever-varied, never-ending landscape that is otherwise too far away to see.

Written by an author who is clearly passionate about his subject.

People’s first reaction to such a device (“WOW”) is amazing. It is, therefore, incredible disappointing to realize that the product is unusable.

- from elements blog, on the Prada phone (by LG).

The two smartest designers I know spawned their own consultancy for user experience on mobile devices. Thanks to blogging, you can get their insights for free!