It really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like mil­li­liter can be very dif­fi­cult to deci­pher. If you ever had to read or write a pass­word with 1, i, l or I, you know the prob­lem. That lit­tle com­par­i­son below is also avail­able from the down­load page.

If you cook recipes from a US cook­book, you need to use mea­sure­ments that seem archaic to a met­ri­fied Euro­pean like myself. They use cups for liq­uid mea­sure­ments. US fluid ounces are dif­fer­ent from UK fluid ounces, but that is another story. I made a con­ver­sion chart for our kitchen, list­ing cups, table­spoons (which they like to abbre­vi­ate as TBSP), tea­spoons (TSP) and mil­li­liters. Euro­peans know that one of the advan­tages of the met­ric sys­tem is the fact that liq­uid mea­sure­ments fol­low the same stan­dard as those for other sub­stances. Thus, a liter of water (i. e. 1000 mil­li­liters) weighs 1 kilo­gram (i. e. 1000 grams). I’m using US spelling here, UK Eng­lish would be litre and kilogramme.

I made a pdf which you’ll find in the down­load por­tion of this blog, so you can down­load it, print it out and stick it to you fridge door or wher­ever else you wish. Mag­nets can­not be down­loaded over the inter­net yet.

A bunch of old guys on stage in New York: Roger Black, Matthew Carter, Paul Shaw and Erik Spiek­er­mann. Mod­er­ated by Maxim Zhukov.

FF MetaSerif Pro: char­ac­ter­set runs to 5 pages now with Cyril­lic et al: bit.ly/zwavJI

— erik spiek­er­mann (@espiekermann) Jan­u­ary 18, 2012

Our book­shelves in Berlin run over two floors. The only way to get to them is by using a harness.

If you – like me – have more than one book and never know how to arrange them, watch this movie. It was made by the own­ers of Type book­store in Toronto.

Cre­ative Arte TV gave me 8 min­utes to draw my ideal stu­dio space. For those of you who have already com­mented on the prac­ti­cal issues, like where the day­light might come from and where the toi­lets are: this is an idea, not a plan.

Con­nected to the Web, Lit­tle Printer has wide range of sources avail­able to check on your behalf. We call them “pub­li­ca­tions”. Sub­scribe to your favourites and choose when you’d like them deliv­ered. Right on time Lit­tle Printer gath­ers every­thing it needs to pre­pare a neat lit­tle per­son­alised pack­age, printed as soon as you press the button.

Check out the web­site or watch the video:

Hello Lit­tle Printer, avail­able 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Now and again, Blue­print mag­a­zine pub­lishes one of my monthly columns on their web­site. This is the Novem­ber column.

ONCE I KNOW what topic I want to (or have to) write about, the most crit­i­cal deci­sion becomes inevitable: how to begin? No evening class in Cre­ative Writ­ing, no jour­nal­ism course fails to men­tion how impor­tant the first sen­tence is for the impres­sion a text makes upon the unpre­pared reader. Nor­bert Miller, a Ger­man lit­er­ary his­to­rian, pub­lished a col­lec­tion of essays about what he called this ‘rad­i­cal deci­sion’. The first sen­tence com­presses the infi­nite space for reflec­tion into a finite object, set­tling on one ver­sion out of a mul­ti­tude of vari­a­tions and pos­si­ble strategies.

Con­sider these alter­na­tives: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ and ‘One morn­ing, as Gre­gor Samsa was wak­ing up from anx­ious dreams, he dis­cov­ered that in his bed he had been changed into a mon­strous ver­minous bug.’
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