In my watching of pop computing culture since 1975, few things really illustrate what we've lost better than the evolutionary path of Microsoft Word. Originally a tool for writing and communication, the basic character-stream functions of Word maybe have improved from grade-school requirements to sophmore, but that charge of progress has been at the cultural cost of something else even more precious. Way back when we often lamented these food-processors for words as essentially tools for writers designed, tested, proofed and marketed by people who were not writers; in all the years since, instead of leading us to a goal of better writing, we've lead ourselves to a goal of lesser expectations, and in our being collectively Word processed, business documents lost all sense of craft, and all sense of artful style.

Before the mszealots and lawyers jump on me, I don't mean Word literally --- because of it's market monopoly, Word has provoked all pretenders to follow suit, even (sadly) the free opensource versions --- it's been a major disappointment to watch the 30-year evolution of these font painters, a betrayal akin to this being Cronkite's 21st Century and I still can't buy a flying car or videocall home off my wristwatch, and it takes no less than 4 hand-held remotes to switch from satellite-TV to DVD in this house.

What's happened is a common thing in digital pop culture: We invariably automate all the wrong things.

bubbling up the dumbing down

Just as we powerpointed every argument into a sales pitch, we've reduced almost all our most earnest writing to extended ransom-notes, a hoary hodge podge of artless typography, obsessed with contextually agnostic but technically correct spelling, and proper active-voice business grammar that we were all taught to ape back in grade 5. The software excels at what we can already do effortlessly on our own, yet arrives in version after upgraded version completely devoid of any of the real domain expertise we so earnestly require, namely some encapsulated sense of that four hundred year accummulated experience from the noble traditions of typography and layout.

Framable Receipts

This wayward path of ours was graphically illustrated to me today when Ralf recommended a trip through Dr. Hugo H. van der Molen's historic letters and invoices ---
in an age when, technically, even a lowly gas-bar ATM receipt could economically reproduce any bit arrangement imaginable, when was the last time you had your hands on any invoice that made you pause and consider that a human had created this form out of any sense of pride for their enterprise?

And yet, technically, thanks to all these computer aided design kits, even such trivial artifacts as cash-register tapes should be cheaper to produce artfully than in any prior time in our history. Instead, Zehrs' cashiers hand us our tallies backed by 3-colour coupons every bit as haphazardly char strewn as we'd do ourselves.

It's the design expertise the rest of us, the common unwashed lay-people outside the typeset shops, this is what we really needed encapsulated into our tools. Forget the stuff we know, we need the stuff we don't know, and yet, without exception, every font-painter will gladly tell me that my grammar is too joycean for all the gradeschool drop-outs in the executive office, but none will tell me where or why Bauhaus may be better than Luxor, or how wide to column Helvetica at 12pt, or a thousand other things learned painfully by generations of printshop competition.

And it doesn't need to be this way; it's not a fault of the tools. Many of us from the earlier days of Unix still keep a sizeable footprint on the harddrive for some sort of TeX, the free typesetting system developed by the American Mathematical Society, originally to provide sufficient typeset skills to mathematicians that they could typeset their own journal papers and thus avoid embarrasing copyist mistakes. The younger sibling LaTeX simplified the original for the general masses and saw a good run, and TeX/LaTeX understood a few things about columns and headers, about ligatures, orphans and fonts, and was able to even transmit a bit of teaching about the basic elements of style.

oh, bother

But this was not meant to be for the font painters. Instead of digitizing the hands of the typesetter, they gave the people what they wanted, which was a freedom to put any letter anywhere on the canvas of the page, and while freedom is good, they simply left out any sense of typesetting beyond some quickly cobbled templates and stylesheets. Sure, you can obtain stylesheets from talented professional designers, but when no one else does, why bother? Even if you do, the font-painter tools work against the process flow; you need self-discipline (and basic knowledge) to avoid breaking these loosely enforced post-hoc templated rules.

What's worse, despite the central role of print in our culture, this gaping and widening hole in our collective knowledge about the ways and means of the technology of print has now bubbled back up to print shops who no longer feel any pressing need to know better, and presumably the schools no longer feel any pressing need to teach it. While there are some keeners who have gone the route and can and do produce amazing work, there is no longer any guild, no journeyman/master designation of any merit that can prevent anyone with QuarkExpress from slapping up a shingle.

The Possible Print

I recently was offered a great deal on new business cards by a new print shop; it was a co-advertising thing to help them promote their business as much as mine, and considering I normally font-paint my own on Grand&Toy card-stock, I thought it might be fun to see how the other half lived, get something really, really knock your socks off and outside the norm of what generally passes between thumbs at the conference shows.

Since any business card is not only my advertisement but just as much an advertisement for skill, art and technology in the shop who created it, I said to them, "I want you to make me a card that instantly says, 'this card could only have been made by a professional printer'.

I got silence at first. Then a "what do you mean?" puzzlement, like I was supposed to know? They went off, I didn't know what to expect, and when it came back, it was nothing I couldn't have done myself with the G&T kits and my inkjet, looking every inch like the standard biz-card templates in Word or OpenOffice.

I didn't know what I could have expected, but that's my point: I don't have their knowledge, and my software hasn't been teaching me anything about the real business of business printing. I could only guess: Maybe something printed to such a fine resolution that no personal computer printer could manage it?

Whatever that pro-sizzle might be, I don't know, or I didn't know until I posed that same question to my own collection of many elastic-banded bundles of cards. It took some sifting and digging past bond paper, embossings, foil trim, all sorts of home-makeable ho-hums like that, until I came to one example, one brilliant example:

The card was for Kate Smith from Byte Size Media, a simple standard-sized two-colour card, sans-serif font, nothing special except for one detail:

There's a tooth-ridged bite cut from the corner of the card.