Thursday, December 23, 2010

Comic Sans Criminals - help is available

If my faithful reader has font-related issues, particularly the overuse of Comic Sans font, they could do worse with their time than pop over to the Comic Sans Criminal website. If you've wondered when you should - or perhaps should not - use that popular font, a ready reference guide is available.

The site promises other resources, such as other 'comic' fonts, and 'dislexia fonts', but as I didn't check those out, I can't rightly say if they're easy to download, install, use 'n' such. But you're bright folk; I have every confidence in your ability to check it out ... and if necessary send me a stern (but hopefully gently) missive of 5,000 words or less.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Advertising and Librarian Image

Once again, the advertising on Facebook has proven more diverting than some of the "apps". It's interesting to see this offering from 3M's advertising division, showing happy - but very professional - information and literary gurus in a modern brightly lit setting. Now I'm wondering if what our profession actually needs is not demonstration of the value we add to society, commerce, government, and education, but perhaps an actual advertising campaign of the Madison Avenue variety.

Goodness knows, we've been providing proof of both the pudding and research types, for (literally) millenia. And we're still fighting the same battles with the same result ... because we're using the same methods. Someone famous (you look it up, I'm on holidays) once said something along the lines of if you want a different result, you have to do it differently.

But of course, it always comes back to who is going to do the "organisation" (produce the tender document, vet the submissions, oversee the campaign, etc), plus who/how is going to finance the strategy ... not to mention how the success will be measured.

Are we there yet?