Search this site

The ampersand (you know, the ‘and’ symbol) might be my absolute favourite glyph. Ampersands are expressive, they’re classic, they’re abstract, and they’ve got a long history that dates back more than 2000 years. I’m so committed to my love of ampersands that I even had one as a feature at my wedding. A 3 foot tall handmade ampersand paper piñata stood between my soon-to-be husband and I during our ceremony and then it helped kick off the party after dinner when it hung from the rafters and I smashed it to smithereens spilling candy all over the dance floor. Interestingly, ampersands are ligatures; they are the combination of the letters E & T. They vary widely in their stylings, with some it’s easy to see the two letters and others are much more ornate and abstract, especially true italics versions within many typefaces. Much like human genetics, the combined results of the two parents can produce vastly different looking offspring. Author Simon Garfield of the masterpiece of a book called Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, describes ampersands this way: “Done well, an & is not so much a character as a creature, an animal from the deep.” In other words, it’s the unexpected, mythical, gangly kraken of the page. (“Release the ampersand!!!”) Furthermore, as author Keith Houston explains, “...the it­alic am­persand has be­come something of a play­ground for ty­po­graph­ers, and many it­alic am­persands are in­tric­ately de­signed works of art when com­pared to their con­form­ist ro­man coun­ter­parts.” There are very few characters that allow for so much personality and character; the capital Q, capital R and perhaps the capital S as the exceptions, but the ampersand provides an opportunity to move from following a formula to improvising in the recipe; from the science of type to the art of designing glyphs. For all of its prominence in our modern world, it’s important to note that the ampersand has a legendary origin story; a symbol with no known creator that rose from the ashes and beat the odds to become one of the most beloved symbols in existence. Cue dramatic music… There lives an epic symbol who had the odds stacked against him. Born an orphan to the letters e and t, nothing more than a scribble on a wall, in the ancient city of Pompeii. Almost lost forever under a layer of molten ash, the unlikely ligature was uncovered and adopted as a scrappy shorthand, rising up to usurp the established Tironian et with glitz and glory. He would live on for hundreds of years, making an impression as blocks of moveable type, making the shortlist for the typewriter keyboard and then appearing on some of the highest valued real estate; taking his mighty stance beside Tiffany and a permanent place in type history, literally carved in stone. This. Is. Ampersand. So that’s the Coles Notes version of the ampersand’s saga of rising to ubiquity, but what actually happened? How did ‘the little symbol that could’ go from a scribble on a wall to billions of uses in documents big and small, young and old? The Ampersand’s Ancient History As detailed in Keith Houston’s wonderful book that I reference often, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographic Marks, the ampersand spent nearly one thousand years coexisting with an opponent, the Tironian et. So let’s start here. What is a Tironian et? Who was Tiro? About 2000 years ago, Tiro was born a slave of Cicero’s household. As in the Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman politician, philosopher, lawyer, public speaker and all around celebrity. (As an aside, the ‘Lorem Ipsum’ filler text used by designers as a placeholder as a stand in for the real text. What is Lorem Ipsum? It’s actually a jumbled extract from Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil.) Tiro was a scribe who was very good at his job and who became Cicero’s secretary, biographer and confidant. Cicero travelled to Greece and was impressed by their use of shorthand so he tasked Tiro with creating a similar shorthand for the Latin language. One of the few symbols that stuck (of over 4000) was Tiro’s character representing the Latin word ‘et’ or ‘and’. The Tironian et looks like a stylized subscript number 7. As the years went on, the Tironian et was popular in the Middle Ages, in manuscripts with blackletter script. Interestingly, part of the reason that the Tironian shorthand system didn’t stand the test of time was the distrust of witchcraft and magic that was connected with the secrecy of shorthand writing. The Tironian et continued to fall out of popularity and it virtually disappeared, except in one modern place... So where can this funny little elbow of a symbol be found in the world? Just a quick hop across the pond to Ireland and you can go on a symbol safari and see the Tironian et in the wild. The symbol’s still used in the Irish Gaelic language and can be seen on street signs all over the country. And if you’re wondering what happened to the talented, enslaved Tiro, he continued with a successful career after Cicero’s death, made lots of money, was a freed slave, dubbed himself Marcus Tullius Tiro, bought a farm and died peacefully at 100 years old. And speaking of 100, the ampersand wouldn’t be born for another 100 years after the Tironian et… and it was barely born, at that. The ampersand was practically an orphan - nothing much more than graffiti on a wall, scribbled by an anonymous artist in Pompeii around 79 AD. The Ampersand’s Modern History For many years, the ampersand was included in the alphabet. It was the 27th character and school children were taught the symbol as part of learning the alphabet. According to an article in Medium, ampersand was the only letter of the English alphabet that did not represent a sound. This is actually pretty profound because that’s what an alphabet is. Letters are symbols that represent spoken sound. At one time the alphabet was a truly a novel invention that enabled individuals to communicate spoken sound in a whole new way that would stand the test of time. A communication method that could outlive a person’s physical existence on Earth. For thousands and thousands of years before the first alphabet was developed, complex communication (more than simple pictograms or ideograms carved into a wall) was delivered by voice from one person to another. The alphabet meant that speech could be spoken, coded using symbols of the alphabet, and then decoded back into spoken sound at a later time, by someone completely different in a different place in a different time. So with this understanding, it’s quite meaningful that the ampersand did not represent a spoken sound. Let’s get back to the way in which the ampersand was incorporated into the alphabet. After XYZ came, ‘et, per se and’. It would have been confusing for kids to say ‘XYZ and…’ And what? So they were taught to say et (Latin for and) and then, per se and, meaning ‘and’ by itself, clarifying that it was referring to ‘and’ as in the symbol, the 27th character of the alphabet and not a link between the alphabet and something that comes after it. ‘Et, per se and’ morphed into ‘and, per se and’, which then morphed into the word ‘ampersand’. The Merriam-Webster dictionary states that its first use of the word was in 1795 and by the year 1837 (less than 200 years ago) the term ampersand was immortalized in the English dictionary. So unlike the mysterious origins of fellow glyphs (such as the octothorpe), the ampersand’s nomenclature is fairly straightforward. It’s a conflation of ‘et, per se and’. And according to Grammar Girl, the word ampersand is referred to as a ‘mondegreen’, which is a word that’s name comes from a mishearing or a misunderstanding. When you sing the wrong lyrics to a song because they sound like something else, that’s a mondegreen. And a mondegreen is a mondegreen itself coined by writer Sylvia Wright, who misheard a line from a 17th-century Scottish ballad. She heard “Lady Mondegreen” instead of “And laid him on the green”. And decided to name this phenomenon after said fictional Lady Mondegreen. Looping back to the ABC’s, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how ‘ampersand’ was integrated into the ABC song as we know it today… XYZ, ampersand? Said simply, it wasn’t. The ABC song as we know it was adapted from a song called The Schoolmaster, copyrighted in 1834. Before this kids would often learn the alphabet using a rhyme called Apple Pie ABC and parts of this rhyme appeared in religious texts as early as 1671, appearing printed in its entirety in 1742. It goes something like this: “Apple Pie ABC” (original version): A was an Apple pie; B bit it; C cut it; D dealt it; E eat it; F fought for it; G got it; H had it; J joined it; K kept it; L longed for it; M mourned for it; N nodded at it; O opened it; P peeped in it; Q quartered it; R ran for it; S stole it; T took it; V viewed it; W wanted it; X, Y, Z, and ampersand, All wished for a piece in hand And because the ampersand came at the end of the alphabet, the 27th character, by the 1880’s ampersand became slang for ‘posterior’ or ‘rear end’. (I like big ampersands and I cannot lie?) You may have also noticed that the letters I and U were missing, which were added later with “I inspected it” and “U upset it”. Additionally, it’s important to clarify that not every book about the English language included the ampersand as the 27th character. Many did, but others didn’t. This non-standardized inclusion helps explain why the ampersand just kind of disappeared from the alphabet without much of a trace in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. Ampersand’s Use While the use of the ampersand symbol is generally frowned upon in formal or even semi formal writing in the English language, It has its place in modern writing. Ampersands are used to link items in lists and are commonly used in the academic world to cite references. It’s also often used in the world of blogging and social media where there are fewer rules to follow, buuuuuuut they’re not recognized in hashtags or in URLs. They’re also commonly used decoratively alongside display type in headlines in large and small publications alike. If you’re like me you’ve probably used the word the abbreviation for etcetera (etc.) in writing both casually and formally. It’s a commonly used and commonly accepted way to specify that there’s more to the story. But did you know that the short form for etcetera (etc.) can and is also denoted using the ampersand? That’s right. ‘et’ meaning ‘and’ and ‘c’ for cetera meaning ‘the rest’. And it can also be denoted as ampersand with a c on the end. A short form of a short form. Inception for symbols... In researching this podcast episode and learning about how ampersands are used today, I learned something absolutely fascinating. I learned that when you see the credits roll at the end of a film, writers who collaborated more closely together on the project will have an ampersand between their names versus those with the word ‘and’. For example two writers within an ampersand between their names means that they actively collaborated and wrote the piece together, whereas two writers with an ‘and’ between their names implies that one writer was involved in rewriting parts of the other writer’s work. Who knew? Restore the Ampersand? In a publicity stunt for their 100th birthday celebration, A&W Restaurants created a video and started a change.org petition to ‘restore the ampersand as the 27th letter of the alphabet”. From the petition’s page: “...Ever tried to use an ampersand in a hashtag? Or a URL? It doesn’t work. We think that’s pretty lame. After all, the ampersand was actually part of the alphabet once upon a time. So as we celebrate our 100th birthday in 2019, we at A&W Restaurants are only asking for one thing: bring back the ampersand. It’s utilized by thousands of brands, organizations, bands, films and publications. It’s a useful, universal symbol of bringing things together... ...But then it mysteriously and inexplicably disappeared from the alphabet. In this digital world, its exclusion has made all of our lives a little harder. Think about it… Aandw.com is clunky and ugly. The Twitter handle @aandwrestaurants looks ridiculous. #A&W is read by computers as just one lonely #A. Sometimes using a “&” just makes a lot more sense.” Although clever, I’m not sure how much sense it would make to actually restore ampersand to the alphabet. The petition is appealing to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but the symbol’s got the odds stacked against it because it doesn’t even symbolize a sound, after all. The petition is aiming for 10,000 signatures and two years in they’re only 78% of the way there. Yikes, that can’t be a good thing. Coming Together Although A&W’s campaign is cute, I’ll think it’s little more than that: cute. But here’s some truly great change that happened because of the ampersand. There’s this really cool group of type designers and type lovers with an even cooler name: the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). From time to time they will create amazing new type for a good cause and they call it FontAid. In 2010, SOTA released ‘Coming Together’ to support Doctors Without Borders and the Haiti Earthquake disaster. The symbolism in the ampersands is the unity and solidarity in helping one another through disaster relief. Here are some key facts about the typeface: The font file contains 483 different ampersands Nearly 400 designers from 37 countries contributed OpenType font format Cost $20 US After all, coming together is what the ampersand was built to do. Now you have a better understanding of what an underdog the ampersand was and at least part of the story as to how it rose to fame today. What was once a scribble of graffiti almost lost forever under a layer of ash, ‘the symbol that lived’ has entrenched itself into modern popular culture in so many ways. I know the ampersand’s roots are in Pompeii, but I think that it’s in some way connected to Canada. Speaking as a Canadian, any symbol that represents ‘eh’ has to be ours. But the ampersand is more than simply an abbreviation; it links type back to its origins of writing with a quill, reminding us of this history with every “Shift + 7” of our keyboards. Music by Freesound Epic Strings AlexProst Epic Chorus Song frankum Happy Sounds Mativve Record Scratches filmsndfx Canada geese sanus_excipio Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

We’ve made it to the 21st episode and I have another very special interview for you. Sarah Aspler, Senior Editor at Buzzfeed, joins us on today’s podcast! She has a wicked sense of humor and creates nonsensical quizzes for a living. It’s magic! Sarah will help us understand some of the visual design decisions made at Buzzfeed, including a look into the world of professional meme-making and a glimpse into her career path that led her to her current role. I can’t wait for you to meet her. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Buzzfeed, it’s time to embrace this wonderful procrastination tool. Buzzfeed is “the world's leading independent digital media company, which leverages data and innovation to reach hundreds of millions of people globally.” In other words, their content permeates the hearts and minds of people in every part of the world. The company creates articles, lists, quizzes and videos, as well owning a portfolio of lifestyle brands, engaging in investigative journalism, and developing products and experiences. They are HUGE. Some key takeaways from Sarah’s interview: Procrastination can pay off! Anyone can write a post or create a quiz on Buzzfeed Spin class is hard! Lower res memes tend to be more popular than really polished memes Buzzfeed has an approved list of fonts that can be used by their designers Accessible design is so important in all areas of design - even quiz and meme-making! Sometimes you have to put your ego aside and accept a failure for what it is - learn from it and move on Knowing basic Adobe Creative Suite skills will help you stand out from others “Don’t be too precious with your work” - good is sometimes good enough, make you and your work available for people to see MUSIC Music by Podington Bear - Streetbeat Heat Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

I’m so excited for today’s episode! Christopher Rouleau, Toronto-based graphic designer, letterer and visual artist, joins us on today’s podcast! He’s also one of the co-founders of Ligatures, Toronto’s typography hub, and he’s a regular contributor to Uppercase Magazine. Christopher has collaborated with magazines like Today’s Parent and Chatelaine, as well as companies like Pepsi and LG. His work can be found in store windows, on packaging and in books. Much of the work he sells in his online shop connects local history with new-age lettering techniques to create the perfect visual marriage. I can’t wait to get started. Takeaways from a chat with Chris: If you look hard enough, inspiration can be found everywhere Drawing with pencil to paper is critical so that that initial sketch can turn into a full fledged idea Our brains are full of ideas if we just push them for a little more Even the pros (like Christopher!) aren’t necessarily good at everything they try when they first start - sign painting was a challenge for him Peameal bacon is rarely $0.99 Having opportunities for creativity outside of client work is important There’s a lot to be said for play, curiosity and experimenting Setting limits or constraints helps foster creative thinking - “best is the enemy of good” No matter how many people are in this industry, there’s room for everyone Understanding what uniqueness you bring will help you find your place in the industry and it’s something you’ll develop over time MUSIC Music by Podington Bear - Elephants on Parade Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

We’ve got the Leafs, we’ve got the Jays, we’ve got the Toronto FC, and we’ve got the Raptors. Today we’re talking Toronto sports... with a typographic nerdy twist. All four of Toronto’s major league sports teams have, at some point, been victorious in their respective leagues. The Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team is over 100 years old and they last won the Stanley Cup in 1967 after beating the Montreal Canadiens in game 6 (they were the underdogs in the series). The Leafs won the Stanley Cup championship a total of 13 times, but much to the dismay of Leafs fans everywhere, they haven’t won it in the last 53 years. The Toronto Blue Jays baseball team last won the World Series in 1993, as well as the year prior in 1992. The team was established in 1977 and made their home the Skydome (now called the Rogers Centre), which was the first and only stadium with a fully retractable roof, built in 1989. The Toronto FC (Football Club) won the MLS Cup final in 2017. The team joined Major League Soccer in 2007 as the first Canadian team in this North American league and quickly became huge contenders who won the championship just 10 years later. And finally, the Toronto Raptors basketball team had quite a year in 2019, winning their first NBA Championship and causing the City of Toronto, the province of Ontario and all of Canada to stand behind our national basketball team. This franchise was established in 1995 and reached the level of epic just last year with the help of the now household name, Kawhi Leonard. We’ve got four winning teams, but do we have four winning visual identities? Let’s dive into each franchise’s logo and a look at who, what, when, where, why and how they came to be. TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS In digging around the Interweb and doing research for this episode, I learned a lot about the history of Toronto sports that I wasn’t aware of. For example, I didn’t know that the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey franchise began in 1917 under the name “Toronto Arenas”. Their logo was a large, heavy-set navy blue slab-serif-looking capital T with terminals on the ends of each arm. In 1920, the franchise was purchased by an established men’s club and became a professional team. They were renamed Toronto St. Patricks, with a dark green word mark logo. The St. Pat’s logo changed in 1923 to a dark green pill-shaped symbol with the words ‘St Pats’ inside. The typography is actually quite interesting here. The ‘t’ after the ‘S’, denoting “St” is a superscript and appears smaller and raised to land just above the cap height of the letter S. It appears as though it’s been kerned in closer to the S and it’s nestled right in beside it. The ‘ats’ in Pats is in small caps and each of the letters are kerned in closely to one another, almost to the point of touching . The team’s logo took on 3 additional looks in the next 4 years. In 1927 ownership changed and it was then that the Maple Leafs became the Maple Leafs. The logo reflected the transition from one identity to another; the new team name and the leaf symbol were there, however the leaf was still the Toronto St. Pat’s green. Finally, in 1928 the Toronto Maple Leafs logo looked a lot like it does today, 90+ years later. The logo continued to shift a little by little but the next big transition was in 1967 in commemoration of Canada’s centennial. The maple leaf in this new logo mirrored the leaf on the Canadian flag. From a design and typography standpoint, a lot changed. The shape of the leaf became less stylistic and a lot more modern. Clean lines, fewer points on the leaf (from 35 rough little tips to only 11) and simplistic shapes reigned supreme. Also, the designer chose to mix type - the ‘n’ in Toronto and the ‘m’ in Maple are lowercase letters, while the remainder of the letters are uppercase. This logo in its current state only lasted four years before transitioning to a bolder, more linear, all uppercase letters in 1971. According to Font Meme, the typeface used in the Leaf’s logo from 1988 - 2016 was Kabel Black, a geometric sans-serif face, designed by Rudolf Koch in 1928. Other notable companies that use this typeface for their identities include Comic Relief, Build-a-Bear, Monopoly game, the movie Dumb and Dumber and amazingly-named grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly. It’s a commercial font that is available for purchase from $43 Canadian dollars. Very few changes occurred to the logo until recently when in 2016 the logo reverted back to its roots (in honor of its centennial), inspired by the look of the logo from the 1940’s - 1960’s. This time, there were 31 tips on the leaf that carry the symbolism of the 1931 opening of Maple Leaf Gardens and 17 veins, alluding to the 1917 team establishment. Cleverly, 13 of the veins are placed above the words ‘Toronto Maple Leafs’ to pay homage to the franchise's 13 Stanley Cup victories. Furthermore, the typeface choice is a little less harsh than the one of the 1940’s, with more rounded letterforms, compared to the angled cut corners of the originals. SportsNet examined how many Stanley Cups were won with which logos and the overwhelming winner was the logo that spanned from 1938 - 1963 (the same logo which the 2016 was modeled after), with 8 trophy wins during this time. If you’re ever in their neighborhood of Church Street and Carlton Street in downtown Toronto, pop into the Loblaws grocery store on the north west corner. The former home of the Maple Leafs, Maple Leaf Gardens, has been recently converted into a flagship store for the Canadian grocery giant, Loblaws, as well as a sports and recreation facility for Ryerson University now called the Mattamy Athletic Centre. Memorabilia, including stadium chairs at the snack bar, can be found in this grand grocery store. But for the full experience, wear your best toque and walk down aisle 25. Right next to the tuna you’ll find a red dot on the floor signifying the former centre ice. Toronto is also home to the Stanley Cup, just a short walk south from the original Maple Leaf Gardens is the Hockey Hall of Fame on Front Street. This original 1892 Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup (purchased and donated by Lord Stanley) was awarded to champions of the league until 1970. It now has a permanent home in the Vault Room at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. According to the official site of the Hockey Hall of Fame, there are currently 2,342 individuals engraved on the cup and the first team to engrave its roster was in 1907 (Montreal Wanderers), but it didn’t become tradition until 1924. Interestingly, there are a few women on the cup and the first woman who was officially engraved on the cup was Marguerite Norris, who was President of the Detroit Red Wings in 1954 & 1955. All of the text on the Stanley Cup is engraved and there have only been four official engravers in the entire history of the cup. The current official engraver, Louise St. Jacques in Montreal, has been tasked with hammering a punch (not unlike those created by Gutenberg used to make moveable type) into the silver of the Stanley Cup for 38 years. Every September she is sent the trophy and the approved list of names to be engraved on the cup. The cup is methodically taken apart and she works only with part of the trophy (one of the bands), which is secured into a homemade circular jig. She then gets to work. "Before engraving, I go through the list, count all the letters and make certain they will all fit into the space allotted." explains St. Jacques. Each name takes her about 30 minutes to engrave, using hammers of different weights. She uses a piece of metal to create a baseline for the letters to sit on. She relies on optically kerning (letter spacing) each of the characters, which is no small feat. The process of engraving means that there are no back buttons. So even when proofreading and being as careful as possible, there are bound to be a few mistakes over the course of 2,342 names. Some of the funny ones include: In the 1941-42 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ player Turk Broda was represented twice on the cup, once as TURK BRODA and once as WALTER BRODA. In the 1962-63 season, Toronto Maple Leafs was misspelled as TORONTO MAPLE LEAES. In the 1971-72 season, Boston Bruins was misspelled as BQSTQN BRUINS (mind your p’s and q’s!) In the 1983-84 season, the Edmonton Oilers’ owner Peter Pocklington included his father’s name on the roster (Basil Pocklington), however he was unaffiliated with the team. When the NHL learned of this, they ordered that the name be removed and it’s now covered by 16 X's. In the 2004-05 season, the lockout is recognized with an engraving that reads: SEASON NOT PLAYED. In the 2005-06 season, Carolina Hurricanes’s ERIC STAAAL was corrected to ERIC STAAL. And Leaf’s fans, one final note about your hockey team’s identity. Why is it that they are called the Toronto Maple Leafs and not Toronto Maple Leaves? It has to do with the fact that they were named after the Maple Leaf regiment of the Canadian Army. Because they were named after a proper noun, the pluralization is correct - Maple Leafs, not Maple Leaves. Go, Leafs, Go! TORONTO BLUE JAYS Transitioning from a stick and puck to a bat and ball, let’s talk about our Toronto Blue Jays. The Toronto Blue Jays are Canada’s baseball team. The team’s name was a result of a naming contest held in 1976 and of the 4000 submissions received ‘Blue Jay’s was the winner. But the team wasn’t given its name because Toronto is home to an abundance of the blue bird (we’d sooner be named the Toronto Racoons, if that were the case), instead it was likely due to the team’s connection to the owner of Labatt’s Breweries and their Labatt Blue beer. There was outrage. It seemed that Toronto didn’t like their new team name. Since their formation as a team in 1977, their logo has gone through six major transformations. The Blue Jays original logo from 1977-1996 was designed by Toronto-based company Savage Sloan, Ltd. Although there’s little information out there about the typeface used in this logo, it looks an awful lot like a typeface called Newland Inline. Author of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, Simon Garfield, has named Newland Inline #3 on his list of the worst fonts in the world, right behind #2: Ransom Note and #1: The 2012 Olympic Font. Newland Inline rose to ubiquity through the American Spirit cigarette logo, as well as many years later in the Jurassic Park logo. Garfield has this to say about Newland Inline: “It is a dense and angular type, suggestive of something Fred Flintstone might chisel into prehistoric rock. The inline version is bristling with energy and a quirkiness of spirit, a bad type predominantly through its overuse rather than its construction.” Garfield also notes that Newland Inline was designed in 1923 by none other than Rudolf Koch, the same designer as the typeface Kabel. The plot thickens! Remember taht Kabel was the Leaf’s typeface of choice for years, during the same time that this Newland Inline-esque typeface was sported on the Jays’ logo. In 1997, a new logo was unveiled, this time with a more modern-looking bird, complete with drop shadows on its face, sitting atop a maple leaf. The word ‘Blue Jays’ appeared underneath the image with an all-cap first and last letter (B and S) and small caps middle letters. This helped to frame the logo and provide visual symmetry. The strangest identity that the Blue Jays’ logo took on was in 2003, when an anthropomorphized, tattooed Ace (the Blue Jays’ mascot) on steroids was trying a little too hard, flexing his biceps from behind a large and clunky capital letter ‘T’. Yuck. Interestingly, while the different logo variations are all taken credit for by their appropriate creators, this logo is an orphan; perhaps the design was so bad that no one wanted to claim it? This identity didn’t even make it to three strikes; it lasted a single season before being thrown out, replaced with a sleek combination mark: the word ‘Jays’ with an angry and tired looking bird head ready for action. All traces of red were removed from the logo, replaced with a monotone blue, grey and white palette. This logo was designed by Toronto-based Brandid and all reference to their Labatt Blue past was scrubbed from their visual identity for a period of seven years from 2004 - 2011. For the 2012 - 2019 seasons, the club went back to their roots; a nostalgic logo that sported an updated version of the beloved blue jay, this time with a sleeker profile. (It looks as though Ace brushed his hair back with a little more gusto. His head feathers are a little flatter and sit back on his head further.) From a typographic perspective, something interesting happened in this rendition of the logo. Old was married with new. The original Newland Inline-esqe typeface of the original logo made a comeback, dressing up the word “Blue Jays”, this time paired with a modern, lighter, non-inline version of the face for the word ‘Toronto’. The terminals at the ends of the T’s arms, as well as on the R and the N create a brotherly bond, a sibling similarity to the original typeface. By this point, the franchise had captured a league record no one wanted: 21 consecutive seasons of missing the playoffs, directly after having won two back-to-back World Series in the early 90’s. Perhaps the franchise was hoping to tap into some of their vintage winning energy and re-adopted the logo that saw them through two World Series wins. And finally, in 2019, the team paired back to the basics, removed the words, the baseball and the circle holding everything in place. Ace with a red maple leaf in his hair is what now represents the team. There’s huge variation in each of the six logos, with differences in styles, colours, and words have changed in the last half a century, but one thing has remained the same: there has always been a profile of a blue jay looking to the left. He began looking young, freshly-fluffed and ready for action. He matured into a modern version of himself. He had a very brief stint with performance-enhancing drugs and got a tattoo against his mother bird’s wishes. He was tired and angry with himself for who he’d become. He decided to go back to the bird he knew before getting caught up in the trappings of modern life. And finally, along with the rest of the world in 2019, he was intrigued by the phenomenon that is Mari Kondo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and decided that all of the background clutter wasn’t sparking joy. So he thanked it and swiftly got rid of it. Let’s take a moment to do a 7th inning stretch before jumping into our third Toronto sports franchise. TORONTO FC The Toronto FC’s logo history is as neat and tidy as the hair cuts on most of the team’s players. The franchise is merely a teenager, a prepubescent 13 year old who hasn’t yet matured into adult-hood. There has only been one logo in the franchise’s history. The logo was created by AmoebaCorp. Originally the team was to be named Toronto Northmen but the team name went to an online vote where 40% supported the simple Toronto FC name, a nod to European sports traditions as the FC stands for “football club”, versus soccer, as we call it in North America. The primary logo colour is red, with secondary black, grey and white. The team is nicknamed the ‘Reds’ based on the logo design. (I wonder if the red had been replaced with blue or purple or chartreuse, if any of those names would have caught on… the ‘chartruesuessssss”...) At the centre of the logo there's a shield that encompasses the majority of the design elements. There is a stylized maple leaf on top (they look more like raspberries to me) and a large grey T centered in the design. A small F and C sit on either side of the T with the word Toronto inside of a ribbon, wrapped around the imagery. Lines and various tinted areas exist within the shield behind the T that look a little like a rugby ball. Fans and management alike seem to be happy with the logo so we’ll see if it follows in the Maple Leafs’ footsteps (a variety of changes early on) or in the Blue Jays’ footsteps (sticking with the same identity for 20 years). Time will tell. TORONTO RAPTORS Finally we come to Toronto’s most recent victors, The Toronto Raptors, the 2019 NBA Champions. There have been two major Raptors’ logos: the first from 1995-2015 and the second from 2015 to now. The story of the Raptors’ name and visual identity is a fascinating one with a few twists and turns. I mentioned the movie Jurassic Park earlier and I’m about to go there again so “Hold onto your butts!” The Toronto Raptors were almost not the raptors, but the Toronto Huskies. However, management decided to drop the idea because it seemed as though no one could come up with a logo that didn’t look like the Minnesota Timberwolves. According to a CBC news article in 2019, approximately 125 media partners were asked to contribute name ideas and a final list of 10 names was open to public voting. Are you ready to hear what they were? There were the Beavers, the Scorpions and the Terriers. The final three names in contention: the Dragons, the Bobcats and the Raptors. And according to Logos-World, the final choice of the Raptors’ name was inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster released in the same year as the inception of the team. That movie is, of course, Jurassic Park. Barney the dinosaur was also a popular kids show of the time and their purple uniforms even became known as the Barney uniform. Dinosaurs were hot in the 90’s, an important piece of popular culture, now ingrained in the legacy of a Toronto sports franchise. The Toronto Raptors’ first logo was an anthropomorphized dinosaur (velociraptor) dribbling a basketball, with shoes that gave his prehistorically pedicured toenails room to breathe. The word ‘Toronto’ appears in spikes (maybe teeth?) along the top of the logo. The team’s colours were very indicative of the decade in which they were established: a 1990’s vibrant purple with red, white, black and grey accents. In 2009, the vibrant purple was benched and red subbed in. In 2015, a new logo was introduced, designed by Toronto agency, Sid Lee, and the dino was ditched for a simpler emblem with the presence of the raptor felt in the clawed ball. Also, the current version of the Raptors’ logo is suspected to use the typeface Millionaire. However, this logo found itself on a different kind of court… in the court of law. In a news release by The Canadian Press in June 2019, a legal battle, initiated by Monster Energy claims that the Raptors’ logo claw marks are too similar to their ‘M’ logo. (This was happening in the middle of the Raptors’ prehistoric rise to glory.) The problem was explained this way: "(Monster) will be damaged by registration of the (Raptors) in that the mark will dilute the distinctive qualities of (Monster’s) mark … and will lessen the ability of (Monster’s) mark to distinguish (Monster’s) goods." Raptors owner, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, pointed out that the Raptors have been using claw marks on their mall since the early 90’s and the ball is essentially the same now as it was then. Trademark lawyers quoted in the article said that typically the two sides work out an arrangement amongst themselves. In all of my digging for an answer to the legal battle, I couldn’t find anything. And the Raptors still use their logo. And Monster still uses their logo. So I guess it’s safe to say that the issue was resolved? The final piece of this Raptors’ visual identity is the iconic phrase and wordmark: We The North. I can picture the typeface used. To me, the phrase and the typeface are inextricably linked; never the two shall part, ingrained in my brain forever. The Raptors’ new identity and their authentic ‘We The North’ campaign was born far from the streets, in a corporate boardroom by highly paid advertising professionals. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure. Agency, Sid Lee, wanted a way to represent and communicate that the Raptors’ were Canada’s team, embracing its fringe status and standing tall, true north strong and free. The agency landed on ‘We The North’ slogan for two reasons: 1) It felt like a declaration from Canadian basketball fans and 2) “it also sounded wrong in just the right way”. The agency said they never considered ‘We Are The North’, but they were asked if that’s what it should be or if they should include a comma after the word ‘we’. But shouldn’t there be a comma? Is ‘We The North’ grammatically incorrect? A deep dive on the Internet reveals that it is, in fact, grammatically correct. One Quora contributor explained it this way: “‘We the north’ is used as a way to apply some characteristic to the group such as “we the north will never be defeated". “We are the North” is used to identify who “we" [is referring to].” Another contributor made a good point that “We are the north” is a general and complete statement, one that is likely un-trademark-able. Further, for online marketing purposes #wethenorth is a lot more straightforward, neat and tidy than the awkward and vowel-heavy #wearethenorth. But, are we the north? Technically speaking, the Portland Trail Blazers and Minnesota Timberwolves are both further north than Toronto. And the typeface? A Sid Lee designer found it on the web called ‘Chinese Rocks’, which reminded the agency of hand-written signs posted around NBA arenas. The typeface is inspired by hand-cut rubber-stamp lettering on Chinese export containers of the 20th Century and was designed by Ray Larabie in 1999. Annnnnnd boom goes the dynamite. That brings us to the end of our look at the visual identities of Toronto’s major league professional sports teams. More than 100 years, 17 logos, 4 teams, 1 city. Toronto, your sports teams aren’t always winners but you still sell out stadiums and your fans are some of the most passionate on the planet. MUSIC Magic - Six Umbrellas Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Welcome to our second Talk Paper Quizzers episode where contestants answer trivia questions to compete for the completely fictional, completely worthless, yet highly-coveted “Apostrophe”! We’re mixing it up this time and instead of having two contestants compete head-to-head, we have a live studio audience answering questions from the comfort of their homes. Our audience is made up of university-level typography students. There will be 4 rounds of questions and you will be asked a total of 25 true/false questions related to the 4 topic areas: Formatting your type (ex: type size, line length) Focusing your type (ex: emphasizing using bold, underline, italicize) Fine-tuning your type (ex: kerning, tracking, hyphenation) Finessing your type (ex: figures, small caps, initial letters) In other words, the categories are about putting type on a page, making keywords stand out, adjusting the spacing and subbing-in more suitable glyphs where necessary. All while sticking to best practices of typography. Contestants in our live studio audience keep score at home. A member of our audience with the most points at the end of the game wins the Apostrophe! (We’re relying on the honour system here.) So grab a cup of tea, glass of fizzy water or something stronger and I invite you to play along with our pub-quiz style show too. Let’s Talk Paper Quizzers! Music Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Sound Effects Oohs and Ahs - noah0189 Winner Bell - oldedgar Game Chimes > Wrong - Raclure Timer With Ding - keweldog Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

The octothorpe. Sometimes it’s referred to as a number sign, sometimes the pound sign and sometimes the hash sign (popular in Britain as a short form of ‘hatchmark’). It’s also been called a grid, TicTacToe, pigpen and square. More recent nomenclature refers to it as a hashtag and if I were a betting woman, I would wager that if you show an octothorpe to 100 people under the age of 25, 99 out of 100 would refer to it as a hashtag. The humble little octothorpe wears many hats; for example in the game of chess it signifies checkmate, it’s a stand-in for the musical sharp symbol, and in many programming languages it indicates that the rest of the line is comment only and not part of the code. Proofreaders use it to let an author know to insert a space, and it’s used in press releases, whereby three octothorpes in a row are used to signal the end of one. The origin story that accompanies the octothorpe is much goofier than the formidable name ‘octothorpe’ itself. While all the other type superheroes and shady character origin stories err on the side of epic, the octothorpe’s origin story is the equivalent of someone’s uncle finding the symbol in a basement and saying ‘oh yeah, this’ll work’. It’s a character with many names, many uses and a winding, cloudy history of how it became one of the worlds most used and recognizable characters, but where did it come from? In his book, Shady Characters, Keith Houston explores just this question… and it’s not as straightforward a story as you might expect. There are three main eras in the octothorpe‘s history dating back to Ancient Rome. So let’s start there. The Roman term for pounds (as in weight) was libra pondo. Libra meaning ‘scale’ and pondo from the verb ‘pendere’ or ‘to weigh’. Each of these words libra and Pondo were synonymous terms for one pound in weight and that’s where the pound sign gets its oldest name as well as its balanced symbol: two vertical lines and two horizontal lines intersecting to create a balanced form. This takes us to the second part of the octothorpe’s history. Fast forward to sometime in the late 14th century, the common abbreviation for pound (lb) was adopted and entered into the English language. Perhaps you may have figured it out already, but ‘lb’ is short for libra. Scribes often accessorized the ‘l’ and ‘b’ with a line or tilde (tiny squiggle) drawn above the letters’ x-height to denote the fact that it was a contraction. The marking of lb with a tilde was so common, in fact, the early printers created a single combined punch for the two letters. It then morphed into what we know today as a modern day octothorpe because of “carelessly rushing pens of successive scribes”. Chicken scratch handwriting for the win! So while the abbreviation lb lives on as a short form for pound today, the octothorpe, also called the pound sign, is the scrawled, amended version of lb. So the lb with a tilde is the missing evolutionary link from how as to how the octothorpe as we know it today, came to be. As a fascinating aside, the British pound sign (a stylized capital L) is the octothorpe‘s sister. It quite simply refers to ‘libra’: a capitalized stylized L with a tilde through the middle of it. The tilde denotes the fact that it’s an abbreviation. And now onto the third part of this symbol’s history. There’s a lot of controversy and confusion around the origins of the name octothorpe. As Houston notes in his book, big names in the literary world, such as the American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary have presented ideas as to the octothorpe’s naming lineage. I won’t bore you with the details, but all is to say that none of them are adequately substantiated. Instead the octothorpe’s name comes from a much less likely place: Bell Labs. As in the 1950’s telephone giant. Bell Labs, which was the research arm of AT&T, won a total of seven Nobel prize in physics awarded for inventions that make it possible for telecommunications technology (including the Internet) possible today. Rotary phones - you know the ones where you stick your finger in a little hole that overlays the numbers zero through nine and pull in a circular motion until it goes click click click all the way back around,,, and then multiply that by seven times for the average telephone number or 10 digits in today’s world area codes… I grew up with a working rotary telephone in my basement let me tell you that calling into Kiss 92’s radio shows to try and win contests as a 12-year-old was made overly difficult using this archaic technology. Needless to say, the rotary telephone technology needed an upgrade: enter Touch-Tone telephones. The Touch-Tone telephone pad is what we all know and love today; a grid of three buttons across and four buttons down and the numbers one through nine in the first three rows with the number zero smack dab in the middle of the last row. But what to put on either side of the zero? It was the year 1968 when these two unused buttons were made available to control menus and other special services available through the phone. So the questions asked by Bell Labs were twofold: what symbols should occupy these buttons and what should these symbols be called? Some of the first prototypes of the new keypad had a five pointed star on one side and a diamond on the other side but there was something wrong with that approach. Any ideas? Neither the five-pointed star, nor the diamond appeared on a standard typewriter keyboard so that was problematic in order to communicate anything about the touch tone phone using typewriter technology of the time. It was Doug Kerr, a Bell Labs engineer, who was working on this new project who came up with the new symbols that stuck: the asterisk and the octothorpe. They needed the symbols to be part of the ASCII character set (that would become adopted by computer manufacturers), as well as symbols that were present on current typewriters. In other words, the two symbols had to bridge old technology and new technology to stand the test of time. The symbols that we know and love today were selected but they needed a reboot as to their names. If you’re like me, you’ve called the asterisk an ‘asterix’ your whole life. The Bell Labs team agreed that it was tricky to pronounce and to spell, so they decided to rename it ‘star’. Furthermore the pound sign was chosen, however it didn’t really have an agreed-upon name that could be used internationally. Kerr wanted to name the octothorpe a ‘diamond’, alluding to the centre shape of the symbol. But some of his colleagues were not convinced. And this is where the story gets confusing and confounded. Some of the individuals that author, Keith Houston, reached out to to write his book had different ideas of where the term octothorpe actually originated. There are three different origin stories that all seem a little far-fetched and unsubstantiated, including the fact that octothorpe is simply just a made up term; the fact that it has connections to the native American athlete Jim Thorpe who died in 1953 and was considered to be one of the greatest American athletes of all time; and the fact that ‘octo’ meant eight and ’thorpe’ meant village. It was actually originally referred to as an OCTATHERP. In new stories in the 1970s, the new telephone symbol and its new octothorpe name were publicized. And that’s the story. It just somehow came to be. Perhaps the term octothorpe and where and who it originated with at Bell Labs will likely be lost to history, but it’s amazing to think that an ancient symbol had it’s official naming party so recently (about 50 years ago). I guess it had to do with the fact that before then, the octothorpe didn’t have an internationally-recognized name. So such a huge telecommunications company coining a term for an ancient symbol that would be used on their technology all around the world is enough clout to make it official. And more recently, the octothorpe has made a huge resurgence. Fast forward to 2007. Twitter was in its infancy and a basic tool compared to what it is now. Users were frustrated by the fact that they couldn’t organize their tweets and didn’t have the ability to specify what they wanted to see surrounding specific topics or events. My favourite part of the story is the fact that what we now know and love today as ‘hashtags’, quite literally transforming the globe, influencing election results and perpetuating global social movements, started outside of Twitter’s four walls. Chris Messina, who was a former Google and Uber lead, wrote a blog post suggesting that Twitter’s posts should be grouped into what he called “channels” that were denoted by an octothorpe and a keyword. So what’s a guy with a blog got to do to make his channel vision a reality? Well he just had to go knock on Twitter’s door. In an interview with Wired, Messina admitted that he really didn’t know anybody at Twitter’s headquarters but he decided to approach them on foot anyway. He walked up to Twitter’s co-founder (security please?!) Biz Stone (great name) and simply said “Hey, we’ve been talking about this problem with groups on Twitter. What do you think about using pound symbols to tag posts?” As Stone recalls, he asked Messina “OK, but what do you want me to do about that? Go ahead and do it.” Messina began using them with his friends with some success, but it wasn’t until 2009 that Twitter officially embraced hashtags, creating a search tool so that users could see who else was using a specific hashtag. Stowe Boyd, a former research head at Gigaom, explains that the term ‘hashtag’ originated from programmer culture, referring the a hash in code - programmer’s terminology for the octothorpe. (What a different world it would be if we referred to them not as hashtags, but as poundtags or numbertags or even the originally proposed ‘channels’.) Hashtags deepened the network of connections between users as well as how users interacted with content, and it could lead a user to make new discoveries - new people and new content. But they weren’t created without some backlash. Messina’s said, “In the beginning people really hated them! People didn’t understand why we needed hashtags, and the biggest complaint was that people just didn’t like how they looked.” Ahhhhh… this sounds familiar. To rewind more than 500 years ago, Mr. Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany wasn’t met with all smiles and handshakes at the talk of his new business venture. The advent of the printing press, arguably the single greatest technological advancement of the last millennium, if not ever, was met with criticism. The fact that Gutenberg’s Blackletter type was designed to mimic the handwriting of scribes, probably didn’t help. (Cheap knockoff, anyone?! Nobody wants to buy a genuine ‘Frauda’ purse). After Twitter’s 2009 realization that “hey, maybe these users are onto something”, Instagram adopted hashtags in 2010 to label content. Just-in-time information on any topic imaginable was now at the fingertips of users across multiple platforms. GQ magazine even named the octothorpe the symbol of the year 2010. Messina says that the number one question he gets asked is whether or not he worked for Twitter. He didn’t. He contributed to Twitter’s offering, however he maintains that “…the hashtag was not created for Twitter. The hashtag was created for the internet.” So while Google’s goal is to catalogue the world’s information, perhaps it’s the role of the hashtag to catalogue the world’s real-time information. So the next time you Tweet, pay homage to the symbol that gets a new identify with each upheaval in communications technology: writing in Ancient Rome, printing in medieval Europe, Touch-Tone telephones in the 1960s and the Internet in the 21st Century. #libra #lb #pound #octothorpe Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Hyphens. (So this is what Talk Paper Scissors has come to…) A teeny tiny straight line. The simplest typographic mark there is. Nothing more than a scratch on a page. Or is it… There are no fewer than seven (yes seven!) distinct marks that look like a hyphen, designed to be used in different situations. But we’ll get to these in a minute. In today’s episode, I’m excited to share all that I’ve learned about the wonderful world of hyphens from author Keith Houston and his excellently thorough book entitled Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. It’s a magnificently deep dive into the geekdom of signs and symbols, perfect for graphic designers, printers, and english majors alike. I also have a really bad joke to tell, but I’ll wait until the end of this episode to tell it because I hope it will make a heck of a lot more sense by then. So please bear with me... and please be kind after my joke’s over, too. Promise? So let’s start in the logical place of identifying the seven distinct typographical hyphen-like glyphs… but only but only one can be a true hyphen. First, we have no fewer than four dashes, one mathematical minus sign, one “fake hyphen” (called a “ hyphen-minus”… a term which is hyphenated… so it’s a hyphenated hyphen, if you can believe such a real typographic unicorn of an oddity exists) and finally, one hyphen. First the four dashes. As Houston explains: “The ‘dash’ is not so much a solo artist as a quartet where each member wears the same suit but plays a different instrument.” The dash’s name is widely recognized as simply referring to the verb ‘to dash’, in the sense of striking violently. The two most commonly used dashes are the em and en dash (spelled e-m and e-n, respectively). Em and en are typographic units of measure. They are relative units that change depending on the size of type you’re currently using. To understand the bigger picture, they’re used in conjunction with absolute units of measure, such as a centimetre or an inch, which never change. They’re absolute. An inch is an inch is an inch, whether you’re designing in 10 pt. type, 100 pt. type or 1000 pt. Type. Relative units like em and en change depending on the size of your type, while absolute units never change. Em dashes are equivalent to an uppercase letter M in width (and in height - M’s are square). If you’re working at 10 pt. type, the length of the em dash is 10 points. An alternative, and perhaps simpler way to remember the length of an em dash is that it is equivalent in length to the point size you’re currently working in - in 24 pt. type you’ll have a 24 pt. dash. (Think of yourself as a giant letter and the point size you’re working in is your height and the length of the em dash is your arm span when your arms are stretched out to the sides, which is equivalent to your height… that’s a thing, right? I think that’s a thing anyway… hit pause to test it out.) Em dashes are used to indicate an instance of ‘aposiopesis’ (AP-o-sigh-o-pee-sis) (an abrupt change or end to speech - “What the—?“) They can also be used to sensor portions of words or entire words when doubled up. In fact, dashes were used so commonly to censor words in the 1800’s that the term ‘dash’ became the nickname for bad words themselves: What the dash did she just say?! En dashes are equivalent to half of the em (or half the point size of the type you’re working in - 24 pt. Type means that your en dash will be 12 pts.). En dashes are used between sets of dates in place of the word ‘to’, as well as connecting compound terms (think: sister-in-law)), and much like it’s em dash counterpart, it acts as a sensor of individual characters in an offending w- -d. (To confuse matters, American and British style guides often interchange the em and en dashes; one favouring one and the other, the other. I read that as: both are correct, then! The third dash is more exotic and it’s called a “quotation dash”, which is the longest of all the dashes and is used to denote spoken dialogue. If an author chooses to use them, each new line of dialogue has a quotation dash placed in front of it. The final dash is called the “figure dash”, which is used to separate strings of numerals that don’t represent date ranges. For example, the dash in a phone number is a figure dash. This dash is designed to match the width of a typeface’s numerals to maintain equal width in lines of numbers. For consistency and conformity’s sake. So there are our four distinct dashes and in which situations each is used. Next, we’ll move on to the mathematical minus sign, which is about one third the length of an em dash. Although relatively straight forward, the true minus sign is often not used appropriately. Instead, what we most commonly see when typing is… hyphen-minus. The hyphen-minus was born in the late nineteenth century in the transition from exclusively handwritten work to the use of typewriters. The first QWERTY keyboard (the keyboard layout we know and love today) featured a single hyphen-like character, called the hyphen-minus, which is slightly shorter than a true hyphen. The hyphen minus is a catch-all character that was a product of “the great typewriter squeeze”; there could only be so many characters available on a keyboard and a single dash is all that could be afforded, along with a comma, underline, colon, semicolon, period, ampersand, question mark and apostrophe. Now thought-of essentials like the number zero, number one or an exclamation mark weren’t present on the initial 1878 keyboard. Cleverly, the number zero had the letter O as a stand in, the number one was denoted by the letter I and an exclamation mark could be achieved by typing a period, a backspace and then an apostrophe. Exclamation marks continued to be a rarity on typewriter keyboards for nearly the next 100 years. There’s even a note in The Secretary’s Manual of 1973 explaining how to manually construct them. In the days of typewriters, instances that required dashes longer than a hyphen-minus (such as em dashes) a double, unspaced dash was the solution. Now professional printers would have access to many additional (nearly unlimited) glyphs, above and beyond what could be squeezed onto a typewriter keyboard, so it would be the compositor’s job to transform a double hyphen in a manuscript into a proper em dash in the final printed piece… however, sometimes the double dash slipped by accidentally. In fact, there was one place that the double hyphen remains even today: comic books. Comic book dialogue employs the double hyphen. Just like Comic Sans, the double hyphen is a feature prominent in comic books, but unlike Comic Sans, double hyphens have largely stayed in the pages of comic books, while Comic Sans has wandered off to annoy documents in nearly every other domain. Lastly in our lineup of 7 hyphen-like characters is… the hyphen. The hyphen is ever-so-slightly longer than it’s imposter, hyphen-minus. Hyphens are simply used to connect words that have combined meaning, as well as to connect broken words over two lines. Here’s a look back on it’s evolved and shape-shifting history. The hyphen has a long history that dates back to second-century-BC grammarian Dionysius Thrax, who catalogued the marks used to clarify emphasis, intonation and rhythms of speech. Back then, the hyphen was a bowed line (think a rounded open or closed bracket that’s tipped over, like a turtle on its shell). This sublinear hyphen hung like a hammock, drawn under two words, connecting them. Punctuation of any kind was especially handy during this stage of the written word’s history when text was written entirely without workspaces. Imagine reading long hashtags on Twitter or Instagram, but now imagine that’s how everything was written. (You think your marketing textbook is a tedious read now, how would Mr. Thrax have felt!?) The sublinear hyphen existed for centuries and as society evolved, as did the language used to describe it. Many words that were once hyphenated were simply made into compoundwords (I love the fact that compoundwords can be written as a compoundword). And then Mr. Gutenberg entered the mix. His moveable type had “airspace” above and below each character and it proved quite difficult to insert the Greek sublinear hyphen into his typeset pages (Houston calls it “typesetting gymnastics”). The sublinear hyphen’s days were numbered and printing finally did away with what was used for centuries to combine words. But how did the hyphen as we know it today make its way into written text. The answer may lie in a hyphen’s other main purpose, which is to connect broken words that were disconnected across lines due to the constraints of the page size, type size and line length: the “marginal” hyphen. The hyphen we know and use today is the Latin doppelgänger of the Greek hyphen, which was used as a marginal hyphen to fix broken words. Marginal hyphens are necessary to help in situations where text can’t be stretched to both margins neatly without huge gaps of white space between words. Therefore, a word may need to be broken over two lines to ensure relatively equal spacing between words in a block of text. One of the most amazing things about the very first printed book in Europe, Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible, is the fact that there was such uniformity of the text (no huge blobs of written word, accompanied by huge gaps of whitespace in between). One of the reasons for such uniformity in the marking and spacing, was that Gutenberg was not afraid to use hyphens… all. the. time. Houston says it best: “…in Gutenberg’s day the first rule of Hyphenation Club was that there are no rules”. Gutenberg used the double form hyphen, which looks like an upwardly slanted equals sign and was popular in his day. He set his hyphens outside the margin for stylistic reasons, which, by some estimations, means that he would have had to set an extra 36,000 pieces of type throughout the bible’s near 1,300 pages to accomplish this little detail. For, you see, any line of text that didn’t contain a hyphen (roughly one third contained hyphens and therefore two thirds did not) would have required a non-printing spacing character added to it so that physical blocks of type were stretched from one side of the chase to the other and locked into place. Fast forward to today. As I look down at my Mac’s keyboard, I’m suddenly seeing it through new eyes. I look at the single hyphen-like character on my keyboard, which has not been given any additional, dashing friends added since the first days of typewriter keyboards. In fact, the single hyphen-like horizontal glyph on my keyboard (apart from the underscore, which also existed on the original QWERTY keyboard design) is the stand-in for all types of symbols we’ve explored here… and it’s not what it appears to be. Let’s agree that the four most commonly used hyphen-like symbols (in order from longest to shortest) are the em dash, en dash, minus sign and hyphen. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought of the hyphen-like symbol on my keyboard as a numerical minus sign (it lives happily beside the plus sign, after all), but could this symbol be an imposter? (Cue dramatic plot twist music.) Has Mrs. Addition been duped all these years? And if it’s not Mr. Minus, who is this alter ego (insert interrobang here)!? This is not a question that kept me up at night. At least not until I began digging into this topic and I looked down at my keyboard with the realization that Mr. Minus probably isn’t who he cracked up to be. After all, if we compare him to em dash, he’s likely a third or so of his size. An em dash is equivalent to the point size used, but remember that a font’s size is larger than simply the height of the capital letters (or cap height). Instead, the height of a font is roughly a bit larger than the distance from the tallest ascender to the lowest descender. I left my typographic ruler at the office, but with some crude measurements, comparing it against the letters on the keyboard, I can safely say our hyphen-like character in question is smaller than an em dash, it’s smaller than an en dash, so I think it is, in fact, a numerical minus sign. And they live happily ever after… but, when that key is pressed… a hyphen-minus is typed! (Whaaaaaaaat?) So by day he goes to work and parades around as a fake hyphen and by night he comes home to sleep nestled in beside his plus signed lady with the appearance of a minus sign? Wow. A double agent. A fake of a fake… THIS, I never saw coming. I digress. No one cares about this and if you’ve stuck around this long. Thank you. Dashing back to my original thought, the four most commonly used hyphen-like symbols are the em dash, en dash, minus sign and hyphen. To type a hyphen (or rather, hyphen-minus because this hasn’t evolved since the days of the typewriter), simply press the only hyphen-like symbol on the keyboard. To type a true numerical minus sign (and I learned this only after some deep digging on Internet message boards), the easiest way on a Mac is to call up the ‘Emojis & Symbols’ menu by typing Control Command Space. In the search menu, type ‘minus sign’ and you’ll be presented with the true minus sign (as well as ‘heavy minus sign’). For a true en dash, the shortcut on a Mac is Option Hyphen. For a true em dash, the shortcut is Shift Option Hyphen or simply hit the hyphen key twice and it will automatically connect the two and extend it to create an em dash. Got all that? One last thing. I pulled up the ‘Emojis & Symbols’ menu again. I was curious so I typed just the word ‘minus’ and I was presented with one more, no good, nefarious, never-before heard of hyphen: the ‘fullwidth hyphen-minus’. Oh boy. Upon closer inspection it appears to be equivalent in length to an em dash and a quick Google search led me to uncover… YET ANOTHER TYPE OF HYPHEN. The small hyphen-minus. (Why, why am I doing this to myself. Just stop now, Diana. Just STOP.) It looks as though it’s equivalent to an en dash, but I can’t be sure at this point. I know curiosity killed the cat and all that, but I am decidedly all in at this point, so I typed ‘hyphen’ into my trusty ‘Emojis & Symbols’ menu, juuuuuuuust to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and (insert em dash here) - you guessed it. More hyphens. Exactly seven MORE types of hyphens to choose from, including the hyphen bullet, non-breaking hyphen and (my personal favourite) the Katakana-Hiragana double hyphen. I did some digging as to what the heck this last one is or when it’s used, but I came up short. All I can tell you is that it looks like an equals sign (but assuredly, it’s not one.) In fact, Houston clarifies that Unicode offers no fewer than 23 dashes for use in the Latin alphabet. My head hurts. And now probably, so does yours. I’m terribly sorry. One very important, nay critical, thing I haven’t asked yet is: does anyone really care? Will anyone notice? I, personally, find it very difficult to tell the difference between most of these glyphs. If you were to line up all seven hyphen-like symbols in a row and ask me to pick a true hyphen out of a lineup, I’m not sure I could do it. So, to the die-hard type geeks out there, yes, using the correct hyphen-like symbol in the correct context is important. For the other 99.9999% of the world, using the hyphen-minus as a stand-in for anything hyphen-like works just as well. If you’ll bear with me for one more minute, I promised you a bad joke. A bad joke about a hyphen. Here we go: Three food critics walk into a restaurant. The waiter seats them at their table and introduces their signature dish. All three order it. When it arrives from the kitchen, each tries the dish one after the other. The first critic, the mathematical minus sign, took one look and said: “I give it negative five stars.” The second critic, hyphen-minus, immediately upon smelling the dish pulled out his typewriter and wrote: “This comes up short of my expectations.” Lastly, the third critic, hyphen, takes a big fork-full of food, shoves it in his mouth and quietly chews. After he’s finished, he abruptly gets up and walks out the front door. The waiter, defensive of the reactions from all the critics finally said: “ It couldn’t have been that marginal… hyphen ate it.” I guess, sometimes, you just have to dine and dash. Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Music by Podington Bear - Cracked Nut Suite Sound effects from Freesound Suspense - woodmoose Typewriter - pakasit21 Shocked - Adam_N Dun Dun Dun - Simon_Lasalle Awe Whistle - InspectorJ Fantasy Windchimes - northern87 Record Scratches - jswonger Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

It’s time for Talk Paper Scissors and I’m over the moon to share another interview with an awesome design and print entrepreneur. Britt Rohr, Founder of Swell Press just outside of Los Angeles, California, joins us on today’s podcast! Britt attended her first letterpress workshop in early 2014 and a few months later, she bought her first letterpress! Britt continued her letterpress journey as a side-hustle and set up a garage studio working on wedding invitations and pieces for friends or friends-of-friends. She continued to work at her day job while growing her letterpress business until May 2017 when she decided to take a six-month leave to give Swell Press a go full-time. From attending that very first letterpress workshop to now, her business has grown substantially, she’s purchased new equipment, she has continued to learn the craft of printing on different types of presses, she moved three times (eventually into her dream studio space!), and she hired a dream-team of women to work with her part-time and then eventually full-time. Britt’s work has been featured in Martha Stewart Weddings, the knot and oh so beautiful paper, among other news outlets. Britt combines old and new technologies to create her beautiful pieces. She uses letterpress technology that uses the same principles that Gutenberg perfected over 500 years ago (inking up and pressing a raised image area onto paper). However, instead of moveable type (individual letters assembled to create the design) she uses polymer (flexible plastic) plates, which means that she creates her designs digitally using software like Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator. These plates are very similar to those used in flexographic printing to produce all kinds of packaging and labels. Designing digitally means that Britt has much more control over her design, as well as virtually unlimited access to typefaces, versus having to physically own moveable type. It’s comparable to wanting to watch a movie and being able to stream hundreds or thousands of movies on a service like Netflix, versus having to actually own hundreds or thousands of DVDs to get the same level of choice. The latter is expensive, cumbersome and less functional than the digital option. Designing for letterpress digitally provides access to all the benefits of using computer design software, while the letterpress technology and beautiful cotton paper accomplishes an artisanal, textural and handmade feel. Letterpress printing takes the finished product to a whole new level. Although she and I could talk all day about everything paper and printing and ink and presses, today’s chat will focus on the areas of design, colour and typography. There is so much I can’t wait to talk to her about so let’s dive right in! Key takeaways from Britt’s interview: Your world can get turned upside down with a single workshop you attend - don’t have your heart set on a specific career path Nature is hugely inspirational to Britt’s designs (so are booze labels!) Look outside of your industry for inspiration instead of copying what’s already out there in your industry Keep your phone on you because inspiration can strike at any moment! Britt was a letterpress printer first and a designer second, so she thinks about her design work differently - know the medium you’re designing in so that you understand the design possibilities Client process: customers come to Britt with a mood board > contract signed > creative design process for Britt where she presents 2-4 initial concepts > Britt and client refine concept together > design is complete > sign proof to move ahead with production > production When thinking about colour, think not only about the ink and the overprinting and interactions between transparent ink, but also paper colour Check out @swellpress on Instagram on August 19, 2020 to check out Britt’s recent favourite project Pantone doesn’t discriminate in terms of the size of your audience - post something beautiful related to them and you may get reposted! Go your own way and try not to care so much about what other people are doing - you do you! The hardest part of printing using letterpress technology is how unpredictable 50 - 100 year old technology can be If you have a medium that you enjoy (like letterpress!) find a local school or business who will teach you how to use the equipment Design for yourself first; don’t jump into getting clients right away so that you can ensure your vision is realized before you work for others Not everyone likes Futura MUSIC Music by Podington Bear: Niagara Falls in a Raft Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

I can’t wait for you to hear this episode related to the very important work happening in social justice activism and the critical anti-racism work here at home and around the world. This episode coincides with Scholar Strike for Black Lives in Canada happening on September 9 and 10, 2020. Thousands of academics in higher education will be participating to show solidarity and protest anti-Black, racist and colonial police brutality in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. During the Scholar Strike, we will pause our teaching and administrative duties. The idea is to use this time to organize opportunities to discuss, reflect and take action on police brutality and violence. Joining me today is my friend and former colleague, Chantel Ragoo, National Sales Director for MOTHER Denim. Chantel now works in the realm of fashion, but she started her career in the design and print production world. She’s excited to share her career path in the design and fashion industries, as well as add her voice to the discussion about Black representation in industry. Key Notes From My Discussion with Chantel: No two days are the same as a National Sales Director for a fashion brand! Anything goes in in the world of fashion and design, art and music so there’s no need to set creative limits Communication, time management and teamwork skills are transferable to lots of different industries so use the opportunities in school to hone them! Chantel finds one of the most challenging aspects of her work is to ensure that she’s not taken advantage of (in terms of the amount of time worked, for example) Work-life balance is challenging Asking for help is important Stop, drop and roll really works Working with a great team, taking time to have fun and having goals to hit bring Chantel joy in her work Chantel believes that the reason only an estimated 3% of graphic designers are Black is because of lack of opportunity; the fact that they don’t see it as an accessible career path To help promote greater inclusion at a university level in the world of design and print, we can work to incorporate touch conversations into our lectures, help organize fundraising efforts as a class and ultimately, recognizing the responsibility that those of us with white privilege have Chantel is her middle name and she has found that muting her first name has (unfortunately) opened up opportunities for her It’s about equity, not equality; getting the right tools in the hands on the people to level the playing field It’s not enough to say you don’t like something; come to the table with an idea or solution to move thought into action “If you know better, do better.” - Chantel’s Mom But Chantel believes that when it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement, not enough people have the critical information they need to do better Difficult conversations are hard for everyone but they still need to happen It’s everyone’s job to learn about anti-racism; it’s not on the Black community to teach us Just because Chantel’s a Black woman, she wants us to know that she doesn’t have all the answers, that she’s still learning and that it’s an ongoing process There are so many resources to learn about these important issues that cost no money to access - they’re free! There are no excuses! Performative anti-racism is not an option; we can’t just say ‘Black Lives Matter’, we have to prove it Consider doing more than donating money; consider donating your time to organizations that support the cause It’s important not to typecast Black women as “strong, Black women” because it’s setting a potentially unrealistic standard to live up to and it can make it hard to ask for help Chantel’s success tips: Being good to the people around you, especially when you are young and starting out in an industry, can be paramount to your success because you’re creating good energy for yourself and building a strong reputation Take initiative and don’t be afraid to make mistakes “If you don’t ask, you will never get!” - Chantel’s Dad Seek out like minded people to become connected within industry and outside of your industry who offer a unique perspective is important to success Pay it forward - become a mentor (formal or informal) and give people a chance Be passionate about what you’re doing MUSIC Music by Podington Bear: Flutterbee Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle PHOTOS Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash Chantel Ragoo Equality vs. Equity: Equality vs. Equity graphic kit

Join host, Diana Varma, as she explores the wonderful world of design and printing, typography and branding, books and publishing. In each episode Diana aims to answer many age-old, deep philosophical questions such as: Where the heck did Comic Sans originate? Why do the majority of printed books have blank pages at the end? What is the world's ugliest colour? What does a sassy three-year-old have to say about the visible colour spectrum? Ready to have some fun? Let's talk paper scissors. Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Today’s episode is one that looks at extremes. Huge type, tiny type and everything in between live here. But before we get to the fun extremes, let’s first have a look at how documents and type are measured in industry. For that, we must start with M-m-m-m-MATH! Now, I don’t want to scare you. Many creative people RUN SO FAST when they hear the dreaded ‘M word’ so I don’t want you to turn this episode off. I truly believe that once you understand the units of typographic measurement and how they relate to one another, I’m confident you won’t be scared of typographic math any more. First, there are a few different units of measure to be aware of including: imperial units of measure (inches), metric units of measure (centimetres and millimetres), and typographic units of measure (picas and points). Here's an easy reference point: 1 inch = 2.54 cm, 25.4 mm, 6 picas, 72 points. If you need to convert from one unit of typographic measurement to another (let’s stay focused on imperial units found in the world of design and printing - inches, picas and points), use an inch as the benchmark. In fact, take out a pen or pencil and piece of paper right now. Pause this episode and go get your materials. I’ll wait. You’re back, tools in hand. So now please draw a horizontal line and label it “1 inch”. Next, draw a line the exact same length below and break up that line into 6 equal parts. Label this line ‘picas’. Next draw a line the exact same length below and break up that line into roughly 72 equal parts (you can break it up into 7 equal parts with little vertical lines and then 10 more parts within each to get to about 72). Label this line ‘points’. So you should have 3 lines at this point: 1 inch, 6 picas and 72 points. These are your 3 basic typographic units of measure. Inches are typically used to describe the overall page dimensions (that book is 5.5” x 8.5”), picas are used to measure horizontal column width commonly used in the magazine and newspaper industries, and points are the way in which type size is expressed. There’s one more piece of this typographic unit information you need to complete the puzzle. Points are a subunit of picas. If you have a look at your hand drawn lines, you should notice that there are approximately 12 points in 1 pica. 12 points = 1 pica. Therefore, if you have a document width of 61 points and you were asked to reduce this value to its lowest common denominator, the correct answer is 5 picas and 1 point (expressed as 5p1). Let's try another one. If you had a document that is 1.5 inches and you were asked to convert that value into picas, the correct answer is... 9 picas. 6 picas is equivalent one inch and 3 picas is equivalent to half an inch. Add them together to get 9 picas. If you’re expression points by themselves (ex: I’m using 13 pt. type), the way in which you express this measurement is identifying the number (13, in this case) and the letters pt. after it. At the end of the day, if you understand the two big ones (inches and points) and how they relate to one another (1 inch = 72 points) this will help you tremendously when using software like Adobe InDesign. Enough math. Let’s get into the fun stuff. Exploring the largest and smallest books and type in the world. Largest Book (Size) One of the world’s largest handmade books takes six people to turn each page. It’s located in a small town in Hungary and it’s 346 pages contain information about the flora and fauna of the region. It was created using traditional bookbinding techniques that were scaled up to work with such a large end product. The dimensions of the book are 4.18 x 3.77 metres (nearly 14 feet by over 12 feet). It’s one of the world’s largest books and it weighs in at a whopping 1420 kg (more than 3000 lbs)! The largest book in the world broke the Guinness World Record in February 2012 is located in Dubai, UAE. The book measures 5 x 8.06 metres (more than 16 feet by more than 26 feet) and weighs 1500 kg (more than 3000 lbs). The book is called “This the Prophet Mohamed” and complies stories of lifetime achievements of Islam’s Prophet. Largest Book (Mass) This one goes to a collection of massive stone tablets in Myanmar. There are more than 700 marble tablets (each one over 5 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide) and tell a story central to Buddhist religion. Longest Book (Most Pages) The longest book is awarded to the 17th century work translated to ‘Atarmene or Cyrus the Great’ and over the 10 volumes contains over 10,000 pages and 2.1 million words. Keep in mind that books published today typically contain 50,000-100,000 words, or 2.5-5% of this book. Even the notoriously long ‘War and Peace’ contains only ¼ of the words, around 560,000. Most Copies Sold This one goes to the Bible, with an estimated 5 billion copies sold (4 billion in the last 50 years alone). It was the first book to ever be printed using Gutenberg’s printing technology almost 500 years ago and it continues to be a bestseller. A work entitled “Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung” came in second with 820 million copies sold and Harry Potter rounding out the top three, selling approximately 400 million copies and becoming the best-selling book series in history. No wonder J.K. Rowling is the one of the richest women in the UK. Most Expensive This notoriety goes to a book owned by Bill Gates, purchased in 1994 for $30.8 million. The book is Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, which is an original hand-drawn manuscript from the early 1500’s and it’s one of 20 of da Vinci’s notebooks still in existence. The entire book (notes and sketches) is transcribed in his unique right-to-left “mirror writing”. Most Valuable This one goes to the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1455 using printing technology and moveable type. Although 180 2-volume sets were originally printed, just 49 exist today and only 21 are complete sets. Thankfully, most, if not all copies are owned by museums, libraries and institutions and many are available for the public to view so we can all enjoy this practically priceless work of art. Check out my fourth podcast episode entitled ‘Gutenberg’ to learn more about this great book. Let’s flip to the other side of the equation for a second - the smallest. Now, I can tell you with great certainty that the least valuable work, with the fewest copies sold, containing the least number of pages is anything any of us has created for school projects when we were little (well, maybe they were valuable to our grown ups). The smallest book in the world was developed here in Canada at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The 30-page book, perfectly named ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’, can only be read using an electron microscope. The book was printed using pure crystalline silicon. It measures an unbelievable 70 micrometers by 100 micrometers - it could fit on the width of a human hair! Now that you’re armed with the knowledge of typographic measurements, you can go out into the world and create the next massive or teeny tiny work of book art. Go big or go home! MUSIC Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Sound Effects from Freesound Female Shout - kokopetiyot Cheering Church - pan14 Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Branding has evolved significantly since the first-ever brand registered in the United States almost 150 years ago (Bass & Co. Beer). Back then, a brand represented a promise and it continues to do so, however with many additional, complex layers of psychology stacked high. As humans, we have developed the unique ability to create meaning from the seemingly meaningless world around us and this is exactly what Debbie Millman (a foremost expert on branding) believes branding to be: branding is simply manufactured meaning. Brands, and the associations we have with brands, come from human brains. They don’t exist in the natural world. And strong design is the communication of that manufactured meaning. So how have brands evolved from the very first registered brand on January 1, 1876, allowing a brand to exist as its own legal entity? It’s time to turn to the work of acclaimed branding expert, Debbie Millman, who is an authority in the history of branding and how it’s evolving in the age of social networking. She is the Co-Founder of Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She’s authored several books on branding and she’s also acted as the President of the design division at Sterling Brands where she has worked on the redesign of over 200 global brands. Millman has identified five waves of brand evolution from 1875 to today, and Millman believes there’s been a radical shift specifically in the last three years, which I will speak to as well. Wave #1: 1875 - 1920 (RECOGNITION ERA) Radio was the primary marketing medium Brand names were tied to an individual, such as “Mr. Kellogg” Brands represented consistency, familiarity and trust Brands provided a quality guarantee and an expected level of product safety Coca Cola and Campbell's soup were the leaders at this time Wave #2: 1920 - 1965 (COPYCAT ERA) Black and white televisions were introduced Anthropomorphic stage of brands - using human characteristics to create a level of connection between consumers and brands because there was no difference in the product itself Lots of “copycat” products were born to try to achieve the successes of the original products - characters introduced as a way to differentiate from exact same products and forge a relationship with consumers Uncle Ben and Betty Crocker are examples of linking a (fictitious - sorry they're not real!) human form to a product in order to establish an emotional connection with consumers to sell more product Wave #3: 1965 - 1985 (STATUS ERA) Colour televisions were introduced Brands became self expressive statements (they “mean something” about the person who uses the brand) A brand could provide status Who you wanted to appear to others as - branding turned into belonging Levi's, Nike, Volkswagen, Marlboro are all examples of brands that became self expressive statements during this time Wave #4: 1985 - 2000 (EXPERIENTIAL ERA) Televisions were integrated into most family homes by this time Cell phones came to market Brands in this wave of evolution can be categorized as creating an emotional experience for the consumer that enabled the consumer feel different from everyone else Disney, Starbucks and Apple are all examples of brands that were experiential during this time Wave #5: 2000 - 2017 (CONNECTION ERA) Up until this point brands have been controlled from the top down, by the corporations who have shaped them and pushed them down to consumers 2001-2004 - “iPod isolation” occurred where the user now had complete control over the product and can customize it - having complete control over their entertainment (some experts were fearful that we were in our own bubbles) - increasing isolation (our brains are happiest when we’re resonating with other humans) Then social networking came along and changed the digital world forever, as it both democratized brands so that they existed in the hands of the people instead of only by companies and facilitated connections through the isolation of devices Social networking through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, etc. exploded as a way to connect with others - connection was (and remains) king The psychological aspects of social networking are absolutely fascinating. Why do we connect online and what motivates our desires to connect? Based on the networking theories of Charles Kadushin, the psychological foundations of social networks are derived from two basic human motivations: to feel safe and to reach out. Online social networks that are dense (a high number of ties within a network, relative to all those that are possible) are seen as highly safe networks because they provide social support and a sense of trust for the individual connected in this network Furthermore, reaching out helps our overwhelming emotional need to feel connected We are the only species on the planet who demonstrates this connection to others (manufactured meaning) through symbols and brands - clothing brands, wedding bands, tattoos, nike shoes Given the choice, a baby will choose the connection to their mother over food (we feel happiest when we have secure attachment to others) and marketers are working to capitalize on this psychological phenomenon We’re not exactly addicted to our phones; instead we’re addicted to the feelings of connection we experience with the help of our phones We’re living in an information era where we have ample opportunity (some would say too much opportunity) to connect with one another, however the quality and authenticity of these connections are often lacking. In a time when network-savvy individuals have the capability and the desire to connect, marketers have the perfect opportunity to “be human” (or recruit humans with lots of existing connections - more on that in a second) and reach out consumers through social platforms. "Limbic Brand" - a neuromarketing-oriented approach to branding, referring to the limbic part of our brain (the part that controls basic emotions and drives) So the question then becomes: How do marketers leverage this knowledge of our motivations to connect online for selling products and services to connection-hungry consumers in the information age? ...And that leads us to today. What I’m calling the ‘Influencer Era’. Wave #6: 2017 - Now (INFLUENCER ERA) Millman argues that branding has changed in the last three years (since 2017) than ever before in history - branding has become democratized - Millman: “Brands can be created by anyone and can be shared by everyone.” Brands are now created BY the people FOR the people This has helped usher in the idea that brands can be movements: ie: Black Lives Matter, #metoo - Millman describes this phenomenon like this: “Branding is now a profound manifestation of the human spirit.” - further humanity through branding - the things we make and mark I will add on that today’s world of connected brands that are for the people by the people, the world of the influencer plays such a huge role in marketing. Influencers on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, for example, are turned to by loyal followers for product and service recommendations. According to the Digital Marketing Institute online, 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities. Why does it work so well? Trust. Trust is the backbone of all strong brands and followers often see their lives paralleled in the lives of these individuals’. Like traditional marketing muses dreamed up by marketing departments, not every single customer will be exactly like the muse they’ve created, but every customer desires or wants to be like the muse in some way. I believe this is the same phenomenon happening with influencers online. Not every follower is exactly like each of the influencers they follow (how could they be?), but every follower sees a part of themselves represented within the influencer. This forges connection, which leads to trust, which could lead to strong feelings of association with the products and services they promote. Furthermore, the Digital Marketing Institute states that 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice with nearly half having purchased a product directly as a result of an influencer. Just a few years ago, influencer marketing was not nearly as powerful or pervasive as it is today. Now, more than three-quarters of women are (willingly! And often!) turning to a marketing channel to make purchasing decisions and they’re being powerfully swayed. With each new wave in their evolution, brands have accumulated the worth and meaning thrust upon them in each of the previous eras. Brands are more complex and meaningful today than ever before in history as each of us aim to live out our individuality in the brand choices we make, whether we realize it or not. (After all, deciding not to choose one brand over another - or choosing no brand at all - is just as much of a choice.) What will the future of branding look like in 2020 and beyond? How will our devices and social networks, both online and offline, continue to shift our understanding of, and interaction with, brands? Well, we’ll soon find out... Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash