Sunshocked

Designed by Chris Costello back in 1983, Papyrus (and not Comic Sans) is my least favorite font. The disdain is rooted neither in its subtle serifs nor its curious kerning, nor any particular aspect of the typeface itself, but rather how it is used—and what the usage says about us as a culture.

It was neither High Fidelity nor Merlin Mann that inspired the following very important list of why lists are very important, but the surfeit of posts on Digg, Tailrank, and Reddit that are merely compilations of things already known—and, specifically, that these posts are wildly popular. Here’s why.

Admit it. You secretly hate MySpace. Maybe not even secretly, maybe you wear the shirt everywhere. Still, you’ve been forced to respect it because it’s an unstoppable juggernaut with over one hundred million members. Well, let’s burst some bubbles.

Last week I fell in love with XFN, a microformat for representing human relationships. I immediately started sketching out fun ways to make it work for me. First stop, my Mac’s Addressbook.

I spent all morning poring over Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. One might imagine that they are quite spectacular. If you’re not a developer of Apple software (which, strictly statistically, you probably aren’t), you can still find plenty of value in “Part I: Application Design Fundamentals”. In fact, I printed out pages 23 through 52 and they now sit on my bookshelf.