China is really big. There are a lot of people in china all sharing the same cultual context. One of the problems that emerges as a result is the fact that over a billion people there are sharing about one hundred surnames. That is starting to cause some difficulty in differentiating people. We can’t all have the same name after all. It would be rather inconvenient. They seem to have come up with one possible solution though – allowing parents to combine their surnames to give their children a compound surname. That seems like a decent solution in theory but only if you lose the misogyny.

The graphic device used to illustrate dialog has a more interesting lineage than you may imagine. It is a slow evolution with a rich history allowing for a wealth of examples of experimentations with incremental shifts in style however abstract it may, in fact, be.

Mark Liberman has done a bit of investigation into the history of typographic censorship (or ‘bleeping‘ as he calls it). It is a very different thing than taking a black marker to text as a tool for censorship. Typographic bleeping involves the replacing of one character with another to abstract or obscure offending words. Anybody who bought a hip hop cassette in the 1990s is well familiar with this trend.

This is an ancestor of the post-modern typographic abstraction found in much of today’s graffiti murals. Glyphs are transformed to create a duality of semiotics between language and image. Peacay has done a nice little write-up on a great subject which is often overlooked and sorely in need of further documentation particularly some which contextualises this work to what we see today in typography and graphic design.

The journopimps over at the New York Times apparently dumb down their headlines for Google. This is pretty interesting as it may point the way towards a new form of writing more kin to madlibs than to formal linguistic composition. One day we could see news articles which dynamically adapt to colloquial or even personal language variances. You could read an article and find comfort in the fact that you know all the words and that there is nothing over two syllables included. You may opt for a lexicon expanding form of news delivery. The same articles could adapt to how individuals or groups want to read them.