Keith Houston's Blog, page 9
March 30, 2020
Miscellany № 87: a coronavirus conundrum
In the midst of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Twitter user @talkporty got in touch to ask:
Dear @shadychars, you are the only one I can turn to in this situation. I am being hounded by EM-DASHES! Help! How has #covidー19uk become a trending hashtag? Nobody types them in.
Read more →
March 15, 2020
Miscellany № 86: back in the saddle
Well, ✨that was fun✨❗ For now, though, its time to work our way through some of the punctuation-related links and news articles that have cropped up during our stay in emojiland. Stick around; theres some great stuff to come.
Read more →
March 1, 2020
Shady Characters on Glenn Fleishman’s Tiny Typecast
A couple of months ago, in the midst of writing my emoji series, I took some time out to have a chat with Glenn Fleishman for his new podcast series, the Tiny Typecast. Glenn is an old friend of the blog and is astonishingly well-informed about books, typography and all things related: we talked about books and book history for what felt like a few minutes, but turned out to be the better part of an hour. Glenn is easy to talk to and, if you check out our conversation on Apple Podcasts or at...
January 25, 2020
Emoji, part 10: state of the nation
We’ve come a long way, , in this series of posts on emoji, and it’s time to round things up.
We’ve seen how emoji were invented, where they came from, and how they went global. We’ve examined the technical and political infrastructure that underpin the emoji we see on our smartphones and computer screens, and we’ve watched emoji transcend their electronic roots to appear in the news, in the courts, in the movies, and more.
Read more
December 10, 2019
The Book (책의 책) is now available in Korean!
I’m happy to announce that The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is now available in Korean, courtesy of Gimm-Young Publications. It’s available now, priced at 24,800, and you can take a quick tour via Google Books.
Read more
November 7, 2019
Emoji, part 9: going beyond
Given all we’ve seen so far in this series, it becomes natural to wonder: what’s next for emoji? And how do we even begin to answer that question?
We saw in part 7 that emoji are neither a language nor a script. But if we might be permitted for a moment to call them script-like, then, of all of the scripts and script-like things that we use to communicate online, emoji were perhaps the first to be native to the digital world. They were born to inject life into Japan’s teen-friendly poke beru, or pagers; later, they were adopted by Apple,...script-,
August 31, 2019
Emoji, part 8: when is an emoji not an emoji?
As exuberant as emoji can be in the right hands, our palette of emoji remains tightly controlled by the Unicode Consortium. There are, however, other ways to embed colourful graphics in your digital messages, and, in the long run, there is every possiblity that they may elbow emoji out of the way entirely. The future of emoji may not be emoji at all.
Read more →
June 9, 2019
Emoji, part 7: the emoji tongue
With emoji everywhere you might care to look, a nagging question remains unanswered. What are emoji? Are they a language, whatever that means? A pictographic script in the manner of hieroglyphics or Chinese characters? Or are they something else entirely? In this post we examine how emoji are, and aren’t, used, and what that might tell us about the nature of emoji as a whole.
Read more →
June 2, 2019
“Collections and Collaborations” posters now available!
As I mentioned last time, last month I took part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations” at which Tom Etherington and I, along with six other pairs of collaborators, launched the poster on which we’d been working for the past few months.
Read more →
May 1, 2019
“Collections and Collaborations” at the St Bride Foundation, London, on 14th May, 2019
On Tuesday the 14th of May I’ll be taking part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations”. It’s a showcase for a set of posters inspired by St Bride and its collections, and I was lucky enough to be paired with the talented Tom Etherington, a book designer at Penguin, to help produce one of those posters.
Read more →
