74: The black art of designing content

While distracting myself from doing real work this week, I learnt the phrase ‘black art’ comes from the world of printing presses. So I delved deeper into the world of content design. Eventually I found a product management angle.

Typesetters would set individual metal letters (‘sorts’) into racks. These were then used to print pages of books and newspapers in black printer’s ink (hence ‘black art’). A typesetter would finesse the spacing between individual letters and words to make them ...