Andrew Vachss Quotes

Courier 12 is the Type-O blood of fonts - works just as good for a 'N.Y. Times' op-ed as a screenplay or a short story.

I don't even use italics or boldface; that's clutter, not clarity. Fancy fonts are fine for blogs, just as calligraphy is fine for diaries. But when you're writing for anyone other than yourself, you want to get as universal as possible.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

I was now ordered to have my writings copied, and put into the printer's hand.

I love graphic design. I love working with design, and I love storytelling, so I've been working on a children's book for a while, and I'd like to see that through.

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.

We print 37 million copies, and we found out about the unfortunate news as we were putting the issue to bed.

I come from a long line of people that write. My folks ran a weekly newspaper.

My daughter writes and is the editor of her school magazine.

The argument that a serif font is too fussy doesn't cut it anymore. You want a font where the letter forms are not ambiguous.

When writing for the page, the focus is on the design - how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.

Format is just the language. Content is the only thing that is important. Form is like handwriting. Whether you write in a scribble or clean handwriting or type it, the content remains the same. You want to write in clean hand, in a kind of a clear format only because it is aesthetically pleasing. I can scribble, that's also fine.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing thing. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it requires simply good sense in the originators & good will in the rest of us.

Lettering should be invisible. You shouldn't notice it, unless it is a determined piece of storytelling in graphic design. Whether handmade or digital, the lettering should be easy on the eye and well placed. It should help tell the story and do nothing to get in the way of it.

But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

The other big factor in building trust quickly is site design quality. Mint.com has one of the best graphic designers ever (Jason Putorti) - he cares about every pixel, all the fonts, all the transparencies and effects. And that shows instantly. People do make judgments of trust on appearance - in the real world and online.

Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it's more impressive than handing a business card.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can't be too close.

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.