Little known fact: One of my early inspirations for Daddy Types was the IBM Selectric II typewriter--aka the typewriter with balls--which ushered in a workplace revolution. With the IBM and the word processors and computers that followed, typing was no longer considered just women's work.
Nowadays, a generation later, the idea of a man not being able or willing to use a keyboard--or of him handing a pile of notes to a female colleague and asking her to type it up for him--is ridiculous.
From the outset, I wanted daddytypes.com to contribute to a similar revolution in the way we, I, society looks at parenting. And besides, design-wise, no one seemed [seems, even two years later, really] to be giving too much love to the Selectric's aesthetic, typefaces and document layout innovations, which were direct precursors to the MS Word word processing conventions that are so ubiquitous now. Courier, Arial, Letter Gothic, Univers, and more were all fonts created for the Selectric.
Anyway, that's all just a self-imporant precursor to saying that while I'm stoked and amused that workfriendly.net will reformat web sites to look like Microsoft Word documents, I'm more interested to find something that makes them look like the monthly sales summary from the Ohio office, circa 1975.
I remember the Selectrics — they were great typewriters and having fonts was wonderful. Courier and Letter Gothic yes, but not Arial — that one was created for Microsoft so that they wouldn't have to pay royalties to the foundries that own typefaces such as Helvetica or Univers.
One of my favorite typestyles for the Selectric was Orator, clean, modern and small caps.
With a Selectric, a photocopy machine and a stat camera one could layout an entire publication...
Kids growing up surrounded by computers are fascinated by typewriters — the simplicity of it all, you type and the words show up on paper - imagine that!
[d'oh, of course, you're right about arial. it's become so pervasive that I-- never mind. And you're also right about Orator, I was trying to find a typeball with it when I did the site. note to self...- ed.]
So, if we read DaddyTypes using this, does that mean we won't see any Uma? Or will we see some Ascii art version of Uma?
hm, good point. Uma does not appear, but the ad images do. perhaps if someone were to create an ad using that picture... brb -ed.]