The Royal Mail recently commem orated one of the UK's greatest works of visual infor mation design when Harry Beck's London Underground diagram was included for the first time on a British postage stamp writes Mark Ovenden. The impor tance of Beck's rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognised and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did - to the nearest major subway network to London: Paris. Full story and lots of fantastic images, plus a neat history of the development of underground maps, is at the Creative Review (via kottke).... — read the rest

Radiohead have given permission for one of their tracks to be used in a TV advertising campaign for the first time in a campaign for homeless charity Shelter voiced by Minority Report and Longford actor Samantha Morton. The TV campaign, which breaks later this month, is called "House of Cards" and aims to raise awareness of the fragile housing situation in the UK in the current economic climate. You can see the video here. (Aside: I'd be interested to know how much this campaign has cost.)... — read the rest

Pretty cool: smarthistory: For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. (Via kottke)... — read the rest

I was disappointed to miss the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Modern recently. It closed in early January and the end-of-year rush meant there just wasn't enough time to make it along. As ever, the Tate's site on the exhibition is an excellent overview of the exhibition, and provides a good number of onward resources to look at. The guide through the exhibition in several parts is linked to below — well worth a read if you get chance. — Introduction — 1. Animal — 2. Zone — 3. Apprehension — 4. Crucifixion — 5. Crisis — 6. Archive — 7. Portrait — 8. Memorial — 9. Epic — 10. Late (Image credit: rachiestar_me on flickr)... — read the rest

A Stephen King fan has 'written' the book Jack Torrance wrote in The Shining, including just one line: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". He repeats the phrase for 80 pages, but makes different shapes with the text as the book progresses. About the project, artist Phil Buehler said: I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays... I thought 'if he [Jack Torrance] continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?' I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week. Cripes: an artist who completes obsessive art projects sets out to create 80 pages repeating the same phrase? Reason for concern, surely? Not so: his fiancee watched the film and realised Buehler wasn't losing it. Phew.... — read the rest

A non-exhaustive round-up of the round-ups so far. More will be added as they appear. — 2008, the year in photographs (part 1 of 3) (The Big Picture) — 2008, the year in photographs (part 2 of 3) (The Big Picture) — 2008, the year in photographs (part 3 of 3) (The Big Picture) — The best pics of 2008 by Tom Jenkins (Guardian, sports photography) — APF photos of the year (AFP) — Pictures of the year 2008 (Reuters) — AP photos of the year (AP) Update: They keep coming: — 2008 - The Year in Pictures (New York Times)... — read the rest

Two good friends once bought me a very thoughtful birthday present: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. In it they had written an inscription which included a reference to the great typographer Jan Tschichold and a comment to the effect that his surname was virtually impossible to spell. They were, of course, completely right; but let this not distract from the great work the man did, including, of course, the Penguin cover re-designs. Two links that might be of interest are below: — Jan Tschichold: a titan of typography — Jan Tschichold: Penguins, paperbacks and posters (9 pictures) (You can read about the elements of typographic style applied to the web here. A set of photos from a celebration of 70 years of Penguin is available on my flickr here, from which the image above is taken.)... — read the rest

Enjoyable interview with Kevin McCloud, he of Grand Designs: Unlike most reality formats, the personal dramas of the people whose houses it features are not the point of the programme. [McCloud says:] "I'm not interested in filming people just because they've got 18 children or something. What has to be interesting, ultimately, is understanding a building through people." Never the other way around? "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all. It is about buildings." I've always enjoyed watching Grand Designs, and though McCloud's style takes a bit of getting used to, it's worth it in the long run. The interview shows McCloud in a good light.... — read the rest

Mencap has recently created, in collaboration with people with learning disabilities, a font which is accessible for everyone to read easily. Mencap has big hopes for the font: FS Mencap will be available for public use, rivaling Arial and Helvetica as the standard accessible font. It is hoped this will make reading easier for thousands. The process for creating the font sounds fascinating, and highlights the importance of typography in communication: Over a three month period, the learning disability group looked at various styles of sans serif and handwritten fonts. They considered how letter spacing, width, shape and style all affected readability and developed a very individual font with 260 characters. During the process, larger and more rounded letters were found to be more accessible. The letter 'v' was given a curved arm to differentiate it from a 'w' and the letter 'r' opened up to make it more legible. More details on the font can be found here: — FontSmith announces a groundbreaking new font for people with a learning disability — FS Mencap, a new standard in legibility — New-look Mencap is here... — read the rest

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Taking advantage of a short holiday, I have completed work on a redesign for arbitrary constant. Whilst I enjoyed the old design, I wanted to go for something a bit simpler that concentrated more on the writing than anything else, and that looked a bit old fashioned. This design should also be more consistent across browsers, too. As with the previous redesign there are still plenty of things to be sorted (not least of which is a new header image), but these will be completed over time. I hope you like it; if you have any feedback, please let me know.... — read the rest

I can't explain it. I just like looking at type. I get a total kick out of it. They are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine or girls' bottoms, I get kicks out of looking at type. — Erik Spiekermann, typographer and designer... — read the rest

This is a brief post to highlight that Penguin has published both Perfume and One Hundred Years of Solitude — two of my favourite books — in its Modern Classics range (see here and here respectively). This is a very fair assessment of the place of these books in modern literature, and I for one am looking forward to having these new additions on my shelf. For a review of Perfume, please see here. A review of One Hundred Years of Solitude is forthcoming.... — read the rest

I've recently returned from an excellent holiday in Paris. For anyone interested in photos of Parisian buildings, you can see a selection here.... — read the rest

For some while, I had let my pro account (or membership) of flickr lapse. This was partly due to a lack of taking photos, not having the time to process and upload photos when I did take some, and generally falling out of love with the much lauded "Web 2.0". As a consequence, I couldn't access all of my photos (a fair limit of 200 is applied to those accounts which aren't "pro") and had a limited number of sets. The main reason for not taking the necessary steps to re-activate my pro account was the need to have a Yahoo account. Many folks complained about it at the time — see here, for example — and, though I wasn't overly-fussed about who owned flickr, I was annoyed about having to sign up to a new identity to access a service I had accessed perfectly easily before for reasons that were nothing to do with me. I've reflected on why this was the case — surely it was just a case of switching sign-in names and carrying on as usual? In a way, yes. But in another way, no. For, without wanting to be precious about it, I had cultivated (to some extent) an "online presence" that had elements of uniformity and consistency about it. Thus, my del.icio.us account was del.icio.us/rich_w, my flickr account flickr.com/photos/rich_w, my Last.fm account last.fm/user/rich_w and my Technorati account richwatts (these all aside from my gmail address the numerous other logins and memberships I have using either rich_w or richwatts). By having to then create a Yahoo account — a process in which it is notoriously difficult to secure a meaningful username (richwatts2007?) — it felt like I was being forced to dilute my own online presence (even allowing for the fact my flickr URL would remain the same). Silly, maybe, but that's what it felt like. I've come to terms with all of this and have now rejoined flickr. Even that process wasn't as easy as you might think: after many attempts to upgrade to a pro account myself, I ended up having to ask a friend to buy me a pro account gift and pay the money to him directly. This, of course, having created a Yahoo account. Nevertheless, or eventhemore, I'm still looking forward to uploading photos to flickr and trying to bring a bit more "visual" to arbitrary constant. It has even inspired me to get out and take more photos, the results of which I hope to share here soon.... — read the rest

On the same day that the bbc was told to become more impartial, a much more fundamental problem with its journalism arose: it is predictable and of a poor quality. The issue on which it was reporting was Architecture Week 2007, and in a wonderfully glib, predictable and, frankly, pathetic fashion, the bbc has welcomed the Week with Eyesore or gem: five controversial buildings and whether they should stay or go. Admittedly, there's history of this sort of thing, but when thelondonpaper — a "newspaper" so poor it doesn't even charge its readers to read it and literally has to force itself into your hand — covers the Week better than the Beeb (link, unfortunately, not available) then you know you're in trouble...... — read the rest

The "quotation of the week" has lapsed on arbitrary constant. This post aims to re-introduce it with the following long quotation from Raymond Chandler's The Long Good-bye: There's a peculiar thing about money[.] In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation — all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can't afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can't expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can't have quality with mass production. You don't want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can't produce a mean fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk. This comes from the The Long Good-bye and is spoken to Philip Marlowe by Harlan Potter — a slight villain of Chandler's most subtle novel. It is a damning passage, but one I was reminded of in writing this post on the London 2012 Olympics logo. For, whilst Chandler is right in saying packaging is what seems to matter whilst what is inside is "mostly junk", the case of the 2012 logo is precisely the opposite: whilst the logo is considered by many to be junk, the Olympics themselves will most surely matter.... — read the rest

There was an excellent article in the Observer a couple of weeks back about Centre Point, which I'm going to post about soon. In the meantime, here's a quotation from that article (by Stephen Bayley) on the three worlds beneath Centre Point's tower: What Williams [Paul Williams, the architect looking to change Centre Point] and his partners did was Google Earth the entire plot and realise that a grimy confluence of buses and junkies was in fact the point where the three cultures of Bloomsbury, Soho and Covent Garden collide. And what the new plan will achieve is an inspirational demonstration of urban 'unplugging': releasing latent potential in existing buildings.... — read the rest

Having been pleased with the first major redesign of this site for a while, the itchy fingers started playing around with the white space and ended up with this latest offering. There are still a few bits to sort out and tweak — and I've no idea what it looks like in other browsers (probably knackered at a guess) — but I'm much more pleased with the header and navigation at the top, as well as the focus a bit of grey background gives to the side columns. There's not as much emphasis on the lesser categories I occasionally post to, just straight in there with the good stuff: politics, film and literature. I'll write a bit more on the redesign at the weekend. In the meantime, I hope you like it.... — read the rest

By chance, I recently came across an excellent archive of historic London Underground maps. This archive has (geographically accurate) maps dating from 1908 and contains all of the major updates made to the London Underground map — including some disastrous changes made throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I have long been fascinated by the London Underground map, though for no reason that I can particularly identify. At a base level, the map is so simple and elegant that it, importantly, serves brilliantly the function it is supposed to serve — perhaps it is this that makes it so attractive. As Harry Beck, the creator of the topological London Underground map, said:If you're going underground, why do you need bother about geography? It's not so important. Connections are the thing.A brief history of the tube map can be found on the Transport for London website (where all current versions of the map can also be found), whilst a reasonable biography of Harry Beck can be found at Wikipedia.... — read the rest

In a typically British move to celebrate the coming of Architecture Week in the uk, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (cabe) has launched a scheme to identify the most badly-designed building in Britain. The concept behind the scheme is to identify the costs of bad design and how it can impact on every day life — with the example of Centre Point at the end of Oxford Street in London cited since it requires pedestrians to walk on a busy road to get around it. Though I agree that the perils of bad design should be highlighted, I don't agree with the idea of asking people to say what they don't like as part of a celebration of architecture in the uk. It's a peculiarly British thing to do and, instead of encouraging people to engage with the delights of architecture and the enjoyment and fascination it can bring, provides people with the opportunity to merely confirm their often out-dated view of architecture instead of challenge it. Yes — some pretty shocking buildings were built throughout the country in the past. But no — people shouldn't be encouraged to look back at these buildings in order to engage with the current practice of architecture — and especially not during an event designed to celebrate that current practice.... — read the rest

Thanks for being patient about the lack of posts on arbitrary constant of late. All real world responsibilities are done and dusted and the real business of life (i.e. blogging) can start again in earnest. Some time ago, I highlighted that some photographs I'd taken of the National Theatre were up for inclusion on an interactive-mapping tourist guide thingy, going by the name of Schmap. Since then, I've heard that my photos have been included in the guide, which is very pleasing indeed — if not a bit odd and, well, unsolicited. At least I'm not the only one. Below is one of the photos included on the guide. If you'd like to see more of either the National Theatre — or anything else of interest — please take a look at my flickr profile.... — read the rest

Following on from the Guardian's recent special feature on Modernism comes Tate Modern's "Albers and Maholoy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World" exhibition, which is athought-provoking and visually stunning exhibition [—] a long overdue opportunity to rediscover two pioneers of Modernism: German-born Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946).The exhibition is currently on now and runs until 4 June 2006. I'll post my thoughts on it here when I've had a chance to go along.... — read the rest

Now, I'm not much of a photographer but I certainly enjoy wandering around places and snapping away at interesting buildings etc. — as the photo above and the others at flickr attest. So imagine my surprise when I was told that two of my photos — including the one above — have been shortlisted for inclusion in the Schmap London Guide, to be published late March 2006. So far as I can tell, Schmap is a guide book with a difference, in that it is interactive and allows you to explore a city as you wish. It appears to be a new set up, and one that is using the vast community and resource that is flickr to find supporting content for the guides. By asking to use photos like mine (all of which are free under the Creative Commons license), Schmap is also generating free advertising, a clever move and one that will immediately engender support from the group of internet users they are most likely targeting anyway. For those interested, other photos I've taken of the National Theatre can be found here. I'll let you know if the photo above is included in Schmap's final guide when the results are announced.... — read the rest

I'm a big fan of the Jubilee line extension, out Eastwards through Canary Wharf and stopping, ultimately, at Stratford. I'd like to write more about the regeneration aims of Michael Heseltine back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of which the Jubilee line extension was one manifestation and on which there is more history here. Before that time, though, here are two images below of the main exit at Canary Wharf underground station — in the morning and the evening. There are a lot more pictures of Canaray Wharf available on my flickr profile.... — read the rest

The image above is of a section of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, located in the unremarkable North Kent town of Northfleet. What is remarkable about this church, built between 1913 – 1916, is that it was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect who later went on to design Liverpool Cathedral, Waterloo Bridge, Battersea and Bankside Power Stations and the traditional K2 red telephone box. The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, then, being one of the buildings on which Scott cut his teeth, is a building of national importance. Confusingly, Giles Gilbert Scott is the son of George Gilbert Junior and Sir George Gilbert Scott Senior. Between them, this father and grandfather combination were responsible for Norwich Cathedral, St Pancras train station and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. Scott Senior has been touted by Jonathan Glancey as "the Norman Foster of Victorian England": [F]orever busy, an inveterate traveller, he [Scott Senior] ran the biggest and most prolific architectural practice of his day. Such architectural heritage, however, was overshadowed for Giles Gilbert Scott by the alcoholism of his father. Indeed, when he was three, his father was declared as of unsound mind and consequently Scott saw little of him: he claimed to remember only seeing him twice. Overcoming the difficulties of his childhood, Scott entered in 1902 the competition to design Liverpool Cathedral. To his surprise — and at the age of just 22 — Scott was awarded the commission. Thus began nearly 60 years of influential architectural design to flow from Scott's pencil. Scott's father's aesthetic had gone against the rigorous early High Victorian Gothic style of his grandfather, Scott Senior. In doing so, he was the creative missing link between the Victorian gothic revival and the arts and crafts movement, between Pugin and William Morris. Gilbert George Scott was something of a halfway house between his father and grandfather and blended the Gothic tradition with modernism. He "packaged modernity in British traditionalism" throughout his career by embracing a more symmetrical approach. After thirty years of exploring his style,this style culminated in Scott's employment as a consultant to make the newly commissioned power station at Battersea more appealing. To do so, Scott: suggested brick as the main material for the central structure and turned the four chimneys — one on each corner — into reassuringly familiar neo-classical columns. The result is the remarkable, vast structure that still exists at Battersea, a building that represented Scott's advocation of the "middle line" — an approach that embraced both "technological progress and the human qualities of architecture". Scott died on 9 February 1960. Like Liverpool Cathedral, the construction of Bankside continued for the rest of Scott’s life. He designed more power stations at Billingham in County Durham and Hoddlesdon in Hertfordshire, but most of his later commissions were for churches. He was working on the final one, for the Church of Christ the King in Plymouth when he was admitted to the hospital in... — read the rest

Whilst it is so cold out and about, I thought I'd post an appropriate picture from my flickr collection. It was taken during Christmas 2005 at the Somerset House ice rink off the Embankment in London.... — read the rest

Where the Tate Modern is concerned, this is something of a holding post. Whilst visiting the gallery recently I discovered that much of its permanent collection has been rearranged. This process is due to be completed by May 2006, which will probably be the time I'll go back and see what the finished article looks like. I'll write more about the new arrangements then and will, I hope, have had chance to visit the planned Martin Kippenberger exhibition ("[h]is work draws on popular culture, art, architecture, music, politics, history and his own life"). What will hopefully have changed as well by that point is the current exhibit in the Unilever series: Rachel Whiteread's Embankment in the Turbine Gallery. Actually walking amongst the plastic boxes is something of a disappointment compared to either seeing photographs of the exhibit or viewing it from the balcony halfway down the Turbine Hall. For me, it's not a patch on Anish Kapoor's Marsyas.... — read the rest

An interesting and informative article on the Russian Supremist painter Kazimir Malevich, a man that took abstract art through futurism and on into a new realm that incorporated more than our own three dimensions.Kazimir Malevich was the most enigmatic and the most provocative painter of the early Soviet period. He can be seen as a pioneer of abstraction and of the minimalist works produced many years later by such artists as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Yves Klein.Malevich was obviously an individual that saw much more in a visual representation than simply what that representation was: he was as interested in the "tonal play of the brush-strokes, the abstract impression of the light and colour": ... the contours of the world of objects fade more with every moment - everything we loved and all from which we lived, becomes invisible.Seeking to find ways in which to express a sort of harmony that he saw between representation and what was being represented, Malevich... spoke of his 'gradual departure from representational to abstract art', explaining that there was no abyss between the two: abstract art should be though of as involving 'a non-representational relation to representationality and of a representational relation to non-representational thematics - to the thematics of surface, colour and space'.Suddenly,Basic geometrical forms - squares, rectangles, trapeziums, triangles, circles, semi-circles and other curvi-linear forms - were not only models for painting, though this was part of their appeal, but also elements of a new utopian future, uniting design, technology and art...[Malevich's] goal was to create art-forms that would represent his own vision of the future, rather than the everyday reality that dismayed him.Is not art a way of escaping the "everyday reality" that pervades all of our spaces? What a wonderful idea Malevich had. (A large selection of his Suprematist paintings can be found here.)... — read the rest

The original purpose of my visit yesterday, aside from celebrating my birthday, was to visit the Edward Hopper exhibition. Unfortunately, it being a Saturday and all, I was too late to miss the queues and could not fashion enough time before my visit to the National Film Theatre to see Nightnawks etc. Coincidentally, or rather not, given the position of Tate Modern in the general scheme of free things to do on a Saturday afternoon in London (or: where to be seen with your friends such that the adjectives "trendy" and "cool" can be applied to you, especially if you have an uneducated disdain for anything challenging and lacking of any immediate benefit short of having to actually think about something), the very stylish Stephen Bayley considers the discussion of "High Art" over "mere" illustration:...in the week that an exhibition of the American realist painter Edward Hopper looks to become London's summer blockbuster, the final, fiery solution for a pile of half-baked BritArt has given us the benefit of reviewing an old argument about what's art and what's 'mere' illustration...Edward Hopper's curious magic, 'riveted to reality's image', in Langston Hughers' words, was to be both illustrator and artist, to be both high and low. He uses the framing, composition and lighting of the media to create unforgettable images. That he captures them in traditional oil paint adds a satisfying layer of complexity to images defined by a trade sensibility. And if Hopper oil paintings have, in turn, enjoyed success as posters, it is because in the 20th century the poster easily surpassed painting on canvas as a test for artistic invention. Say what you like about Analytical Cubism, they do not make posters out of Georges Graque.On a different floor, I was lucky enough to see some more by the Italian artist Alberto Giacommetti. I first saw some of his work in the Sainsbury family collection at the University of East Anglia and was bowled over by his style. I think I am attracted to the darker, pessimistic art that Giacommetti seems to represent and noted down plenty of other works that I was drawn to, such as Rita Donagh's long meadow (1982), George Baselitz's Gothic Maidens series and Franz Kline's Meryon (1960-1). There was also a very good room on Cubism and its legacy, reaffirming my delight at the mathematical shapes and tricks used to wonderful effect that I find very pleasing, as well as a re-acquaintance with Jackson Pollock's famous Summertime number 9A (1948), revealing the delights of chaos and fractals a full 25 years before the concepts had even been invented. Note: links may not work once collection is changed.... — read the rest

Taken from Fragments of the Universe, an article in the review section of today's Guardian:We can't go around every day acknowledging that space and time are a continuum. We know clock time is a convention but that is no help when you're late for a meeting. In the same way, the insights of cubist painting are useless. It doesn't help to know that the form you call a bottle is really a little universe of hardness, transparency, tubular geometry, containing taste, memory, and all the other things a cubist painter finds in a bottle on a cafe table. Cubism is as spiritual as it is scientific. To live the cubist way would mean to be alive to the texture, weight and fragmentary beauty of the world. It would take for ever to appreciate a bowl of fruit.... — read the rest

The Independent on Sunday has undergone somewhat of a transformation since I last picked it up. Despite the cover price rising from £1 to £1.40 in what seemed like a very short period of time (less than one year, my sense of time tells me), my loyalty to the paper was maintained not only by the arts (and in particular film) writing, but also the wonderful design. (My weekly purchase of the saturday version, however, did not continue, despite the weekly column of Howard Jacobson only appearing in that paper, mainly for the notable lack of content when compared to, say, the Saturday Times or Guardian). Today's paper and re-design was initially very disappointing: my favourite section - LifeEtc. - and my favourite supplement - Talk of the Town - have each been discontinued and amalgamated into a hybrid magazine supplement, known as ABC (arts, books and culture). The rest of the paper is relatively unchanged, meaning that the Sindie comprises: the main news section, sportsweek, timeoff (the travel section), business, the Sunday review and ABC. I was never a fan of the Sunday review, except for Eating Out by Terry Durack, the lost world of Michael Bywater and her indoors/him outdoors by Emily Perkins and Simon Carr respectively; which is to say that I don't like all those parts that can only be fitted in to the sunday review and not included successfully elsewhere. My fear was that ABC, therefore, was going to be too much of a mismatch, resulting in some sort of compromise affecting the arts coverage with the introduction of some wishy-washy, wallpaper-esque "you must buy this", supposedly life-enhancing design waffle. To my surprse and relief, this has turned out not to be the case and depsite the slightly inconsistent maintenance of the Talk of the Town design jarring with the old LifeEtc. layout, the magazine has turned out to be a compact (read handy) and still enjoyable read. The paper is of the usual grainy, matt finish - exactly that of the sunday review - which has taken away some of the appeal of TotT, but now that this supplement is available throughout the country instead of just inside the M25, some of the north-south divide imbalance has been redressed. Plus, I assume that the new supplement is cheaper to produce and will therefore halt any cover price increases for the long-term future.... — read the rest

I have very much enjoyed the Twenty Faces feature on textism. As is clear from this article on A List Apart - and indeed from any cursory glance of typography-aware sites - the ability to choose a font from a group that to many seem to have no difference to each other is a fundamental part of the construction of websites, if not only for sanity-based purposes. There was a time when Georgia would have done the trick for me but certainly any newsprint will involve one of the twenty fonts presented here, and if it wasn't so difficult to sort out (apart from using images[!]) then that change would be reflected here. But, of course, it won't be - too much time fiddling about with style sheets is sure to lead to some sort of frustration.... — read the rest