New York — RoxyLabs, the local chew-toy manufacturer, had a spectacular first day on the NASDAQ. Shares of RoxyLabs, priced at $20 each, rose to a high of $40.25 before closing at $36.60. RoxyLabs ended the day with a market capitalization of close to $517 billion, making it very prestigious.

CEO Vanessa Manganese took the news in stride. “Our performance today shows that investors believe in our strategy of taking a scientifically insignificant product and surrounding it with a lot of hype and unverifiable claims,” she said. “And of course, impressive typography.”   → page 3

The Angeleno Society went down in flames this past Friday with the debut of Michael Broderick’s new play Black Helicopters.

How bad is it? By the end of the first act, merely bad would’ve been a welcome kind- ness. By the end of the second act, the audience, myself included, was reconsidering the value of free speech in our society.

Broderick (directing, to use an optimistic term, from his own script) stars as Potiphar Tewkesbury, a character who is himself a playwright and director. Autobiographical? You might think so, except that the play is set—inexplicably, unbearably—in the year 2605. This serves largely as a pretext for the cast to wear no   → cont’d on page 9

• Is It Art?9
• Business16A–18
• Sports & Leisure23–27
• Comics / Crossword34.6
• Petunia’s Bad Advice41

Clarity, personality, simplicity, warmth.
Author William Zinsser, in his 1976 book On Writing Well, identified these as the four indispensable qualities of great writing. Why indispensable? Because the best writing is an expression of the writer’s humanity. These qualities allow that humanity to shine through. As a writer, I find Zinsser’s argument persuasive. ⁂ And as a typographer, I find that his argument analogizes well to design. The designer’s role is to take mundane items and fill them with warmth and humanity. For instance, a font. What is it, really? Just a set of tiny black shapes. Yet, as every reader knows, those little shapes can express a huge range of emotions and possibilities. ⁂ This contrast between constraints and possibilities is what anchors my enduring fascination with typography. Type possesses a strange magic. One reason I embark on new type-design projects is to understand that magic better. ⁂ Another reason is to have some better fonts. Concourse is my first new sans serif design in nearly 20 years. Hopefully, I’ve learned a few things. ⁂ Perhaps most important among them is that drawing letters is the lowest form of type design. The magic inhabits the spaces in between—on the page, but also between us as readers & writers. Type builds a bridge that spans time and space, that connects us through the written word, that lets us share warmth and humanity. There’s nothing else like it. MB