Word: contour
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...literature and music," says Michael Bierut, a partner at the global design agency Pentagram and a frequent client. Such context is important. Whether it is Sumerian hieroglyphs on clay tablets or cybertext on the Internet, the written word is made up of assembled shapes, and the tiniest details--the contour of a serif, the slope of a curve--can evoke mood and emotion as concisely as the message itself does. Thus each of Hoefler and Frere-Jones' creations has a history--and a future. Says Hoefler: "These fonts will be around, not as artifacts but in use, for centuries after...
Take for example the image of a young black girl lording over a kneeling woman, possibly her mistress. The girl appears to be pinching the woman's nose while holding some knife or saw to her throat. The characters are so finely drawn that we can make out the contour of the girl's toenail, but though we see one foot we're unsure of where the other falls. Similarly, we can't determine the relationship of blade to neck, the difference between "grazing" and "penetrating" so important to the woman's life and our understanding. These spatial contiguities...
...Standup Stapler An idea you grasp right away. The last time the stapler got serious thought was in the 1930s, when objects were streamlined for the machine-age imagination. In the ergonomic '90s, when we design for the body, the Boston stapler still keeps a nice contour. It's as grip-friendly as a handshake, as squeezable as a teddy bear, and better looking than most public sculpture...
...searing if not overbearing triangle tremolos, was carried by the performance of the timpani. When loud, as in the first and last movements, the brass was sharp and tight; when delicate, as in the opening chorale of the second movement, they showed amazing sensitivity to dynamics and melodic contour. The most memorable moment of the performance, entirely by virtue of Yannatos' direction, was the amazing melodic truncations in the second movement. Following the return of the English horn melody, the first two chairs of each of the strings, muted, play the melody, yet are abruptly cut off twice. The ensuing...
Sharon Smith's Reverence, with Kissel's delicate and sweet rendering of melody, illustrated just how surmountable these limits are. Keiko Abe's Memories of the Seashore provides another example, a fittingly nostalgic melody in the lower register performed with great sensitivity to contour and phrasing. Kissel's treatment of dynamics, here and elsewhere, added much to the emotive character of these works...