From Ascii Art To Comic Sans Av Karin Wagner

A fresh and provocative take on typography, computing, and popular culture, viewed through four idiosyncratic typographical phenomena from the digital age. From ASCII Art to Comic Sans offers an original vision of the history of typography and computing in the digital age, viewed through the lens of offbeat typography. We often regard text as pure information and typography as a transparent art form without meaning of its own. In this book, however, Karin Wagner offers a fresh perspective that shows how text is always an image that conveys meaning, and typography, far from being meaningless, has in fact shaped modern visual and material culture in significant ways. By juxtaposing four odd typographical phenomena--the pedantic practice of ASCII art, the curious-looking machine-readable typefaces, the blurry letters of dot matrix printers, and the much-maligned font Comic Sans--Wagner paints a vivid picture of how functional technologies influence popular culture when used in ways their