Shady Characters

It has been a long time coming, but I’m pleased to announce that I’m working on a new book.

I wrote the following post for The Future of Text, a collection of essays exploring the past, present and future of text in all its many forms.

The asterisk is old.

My last post, where we took a look at Birmingham’s over-punctuated street signs, stirred up quite a bit of discussion.

Cast iron street sign with an enthusiastic piece of typography for the “Rd.” abbreviation.

In the midst of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Twitter user @talkporty* got in touch to ask: Dear @shadychars, you are the only one I can turn to in this situation.

Well, ✨that was fun✨❗ For now, though, it’s time to work our way through some of the punctuation-related links and news articles that have cropped up during our stay in emojiland.

A couple of months ago, in the midst of writing my emoji series, I took some time out to have a chat with Glenn Fleishman for his new podcast series, the Tiny Typecast.

We’ve come a long way, 👶, in this series of posts on emoji, and it’s time to round things up.

The Korean edition of The Book, on sale now and published by Gimm-Young Publishers.

Given all we’ve seen so far in this series, it becomes natural to wonder: what’s next for emoji?

As exuberant as emoji can be in the right hands, our palette of emoji remains tightly controlled by the Unicode Consortium.

With emoji everywhere you might care to look, a nagging question remains unanswered.

Poster by Tom Etherington and Keith Houston.

On Tuesday the 14th of May I’ll be taking part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations”.

As we saw last time, Emoji 4.0 cemented the Unicode Consortium’s practice of annual emoji updates.

The emoji enlightenment dawned in August 2015.

The cover of the Chinese (complex characters) edition of The Book, as published by Rye Fields Publications.

The emoji season of 2019 is upon us.

So far in this series we’ve seen how emoji were created in Japan, how they made their way into the wider world, and who takes responsibility for them now they’re free to range across our screens.

As emoji become ever more ingrained in our online lives, the question asks itself: who decides which emoji we can type?

In 2011, Apple became the first big tech company in the West to visibly embrace emoji.

As we saw in part 1, emoji did not arise in a vacuum.

Sex!

Long-time readers will remember that 99% Invisible, the wide-ranging podcast hosted by Roman Mars and produced in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, featured an episode on the octothorpe back in December 2014.

A very quick note this week: Shady Characters now runs exclusively over HTTPS.

Asterisk Pass.

Giving credit where it’s due has been an important part of writing for Shady Characters since I started back in 2010.

Some exciting news!

Readers in the EU may have heard about something called the GDPR, or “General Data Protection Regulation”.

Happy new year!

The year is coming to an end and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for me to promote my books!

“An ivory what?”

On Monday 11th September I gave a talk at Southampton University for the 2017 edition of a yearly symposium called “The Future of Text”.

Remember the interrobang‽ Of course you do!

In the wake of my last post (Miscellany № 79: jè?)

A quick reminder today that I’ll be giving a talk at the British Library on Monday 3rd July (just over a week to go!)

Always nice to ease oneself back into the swing of things with a new mark of punctuation, don’t you think?

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be giving a talk about books and book history at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre, 96 Euston Road, London, at 7pm on Monday 3rd July.

I’m pleased to say that the first translated edition of The Book is now available: Książka* is published in Poland by Karakter and is available there in all good bookshops.

Congratulations to Scott Pack and Ryan Pullen (@rpullen86), winners of the St Bride ticket giveaway!

It’s almost here!

I’m happy to announce that I’m going to be taking part in Adelaide Writers’ Week 2017, running from Saturday 4th March to Thursday 9th March.

This article was first published in the Winter 2016 issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors.

Image courtesy of Sam Otis.

This post was first published at Wonders & Marvels.

I am very happy to announce that my wife Leigh and I have just had a baby boy and, as such, I’ll be taking a break from Shady Characters for a while.

So: time to catch up!

It’s some way off yet, but I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the St Bride Foundation here in London on the 23rd of March next year.

Hoefler Text ampersands.