SilverJacket

Go ¶huck Yourself

I'm in a ranty mood.

You know I hate? The use of the pilcrow (paragraph sign, ¶) as a design element. Often in magazines, feature articles will begin with a block of text that's in  bigger type than the rest of the piece. If the part of the story filling that block is more than one paragraph long, instead of using a line break and an indent as usual the designer will keep the text flowing but stick a pilcrow in there.

There are several reasons to stop this. First, it's an ugly, elaborate character, especially for what it does. Use a pipe or a bullet (| or •) or some other arbitrary symbol, as long as it's clean.

Second, it's too explicit. The reader shouldn't stop to think, even subconsciously for a few milliseconds, "Oh, that symbol looks like a backwards P with an extra leg, and P stands for paragraph, and they're telling me that they're starting a new one here." No, don't spell it out. Keep it simple. Again, any subtle visual cue would work. Did I mention the bullet?

Third, it just looks like someone forgot to turn "display formatting" off. Stop being meta and trendy.

Why do I have so much anger?

Don't mind the pit stains.

I hate heather grey. It just might be the worst color there is. I don't understand why people wear heather grey clothes when they don't have to. Once in a while I can make an exception for a t-shirt or sweatshirt, like if it has a school logo on it (as if you're at team practice!), but anything beyond that is beyond me.

Heather grey has several association I can't suppress. First is that it reminds me of a high school gym class. The kind in 80's movies where they suit you in heather grey duds, presumably the cheapest cloth imaginable, where appearance is not an issue. Why would you wear a blouse made out of gym clothing material? Related: I expect to see sweat stains on anything made of that stuff. And heather grey tube socks I won't touch even if they're clean.

Heather grey accent stripes elicit this response: Oh, they almost had enough normal material to make a full shirt. All but those thin stripes. So close!

What gives it that cheap, trashy look? I can only assume that the manufacturer doesn't bother to fully mix the solid grey and the solid white. It looks like it's made of random shreds of cotton half-assedly blended together and then somehow melded into a fabric. Heather grey is the sartorial equivalent of chipboard.