Facebook Sans

The internet, like any organism, self-regulates while experimenting chaotically, and thus it lumbers forward. Design paradigms go from brand new to ubiquity relatively rapidly, and our eyeballs become inured to a sense of how things ought to look. It’s a right-handed universe, and whole vistas we take for granted and don’t even register become visual and functional battlefields when designers make the slightest change.

Facebook

Ask anyone what typeface Facebook uses (or Twitter, or Gmail, for that matter), and you’ll get a lot of dead air. This is good. This means the typeface is doing its job, which is to disappear from our consciousness. But the day Facebook (or anyone else) makes a design change — whoa. The whole world suddenly seems out of whack. Ask someone what the new typeface Facebook is officially “experimenting” with and they won’t know; but ask them to describe it, and they might say “blocky,” or “smaller, easy to read.” How does it differ from what it was the day before? We’ve already forgotten.

Twitter

Facebook has indeed changed their type design; the site is now aggressively sans serif Helvetica small type, regular weight and bold in blue. Except for large headlines from shared news posts; they’re old-school looking, in a deliberately noticeable serif. Does it seems familiar to you? It should. It’s the same type that Google uses, and the same type Twitter uses. The internet hangout has become Swiss. 

Google

Living Off The Grid

Like me on Facebook! 

Now that I’m in the throes of promoting the upcoming publication of my second book, It’s Probably Nothing…, it’s become very clear, very rapidly, how important the internet is to sales.

When my first book came out ten years ago, there was no Facebook or Twitter. There was no Goodreads. Amazon was still sort of new and changed the price of items in your basket according to how long they’d been there, in a ploy to get you to buy them. Literary journals lived decidedly offline. People read actual newspapers instead of hitting up TMZ for news.

Become a fan at Simon & Schuster! 

No-one I knew back then had a personal website, and if you wanted to dabble in that sort of thing, you coded html by hand. It was all very rudimentary, and book promotion meant word of mouth and handing out fliers.

Today, you can find me at my author page at Simon & Schuster, my author page on Amazon, and my author page on Goodreads. You can become a fan of me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter. You can hit the first search result that comes up on Google, which is my website, and link to everything else from there. If you’re reading this, you have already come across my blog — but I have others too; three others to be precise, each with their own theme: Scott’s Last Blog, The Inky Jukebox, and Yuckylicious. You can find many of my published articles and poems online.

In short, I am all over the web. If you wanted to find me, I can be found.

That is not to say I am free and loose with my personal information, of course. You have to actually know me to get that.

Check out my Goodreads page! 

It is with some surprise then, that I still can’t find so many of my cousins in far-off shores or old school friends. Do they have jobs? Email addresses? Have they ever gone to college? Do they belong to any social media site anywhere? Apparently not. How can this happen? How can one live a normal life in this day and age and be hidden in plain view? Are they people who manage without a mobile phone or a laptop? How do they do their banking, pay their bills — and more importantly, buy their books?

I live in Pittsburgh, a city that has been nearly wiped clean of bookstores in which one can buy an actual book. We have a few Barnes and Nobles, and some outlying neighborhoods have a quaint independent store or two (I’m guessing here) that might sell books, and there are, it must be said, some university bookstores which have some things for sale that are not textbooks. But the reality is if you want to buy a book here, you do it online.

Pre-order at Amazon! 

Which brings me back to my point: so much of what I am currently doing takes place through a screen that I am hoping multitudes of potential customers are looking at too. At the end of the day, more will be written in the service of promoting this book (which is excellent, by the way — you should buy it) than were written in the book. The aggregate of words heap up against it like snow.