Help Wanted, Indeed

Like a long-term marriage when you sense your partner’s waning interest in even your most fetching charms, I felt the same alienation of attention from the media company I faithfully served through the better and worse of 25 years. Luckily, I read the writing on the wall two years before the axe came down, so I was in better financial shape than some of my design department pals who also joined me on the chopping block at the end of 2007.

Ah well. Creative burnout had long taken its toll on my psyche and, after being a loyal handmaiden for a quarter of a century, I was granted a pretty sweet severance package, part of which was three-months of training at a high-end career counseling agency. I landed the gig at my old company fresh out of college after making one cold call, mailing an unsolicited resume and having a half-hour interview with the personnel director. As much as I detested the idea of going back to what amounts to kindergarten in order to land a position in a brave, new (and within a few months, totally tanked) job market, I knew getting a position wasn’t going to be as “falling off a log” easy as the last one. Besides, I adhere to the age-old motto, “If it’s for free, it’s for me.”

So, after ninety days of prep in writing a riveting resume, crafting a killer cover letter and winning over even the most inane interviewer, I was armed and ready to hit Monster, Careerbuilder and other boards in search of my next dream job. What the good folks at the agency didn’t warn me about was the moronic and, in some cases, laughable compositions that pass for job postings.

By trade, I’m an advertising copywriter, so it’s a mite off-putting to see at the top of the list of qualifications, “Excellent command of the English language,” followed by “Knowledge of spelling, punctuation and grammar a must.” No! Really? Whodda thunk that a copyrighter wuld need them thar skils?.

Another real turn off are postings that recruit for a copywriter, until you get past the above-mentioned drivel and discover they also require a knowledge of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and, oh say, a background in print production would be nice, too. In other words, they’re not looking for a copywriter, but a whole design services department rolled into one, underpaid scribe. Good luck with that.

But the posting that had “reject” written all over it was on behalf of an agency recruiting for an interactive copywriter who would work on banner ads, blogs, micro-sites, etc. Good enough. But here comes the deal killer: “You will be writing against almost impossible deadlines.” Well hell! Let me rush my resume right over to that agency! There’s nothing like setting me up to fail before I’ve even settled into my cube. No wonder I’ve seen it re-posted three times in as many months.

I’ve heard a lot of bellyaching from employers about the dearth of desirable candidates for what few job openings they have these days. Allow me to play “Dear Abby” and offer management a piece of advice:

If you want to meet me, court me and make a proposal on what I can promise you will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship, you better come to my door looking like George Clooney and not Alfred E. Neuman.

Oooh Melisma! Oooh Misery!

There’s a pestilence afoot in our fair land, and it’s infected million-selling vocalists, “American Idol” contestants and singers of “The Star Spangled Banner” at sporting events from sea to shining sea.

And its name is…“melisma”! (Cue scary music.)

The musical term may be a new one on you, but if you’ve heard Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson or Beyonce (and, unfortunately, that’s almost unavoidable), you’ve heard melisma.

Derived from the Greek word “melos,” meaning melody, melisma is the intoning of a single syllable between several different notes, usually at the end of a verse. (Think of how singers stretch the word “free” while caterwauling the national anthem as your five-dollar ballpark beer gets warm.)

Melismatic singing was handed down from one ancient religious practice to another, starting with the Greeks’ Eleusinian Mysteries, then on to the Muslims, Hindus, Jews and eventually winding up in Western Europe’s Gregorian chants.

Probably the most iconic rendering of melismatic singing is the Christmas carol “Angels We Have Heard on High,” where the “o” in the word “gloria” goes on longer than I’m sure yours truly ever will. Another extended example is from Handel’s “Messiah,” in which the word “born” in the choral work “For Unto Us a Child is Born,” is trilled for a strangulating 57 notes.

The point of melisma in religious practice is to induce a hypnotic state in the listener. Today, the point seems to be the inducement of a full-bore stupor.

Melisma made its way into America’s pop mainstream through gospel music, introduced by such R&B singers as Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, who made their vocal bones in the Baptist church. Adapting the sacred into the secular, these singers used a deft hand with melisma, putting the vocal technique at the service of the heart and soul of the song, not the other way around. The pop singers who currently rule the charts have turned what should be the icing on the cake into the whole damned dessert. No wonder every “American Idolator” strains their chords to emulate these goddesses of gargle, or why lyricists rest on their laurels, safe in the knowledge that the words don’t really matter much because they can barely be understood.

Just like a kid who throws her arms in the air while riding a bike and shrieks, “Look Mom, no hands!” so do today’s divas hope to dazzle with long-suffering syllables and exhibitionist acrobatics.

I think it’s time they put the training wheels back on.

Just Your Type

Want to make a graphic designer salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs? Say the word “typography.”

We’d be eating pizza around a conference room table at my old company when someone would bring up the subject and the graphic designers would get all slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Sometimes, I’d say the magic word myself just to see a string of mozzarella glisten from their lower lips. Ask them what was so enchanting about a group of glyphs and the best they could muster was some mumbo-jumbo that sounded more like a mysterious incantation than an enlightening explanation.

It was around this time that I noticed how publishers were giving readers a brief history of the typeface* used in the book they just polished off. These usually involve the unpronounceable name of the font’s 15th century creator and adjectives such as “bold,” “clean” and, my favorite, “readable.”

Well, shouldn’t all fonts be “readable”? Of course, but they also need to be “legible.” Is there a difference? As it turns out (and much to my surprise) yeah! Legibility and readability are two different, yet connected, optical animals. Let’s boil ‘em down and see why:

Legibility is the province of the typeface designer, who’s charged with creating a font where each character is distinct and recognizable. Think of them as the architects of the alphabet. One of the earliest, most-well known typeface designers is the 16th century Parisian Claude Garamond, whose Roman types are still admired and used today for such essential elements as the small bowl of the “a” and the small eye of the “e.”

Readability is the domain of the typographer, who assists readers in navigating around a page without causing the eye any sudden stops, starts or collisions. By selecting the right font and type size for the job, not to mention using the correct spacing between letters, words and lines, the typographer acts as the text’s traffic cop. If the columns of a magazine, newspaper or the page of a book can be read for long minutes with optimal comfort, then the typographer has safely directed your peepers through a busy information intersection.

If that isn’t clear (and I hope it’s a sight better than the well-meaning yet undecipherable gibberish I’d get from the designers), here’s the bare bones after the boilin’: “Legibility” is about perception; “readability” is about comprehension. If letters are seen clearly, they can be understood absolutely.

Got it? Good. Now go track down a designer and break it down for them.

* This blog uses Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography. A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.

Art, In So Many Words

After three torturous years of algebra, geometry, chemistry and Spanish (which I still can’t speak a word of), I did what any sensible high school stoner would do and loaded up my senior year’s academic agenda with classes that were either a cake walk (music appreciation), a no brainer (typing) or just plain fun (art).

At least, I thought art was going to be fun. Turns out it was more hard work than I imagined. No one told me about perspective (there’s math in art?!) or that some mediums are more suited to an individual’s hand than others (papier måché is just gross). Maybe because I’m a writer, but pen and ink appealed to me the most. My fifteen minutes of Warhol-like fame came as the result of a p & i drawing of a firebird (inspired by the album art of Jefferson Starship’s “Blows Against the Empire”) that not only earned me an A+ but a prominent place in the annual art fair, held in the venerable school library.

If I had known about Jenny Holzer, perhaps I would have used that pen and ink to get my aesthetic point across using both words and media.

After bouncing around a few Midwestern universities, Holzer attended the Rhode Island School of Design (launching pad for many a great artist and musician, most notably The Talking Heads), but found her muse at New York’s Whitney Museum during an independent study program. With a reading list heavy on Western and Eastern literature and philosophy, Holzer had the simple yet brilliant idea that complex thoughts could be boiled down into phrases any average Joe could understand.

Calling the project “Truisms,” Holzer printed these seemingly random thoughts on white paper using black italic script and anonymously wild posted them throughout the city on building facades, signs and telephone booths (remember those?). Provocative phrases such as “A Man Can’t Know What It’s Like to be a Mother,” “Money Creates Taste,” “A Lot of Professionals are Crackpots” and “Freedom is a Luxury Not a Necessity” prompted passersby to take out their pens and write responses or their own “truisms.”

That was in 1978. Over the intervening years, Holzer ramped up her delivery system – metal plaques, sandstone benches, sarcophagi, LED signs, laser projections on mountainsides – for such projects as “Inflammatory Essays,” “Living Series,” “Survivor Series” and “Laments.” Through it all, she has held true to the belief that language is her art and semantics her aesthetic.

Since 2001, Holzer has stopped writing her own texts. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately, and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the texts of others.”

I still have my pen and ink supplies. Anyone got Holzer’s e-mail address?