It's all about appearances

Something that's been very weird to me--okay, whoa, magpie, just noticed the arched window watermark on the update page. By moving the screen back & forth, it either gets brighter than or darker than the rest of the screen. Watermarks on media that would scream, shrivel, and die if actually in contact with water amuse me. And it disappears if I get just the right angle...

Anyways, I'm used to lj, which, even if you're posting to a community and thus don't get to design the details of the journal yourself (The fact that this is not my personal aesthetic is making it somewhat uncomfortable to post here, it somehow doesn't feel like I can entirely post my thoughts, even though the clean, functional format of the class blog works very well with the sort of writing one is meant to put here), most everyone has a user icon (or several). The lack of having some sort of visual aid to help me associate who's writing what is making it really hard for me to keep track of who's who. Not just what username goes with what flesh-and-blood, I've mostly given up on that. But who's writing which entries. I suppose I really should just start reading each individual person's blog, so I have an idea of who's said what, where people stand and develop more of a sense of personality through writing style.

But it struck me as interesting, that I've become so dependent on the multimedia format, that it's genuinely uncomfortable for me to navigate the internet and its individuals with just text.

And branching off of that, fonts are intriguing. The fact that we have so many different fonts we can use, serif'ed, sans-serif, loopy, immitating handwriting, different type-sets, blocky, symbols. It feels like an extra communicative device. The way the words look on the page, the screen, the very building blocks of text used to communicate subjectively while producing objective, concrete words. The written language as visual art.