So you think you have the right of way because your car has five times as many cylinders as mine? You think even though (technically) you don’t have the right of way, that you have enough horsepower to squeeze past me and no one will even notice? I realize that you are a VERY important person in a REALLY big hurry but I have news for you—you hot shot driver. Your reckless driving is going to kill someone.

In order to prevent tragedy in the future, I’d like to offer some remedial driving lessons:

1. Right of way. You don’t have it just because you drive a high performance vehicle. Yes, I understand it is a certain right of passage to be able to purchase a BMW (and congratulations, by the way, on your status in life). But right of passage isn’t the same as right of way. For example, if a driver is turning right at a green light, and you are turning left at that very same green light, you don’t have the right of way. Let’s pretend a driver is on a ramp to enter the freeway, and you’re driving behind them—again you’re in a big hurry—so in order to pass them, you take the car pool ramp. The car on the freeway ramp doesn’t see you gaining on them in the car pool ramp. They don’t realize you are about to overtake them. You do not have the right of way.
2. Zig zag. It’s a fun thing to say, “Zig, zag” (not too many words start with the letter Z). It’s thrilling, I know. And I do understand as previously stated that you are a V.I.P. and in a big hurry. But weaving in and out of traffic doesn’t get you to your appointment sooner. Although if your appointment is with the Big Guy upstairs, then maybe it will. This is rude and dangerous driving.
3. Speeding on icy roads. So your car is equipped with all-wheel-drive and crazy performance under the hood. It’s no match for mother nature. When you hit a patch of ice—and you will, we live in Minnesota, after all—your all-wheel-drive won’t save you. Your car will glide and pirouette with grace and ease until a object crosses your path bringing you to a crashing halt.

And so today, you BMW driver who thinks you are hot stuff, I have a message for you: slow down, pay attention, put down your crack-berry and learn to play nice with the other drivers in the sand box. At the end of the day, all drivers on the road—despite their make and model—are just people sitting in machines. And each of us has a life. And it’s precious. Drive safe.

P.S. I realize this letter is addressed to BMW drivers. The reason I chose this luxury vehicle to illustrate my point is because it was a BMW driver who almost killed me today. I realize that bad drivers come in all shapes and sizes. In no way do I discriminate against drivers of high performance vehicles. But I do dislike people who drive recklessly.

I love to shop Target. I shop there every week. Last week while shopping, I saw these iTunes gift cards for sale. As advertised, the $25 iTunes gift card costs you $25. Regular price $25. Funny? Yes. Usually when you advertise a product, you give an offer or discount along with the message. I guess Target just really wanted their customers to know they carry the gift cards. Here’s a tip for those of you who want to buy discounted iTunes cards: buy them at Costco.

This is a follow-up on my original Up and Up post.

Target recently sent out the direct mailer (pictured below) to consumers, focused solely on their new generic brand, Up and Up. I knew it was only about Up and Up when I saw the arrow logo repeated on the piece at nauseam. I guess the marketers at Target really wanted to burn that logo into my brain.

I like Target’s Market Pantry and Archer Farms lines, but my feelings are haven’t changed about Up and Up—I would rather pay full price for name brands just so I don’t have to look at that awful packaging.

Poor typography is one of my biggest pet peeves. (You already know this if you’ve read my article on hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes). I cringe when I find punctuation misused and abused in publications. Ninety degree typewriter quotes should never be used anywhere ever again. Typewriters are—like—SO 1960. Quotation marks and apostrophes should never be used to note measurements. Shudder. Today I show the difference between: correct quotation marks (+ apostrophe), typewriter quotation marks and prime marks.

Rule number 1: Don’t mistake correct quotation marks for typewriter quotation marks.

Fonts shown here: the serif font is Adobe Garamond and the sans serif font is Interstate.

Rule number 2: Use prime marks when noting feet, inches, hours and minutes.

As you see illustrated here, prime marks are not quotation marks. Prime marks distinguish themselves with a steep angle, no curly cues and point down to the left.

The key command to make a single prime mark on the Mac is shift + option + e. To make a double prime mark press shift + option + g. The single prime mark is commonly used to note feet and hours while the double prime mark is used to note inches and minutes. Further reading about the prime marks can be found on wikipedia.

(If anyone knows the key commands to make prime marks on the PC, will you leave it in the comments? Thanks!)

Cell phones. One of the greatest inventions of our time. I love having a connection to all the people in my life where ever I go. But with the birth of brilliant new objects, negative consequences often follow. At this point, you may think I’m going to launch into the possibility of getting a brain tumor from my cherry-red smart phone. Not today, my friends. Today I’m going to rant and rave about some rude behavior cell phones bring out in people.

We’ve heard or used the term “crack-berry.” I don’t consider myself all cracked up when it comes to my cell phone, but I do display some symptoms from time to time. Sometimes I find myself jumping to check my email on my phone as soon as it buzzes. Other times I find myself checking the phone for new messages when I haven’t even been sent an alert. Yikes. Lay off the technology, right?

But it gets worse.

One of the worst conversation faux-pas a person can make is interrupting. I do it. You do it. We all do it. And it’s rude. It makes a person think that what he/she has to say is unimportant. While having a person’s voice put a full stop on your conversation is rude, it’s much worse when the interrupter is a cell phone.

For example, say I’m talking one-on-one to a friend. I’m just getting to the best part of my story when my friend’s phone vibrates once. Text message. It’s really no big deal until my crack-berry friend can’t resist checking the message. Umm, am I supposed to keep talking? You aren’t actively listening to me anymore! But it gets even worse when the person starts typing back. Hello!!?? There is a person right here standing in front of you, having a real-life conversation! Is the person on the other end of the text message more interesting than me? More important? Have we lost all manners?

Cell phone etiquette is important. Interruption by means of technology isn’t the only bad behavior that has surfaced from cell phone usage. Cell yell is just annoying. Texting while driving can be fatal. Be conscious of how you use technology (and how it may enable bad manners in your daily life).

The moral of this story: Next time you get a text message while you are in a face-to-face conversation, take a second to think before checking the message. And if you have to check the message right away, politely excuse yourself from the conversation. Your friend will appreciate your manners, even though you are still interrupting the conversation.

Do you have a cell phone story to share? Tell it in the comments!

There is nothing I dislike more than the eerie, nasty, yellow glow of fluorescent light bulbs. They are the bane of our existence in corporate environments. Cause headaches. Flicker ever so slightly driving the normal person to insanity. Most people dislike fluorescent bulbs in the workplace. So why buy them for home use? Compact fluorescent bulbs may use less energy and last longer, but their glow is lackluster.

The glow of a light bulb should simulate natural daylight as much as possible. (The original intent of electric lights was to bring daylight to the night, after all.) It’s only natural to wish for the warm, soft glow of the sun to fill our homes at night, right?

Compact fluorescent bulbs emit a cool, green-yellow haze. (I don’t mean cool like, “Dude! That is radical and cool!” Cold and inhuman is what I was going for). Fluorescent lights make skin tones look like death. They change the wavelength of color as we see it. The light feels artificial.

My parents painted their hallway a nice, warm, wheat color. Shortly after painting my dad switched to compact fluorescent bulbs to save money on energy bills. The wall color was awful when combined with the color cast from the compact fluorescent bulbs! I convinced my parents to switch to GE’s Reveal light bulbs and the wall color was instantly changed, suddenly beautiful.

Fluorescent bulbs add a terrible color cast to rooms. They’re unnatural and make me feel moody. My eyes cry out in disgust! Besides their terrible color cast, the bulbs have some negatives including mercury content that calls for disposal as a hazardous waste and taking one to three minutes to reach full brightness. The bulbs are quite bright, so mood lighting is nearly impossible. If you want to use a compact fluorescent bulb with a dimmer switch, you need to buy a more expensive, specially designed bulb.

Let’s talk about halogen for a minute. These bulbs have a nice bright glow. Useful for certain applications, awful for others. The tower halogen lamps that have caused so many fires, for example, are awful. However, let’s not discount them entirely. I have halogen bulbs in my bathroom vanity. These bulbs have been burning strong for three and a half years! No replacement needed (yet, knock on wood).

Everywhere I turn, I’m encouraged to switch all the bulbs in my house to compact fluorescent. What made everyone in the world leap blindly on this bandwagon? (And they must have been blind, if they could see, they’d have realized the awful color cast!) The manufacturers must have had quite the PR campaign.

As for me, I will not use compact fluorescent bulbs in my home. Until a bulb is designed to save energy, save money, save the earth and (most importantly) mimic the glow of natural sunlight, I will continue to buy GE’s Reveal light bulbs. (I even love Reveal’s tagline: clean, beautiful light. Now, isn’t that what we all want?)

People who know me as an Art Director know that typography is of the utmost importance to me. There is nothing I dislike more than the misuse of hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. I’m just going to dive right in and explain.

A hyphen is a punctuation mark used to divide or compound words. An example is: high-five. Simply use the hyphen key to create one (it is in-between the zero and the equals sign on your keyboard.) Most people know and understand how to use a hyphen to make a compound word. You may be thinking to yourself, this is so elementary, is she really writing a blog post just to explain what I learned in elementary school?!

What bothers me is most people don’t know what an en- and em-dash are. Since they don’t know the proper usage of these special characters, they use the hyphen to do jobs meant for the en- or em-dash! Even worse, they use a double hyphen…yuck! Today your life will change forever because you are going to learn to embrace the power and magnitude of …drum roll please…en- and em-dashes!

This is an en-dash. – You will notice that it is longer than a hyphen. (en-dash is to the left and hyphen is to the right:  –  -  ) Amazing how a millimeter can make such a huge difference! But it does!

An en-dash literally means “to.” As in she lived from 1892 to 1935. To use an en-dash properly, simply place an en-dash between the years. No spaces, please! 1892–1935. Another example is: from three o’clock to five o’clock pm. 3:00–5:00 pm. To create an en-dash on a Mac, hit the option key plus the hyphen key. Voila! An en-dash is born!

What is an em-dash? It’s punctuation used to note a pause in thought—just like this. A person could use a semi-colon to do this, but we are talking about the English language here! Add some flair! Using only semi-colons all the time can be boring and who wants that? Not me! Please do not use spaces on either side of the punctuation as I’m doing here — how ugly does this look? Yuck. Look at the last sentence. The em-dash stands out like a toothless, hillbilly at the Oscars. And the last thing we want is for our punctuation to stand out! We want our reader to seamlessly read our text, and don’t want them to hiccup over unnecessary, superflous spaces! To create an em-dash on a Mac, hit the option key plus the shift key plus the hyphen key.

- – — Here you can see the vast differences in length between the three punctuation. Size does matter. And it matters how you use it, too!

(punctuation shown above from left to right: hyphen, en-dash, em-dash)

P.S. For the PC users—I googled key commands for en- and em-dashes and this is what I found. To make an en-dash hit alt and type these numbers: 0150. To make an em-dash hit alt and type these numbers: 0151. All I can think of is, SERIOUSLY!!!! This is just one more reason I love Macs, they make everything easier! Occam’s Razor.