Recently we explored why Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica became some of the most widely used fonts out there, and that got us to thinking: All these fonts are typeface sets that had to be designed at one point, letter by letter. So who does the designing?

There are hundreds of thousands of font styles out there in the world, and yet the mainstays in English and Latin-based languages typically boil down to just three: Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica. They are everywhere, whether we like it or not: from the papers we wrote in high school to the books we read to instruction manuals to advertisements to journals and newspapers. Somehow, this trio has led the pack of font styles for decades...

It’s the fine print page we always skip past as we flip to the first page of our novel. Unassuming. Utterly forgettable. And yet, there’s a lot you can learn from all that tiny text. For instance, do you love that book cover? You can find out who designed it. Want to know what font the book is using? You know where to look. Let’s explore the anatomy of a typical copyright page so you know what all of that fine print is telling you about your book.

Last month, Merriam-Webster announced that 530 new words have been added to the dictionary. Among them are new meanings of existing words, such as “they” as a nonbinary pronoun, “free solo” (as a climber, this is particularly exciting to me), “Bechdel Test,” and “dad joke.” How, exactly, are these new words added?

Data can drive your presentation, or derail it. Merging a lot of data and analytics with your message can be a challenge, because telling the story of data isn’t just about slapping a graph into a slide deck. Data doesn’t speak for itself. That’s where storytelling and presentation design come in.

So you know you want to incorporate virtual reality into your training. Everybody wants to bring in the new kid and have virtual reality (VR) on their team, because the tech is innovative, and memorable.