Sentinel: Your Web-Performance Watchman

Typographic phrases (or: how to turn sayings geeky)

Written by on CSS Wizardry.

Table of Contents
  1. Many hands make light work
  2. Too many cooks spoil the broth
  3. A stitch in time…
  4. While the cat is away…
  5. Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. time is a great healer
  6. Out of sight, out of mind
  7. Two wrongs don’t make a right

A while ago I had the idea to express some old sayings in a silly, geeky way, using code and logic to express logically, the meaning behind some well known phrases. I got Illustrator fired up last night and decided to finally got a few made. They’re kind of obvious really, even a non-developer brain can make sense of them, and deciphering the saying is pretty simple, but I think they’re cool nonetheless.

Many hands make light work

Many hands make light work

There are lots of contradictions in sayings and phrases. Like this one, if many hands do make light work, then how does this next one work?

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Too many cooks spoil the broth

A stitch in time…

A stitch in time saves nine

While the cat is away…

While the cat is away the mice will play

Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. time is a great healer

Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs. time is a great healer

This one is another glaring contradiction, so I decided to combine the two into one poster.

Out of sight, out of mind

Out of sight, out of mind

Two wrongs don’t make a right

This one doesn’t really follow the code paradigm, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Two wrongs don't make a right

Got any more that would work in this way? Leave any suggestions in the comments.

Also, I do realise that, programmatically, not all of these posters make perfect sense. For example, $cooks > 'enough' doesn’t really work in a programming sense… It’s just a bit of fun!



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Hi there, I’m Harry Roberts. I am an award-winning Consultant Web Performance Engineer, designer, developer, writer, and speaker from the UK. I write, Tweet, speak, and share code about measuring and improving site-speed. You should hire me.

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