Last week’s Friday iFAQ was cancelled, indeed a number of iFAQ’s have been severely compromised recently, due to Q’s decision to go stand in line for an iPad. We worried that he didn’t come back right away, but figured he was just playing with his iPad a lot. To be fair, that’s what we were doing, so we didn’t think much more about it. But when he still wasn’t around last Friday we started to worry. So we went out to find him. This is what we found.
Friday evening, we are waiting for Q to show up and record the iFAQ with us. When our usual 7pm appointment came and went we decided something was up. A called his cell phone, but Q wasn’t answering. We decided to go out and look for him at first light Saturday morning.
A quick note about appearances: You may think that the real Q looks like the Q you see on the webpage as you read each week’s iFAQ. But that’s just a cue, to let you know who’s speaking. There aren’t giant queues of A’s and Q’s standing around on each web page, although that would be cute.
Q, in a promotional headshot he had taken in 2009
No, the real Q, the actual, living glyph, has a house in the upscale Avenues district of Salt Lake City and is a hearty 48-point Copperplate Gothic Bold upper case individual. At least, he used to be.
On Saturday morning we went down to the Apple store, looking high and low for Q, shouting “Q! Q! Where are you?” At one point John de Lancie showed up, and it wasn’t until he had called us fascinating mortals and wondered at our determination at continuing our menial existence that he got bored and pointed us to our fallen comrade.
Q was in a bad way. He hadn’t had any electrons or even pigments in days, and had passed out. He had lost way too much weight, indeed his serifs were almost completely gone. His color had de-saturated to the point that he nearly blended in with the concrete, and his alpha channel was so weak that you could swear you could see your hand right through him. He looked more like a 5-point Helvetica Neue lowercase than his normal robust self. We immediately gave him a thin broth of weak ARGB values and started trying to figure out how to get him to a good foundry.
Ideally, of course, we would have taken him to Hermann Zapf himself, but weren’t sure he would survive the trip to Germany. Adobe is much closer, but current tensions between them and Apple left us unsure of the help we would receive at their hands. Finally we contacted Ross Carter (creator of the amazing PageHand) for help, knowing him to be a lover of fine typography, and not one to stand by idle while a poor glyph suffers.
“Q was in a bad way,” Ross told us later. “The CANS guys had made a good start, and his saturation was up to more stable #C0C0C0, but he was still fluctuating wildly. I transferred him into a PDF to keep him from getting any worse and started him on an Alpha drip.”
Q started to recover, growing more opaque and finally getting past the iffy 8-pt mark, but he’s still weak. We predict that he won’t be able to leave PageHand’s support structure for at least another week, which means we’ll have another substitute Q this Friday. But he’s already making jokes and is optimistic for a full recovery.
“I’ve got some good questions in mind, real zingers,” he told us, smiling a little. “I just hope A can keep up.”
