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How do we prove we are the owners of our content? It’s trickier than you might think.

Pixels are dying. Or rather, they’re riding off into the sunset. Retinal display is the thing, and today’s 1080p is tomorrow’s 640×480.

So as designers, we should stop designing in pixels, completely. We should start using points instead.

% and em are great, but they’re relative. So if you tell me something is 1 em wide, I have no idea how big that is. That’s why pixels are popular; they’re absolute. I have a clear idea as to how big a website is if it’s 960 px wide.

Or do I? In fact, px is a relative unit of measurement. It’s relative to the pixel density on the screen. And on a retinal display, pixels are theoretically invisible.

Print never had to deal with all this. Printers have always been able to render insanely small dots-much finer than the latest retinal screens can. Which is why points, or 1/72 of an inch, have always held sway. That and their older siblings, picas, or 12 points, or 1/6″ of an inch.

A point is a point is a point. If a website is 720 points wide, it’s 10″ wide. Period. And any device that renders it can check with its own screen density settings to figure out how many pixels it should use to render that site.

It would be great to see more designers using points and picas in their css. Of course, basing those units on a percentage of a centimeter instead of an inch would make even more sense, but it’s probably too late for that.

Mix salt, pepper, oregano, or whatever with some olive oil and brush it on some flour tortillas.

Place face down on a baking sheet.

Spoon on tomato sauce.

Sprinkle mozzarella cheese and any other toppings.

Bake at 400º for 15 minutes or whatever.

We’re in an odd place with the whole typography thing.

Most people who look at computers on a daily basis have an idea of what fonts are. They just have no idea about how beautiful they can be.

The reason is that screens suck. They are either too low resolution (we can see the pixels) or too tiny (phones). And everyone reads screens nowadays, not paper.

Screens have sucked forever. Just that word, “screen“, is nasty. It’s like a mesh, or a veil; something you have to look through to see the real thing.

If you want a good screen, you’d better be rich. Which is why typography as an artform still only exists in print. If we remove the barrier of location, which the screen claims to have done, artwork should be look the same to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Put the same printed piece in someone’s hands, regardless of this restriction, and she will see the same thing. Stand in front of a painting, sculpture, heck–even digital art, and you see the same thing as anyone else in the gallery. Share a link to your design on behance, dribbble, or your website? Forget it. Everyone’s seeing something different, and most of them are seeing garbage.

Print is inherently ubiquitous. Physical location and space is definable. Screen is nowhere near being able to make the same claim. Screens suck, and it’s pointless to use it as a forum to discuss typographic merit of any design until screens get better, way better.

I had planned on picking up a new mini for my kids once the imac g5 loaner goes back, but this puts me over the edge:

http://www.switched.com/2009/03/17/new-ipod-shuffle-only-usable-with-apple-authorized-headphones/

It seems that apple has begun the same downward spiral toward pissing off the customer base that nearly ruined Microsoft. I hope they can turn it around.