When he gave a demonstration to Guy Kawasaki and Alain Rossman at Apple, the concept of bullet points leaped off the screen where it started to get new life. In the 1980s, the ‘bullet point’ was mentioned as a means to helping improve the user experience in software.Īt the time, developer Dave Winer was working on MORE, an outline application for Macintosh computers. Occasionally, bullets would find themselves baked into the designs of newspaper advertisements where they mainly served to help underscore brand features in what would otherwise be empty, white space. The bullet point really came into its own in the 1950s when it was included in the New York News Type Book - a style guide used by the New York News to communicate design principles for ad copy. It’s no coincidence that the physical traits of bullets morphed into the literary aspirations of bullet points that connote speed and directness.
Then, it often appeared as a square, rotated forty-five degrees like this: ◆įor the majority of the recorded history of publishing, the ‘bullet’ literally correlated to the round shape of munitions like minnie balls and grapeshot fired from cannons and muskets. See also midpoint.īut, the bullet has actually been part of the writing and printing process since the invention of the Gutenberg press. Bullets are commonly hung in the margin to mark items in a list, or centered to separate larger blocks of text. In The Elements of Typographic Style, author Robert Bringhurst relates the bullet to modern-day typography:Ī fat midpoint, not always round, used as a typographic flag. There is not a wealth of information that corroborates the history of the bullet point, and there are only a few places that contain a lively discussion of its origins.īut, there are a few key points in history where its usage starts to evolve from publishing to computing.
ADD BULLETED LIST TO MAC NOTES APP SOFTWARE
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