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How To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body
Nice piece from Smashing Magazine on typography in general, and specifically on choosing great text faces.
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John Daggett’s proposel to the W3 on advanced typography features in CSS
Yes, please!
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Helveticons
Must. Have. Now.
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Introducing Typekit
Jeff Veen, who I have mad, mad respect and admiration for, announces his company’s new project: TypeKit. It’s basically a hosted solution for web fonts, wherein Jeff and team negotiate a license with font foundries, and then you (the average web developer) pay Jeff and team a fee in order to use the fonts. It will use standards CSS @font-face embedding, and automatically switch out Opentype for EOT based on a user’s browser. This all sounds great, but the post is a bit short on details, and I definitely have questions: will it scale? How much will it cost? What will the license look like? All concerns people have over a subscription-based music service versus the iTunes model apply, here. What happens when you unsubscribe? Are the plans per-site or per-designer? And so forth. So, bottom line: sounds like there’s a lot of potential, here, but I’ll save my fanboyish excitement for when I have more information.
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Fuck the foundries
+1
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Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips
Spiekermann has several typesetting tips for you. They aren’t likely to be new to readers of this site, or especially people who have seen one of my typography talks, but it’s still a nice resource to point to.
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50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
That’s a lotta free into right thurr. Via @RubyVelle.
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Font or Typeface?
Nice little clarification between the two words. I liked this bit from Stephen Coles:
VisitWhen you talk about how much you like a tune, you don’t say: “That’s a great MP3”. You say: “That’s a great song”. The MP3 is the delivery mechanism, not the creative work; just as in type a font is the delivery mechanism and a typeface is the creative work.
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The Vignelli Canon
A free PDF book on typography from Vignelli? Yes, please. Wow. Awesome.
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The Typographic Desk Reference
Looks like a beautiful book.
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typographyserved
From the Behance network comes this nice-looking typography showcase site.
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Jon Tan: @font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work
Jon has a good piece on @font-face, and specifically how to make it work in both IE and other browsers. Great stuff.
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typeface.js
sIFR-alike, written in JavaScript using
Visitcanvas. Looks pretty nice at a glance, if not as developed as sIFR. It’s certainly unfortunate that we still have to use these kind of hacks, but as long as we do, I’ll keep noting them here. -
21 Most Used Fonts By Professional Designers
No surprises, here, but it’s a nice list.
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Wilson Miner: Relative readability
Wilson’s great a thought-provoking piece on text size on the web, where he suggests that a 16px base size online is more or less equivalent to a 11pt size in print. He’s got some good evidence to back it up, and the discussion that follows is pretty interesting.
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Jeff Croft at Web Directions South: Elegant web typography
The great folks at Web Directions have posted the slides and audio from my recent typography talk in Sydney. Enjoy!
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John Allsopp: Ubiquitous web font embedding just got a step closer
John Allsopp has some really great thoughts on the trickier issues around embedding fonts in web pages. As you probably know, the real isn’t isn’t the technology, but rather the legalities and licensing. The reality is that font embedding is here (it’s supposed now by a few of the cutting edge browsers), and font foundries are just going to have to deal with it. There are several ways they can make money off it, if they’ll just get a little creative with their business model.
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Dave Shea: Zoom
Dave chimes in on a topic that is very relevant to me lately. He says:
> I wonder whether designing around scaling text is still a skill we need to hold on to, and for how long.
I also wondered aloud whether we still need to be using relative unit for type in my typography talk in Sydney a couple weeks ago, and the Twitter haters came out of the woodwork to say that I didn’t care about accessibility and and I was “not thinking about about my fellow man.” It’ll be interesting to see how they react when Dave wonders the same thing.
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David Carson supports Obama with posters
For those of you who think Shepard Fairey is a rip-off artist and consumerist whore, here’s hoping the great David Carson sits a little better with you.
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The vexed question of punctuation
Some great typesetting rules here. Most of them don’t really apply to the web (that is to say, they should, but we simply don’t have the control to allow for them), but there are a few that do. I was particularly excited by the rules for emoticons, which I’ve always wondered about. I’d created this rule for myself; I’m glad to see someone else agrees:
> A smiley may coincide with a closing bracket (given that it is preceded by an opening one :-).
(Note to Sara Flemming: your ass-backwards open-paren-colon smileys destroy all meaning these rules may have had (:). See!?
Via Dan Mall.
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Jon Tan: Typeface != Font
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out.
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Addictionary redesign by Bryan Veloso
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design.
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Smashing Magazine: Top Ten Web Typography Sins
Probably nothing you don’t already know here, but they’re good reminders, nonetheless.
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An alternative to sIFR: Facelift Image Replacement
Looks interesting at a glance. I haven’t checked out the code, so I’m not sure. If you’re needing non-web fonts in sucky browsers, it may be worth looking into.
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Richard Rutter: The future of web font embedding
Richard puts out a call to font foundries to stop fretting about web font embedding and find a way to make it work in their favor. Noting that by the end of the year, around 30% of web users will be able to view embedded typefaces, Richard says:
> Font foundries could license their fonts for embedding and serve those fonts only to registered websites, using their own hosted system or via a trusted third party.
Word.
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Ralf Herrmann: Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3
Firefox 3 gets big kudos for its incorporation of kerning and basic ligatures in the new version of the browser. However, these improvements are negated by the fact that it also enables discretionary ligatures by default, which is likely to destroy the look of pages rendered in certain typefaces.
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Chad Mueller: Web Typography At It’s Best
Chad’s got a nice post showcasing several great examples of web typography. His selections are definitely good, but it’s worth pointing out that they’re almost exclusively examples of great display type on the web. Very little body type is showcased here.
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Jon Tan: The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design
Jon has a nice piece on the paragraph and how to appropriately use it on the web. It’s an important topic and one I spend a decent amount of time on in my usual typography talk when I speak at events. Far too often, people think typography is all about picking typefaces; Jon effectively explains some of the more nuanced details in this article.
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Fonts.com: Typography for Children
A nice overview on how to choose typefaces and set type in ways that are appropriate for children.
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Incredible typography on the Seed Conference site
For anyone who still thinks it’s not possible to create beautiful typesettings using HTML and CSS. Well done, Coudal!
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Michael Bierut Talks Typography with ‘The Atlantic’
A few great short clips from an interview with the always-insightful Michael Bierut. Good stuff.
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Uptown Theater, Queen Anne Ave.
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Michael Bierut Talks Type
A wonderful eight-minute video with Michael Bierut on the topic of typography. Man, I love this guy. I got his 79 Essays book for Christmas, but haven’t gotten into it yet. Can’t wait.
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Feltron Eight
I look forward to Nicholas Felton’s personal annual reports every year. Sooo well-done.
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Audio available for my Webmaster Jam Session talk
The kind folks at CoffeeCup Software have posted audio of all the Webmaster Jam Session talks from this past September, including my talk on web typography, and the Web Design Roundtable, on which I participated. The audio comes in the form of a podcast you can subscribe to in iTunes or your favorite podcast application.
I was pretty proud of my type talk in Dallas. I felt like it went over really well and had a lot of good information on web typography. The roundtable was also pretty great, with a lot of good questions and answers (yes, someone even asked me about CSS frameworks!).
There were a lot of great sessions at WJS 2007, so be sure to give ‘em all a listen — and come down to the Big D for the event next year!
- Podcast of Webmaster Jam Session 2007 talks
- Slides for Typography: Beyond the Font (Follow along! 3MB PDF)
Enjoy.
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ORK neighborhood posters
These are awesome. I really wish there was a Seattle one. I’d hang it in my home office in a heartbeat.
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Richard Rutter at A List Apart: How to Size Text in CSS
Richard, who continues to be one of web typography’s biggest assets, has an ALA article that’s all about sizing type. He evaluates many different ways of sizing type, demonstrating the results of each across several browsers (including when text is resized by users). He ultimately concludes than an em-based approach is best. I would agree with this completely. He also notes in his addendum that the math needed to use this approach can get complicated, especially with deeply-nested elements.
In the typography workshop I’ve done a few times now, I’ve come to much the same conclusion. If you want the absolute best, most ideal way to size type, using ems is the way to go — but it will take you more time and patience, because of the math. Sizing with pixels is definitely easier, but also definitely not as ideal. You’ll have to evaluate the trade-offs and decide what’s appropriate for a given project.
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Mark Boulton: Content AND Presentation
Mark talks about typography and art direction (or the lack thereof) on the web, noting that while many web designers are making content legible and on-brand, very few are actually telling stories with it. I couldn’t agree more.
Part of the problem here is a purely practical one. In journalism, for example, there is now a demand for news to be posted right freaking now, which means content management systems and templates. That’s somewhat understandable in breaking news type situations, but why aren’t more news sites art directing weekly features and special pieces, which generally aren’t so time-sensitive and have adequate prep time?
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jQuery plugin to auto adjust leading as the measure changes
If you’ve seen my talk on typography, yo know that the rule of thumb says that narrower columns require less leading (or
Visitline-height, in CSS) than wider ones. This cool little plugin for jQuery handles this for you automatically, and works very smoothly. Check out the demo page. Via Wilson. -
WebKit (a.k.a. Safari) now supports @font-face
I continue to loves me some WebKit. These guys are the designer’s best friend — they are really focusing on implementing the parts of CSS that really matter to designers, which is awesome (unless, of course, you’re a JavaScript programmer). :)
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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