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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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Trajan Sucks: Preserving a typographic tradition at the University of Kansas
Trajan is actually a very solid typeface, but it’s wildly overused, and the traditional KU basketball jersey look has far more character. Some KU students don’t want to lose it. Awesome. Via Matt.
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Font rendering philosophies of Windows and Mac OS X
“…Windows looks sharper at the expense of not actually being a very accurate representation of the text. The Mac with it’s design/DTP background is a much more accurate representation and scales more naturally than Windows which consequently jumps around a lot vertically.”
The piece includes a great example of just how true this is. It also includes this great quotes:
Visit“The issue is reminiscent of the ‘I hate black bars on wide-screen films’ brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display.”
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i love typography
A new typography-related blog and information site. Looks like it oculd be a good one, in time. Via Veerle.
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Vista puts Mac OS X font rendering to shame
George Ou puts an image of Vista’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing next to Mac OS X’s non-sub-pixel anti-aliasing and declares Vista the winner. No shit, Sherlock. How about a level playing field?
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80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design
Several great selections here, which include both classics and less-known fonts. A little heavy on the sans serif side, but still…
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Helvetica: Order your DVDs
You can now pre-order the Helvetica film DVD. Go get yours. Well-worth it.
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Rob Goodlatte: Syncotype Your Baseline
A few weeks ago, Newsvine’s Intern Rob™ showed me a version of what is now called “Synotype” he was using in development of his recently redesigned site. I insisted that he must release it to the public. He has done so, and it very well might be the most useful typography tool to hit the web in quite a while. If you’ve ever wanted to make sure your baselines are all neatly lining up, do check it out. Thanks, Rob!
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Typogrify for drupal
Christian’s awesome Typogrify module for Django has been ported to drupal. I think it’s available now on just about every popular personal publishing platform there is. Awesome.
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Mark Boulton: Incremental leading
Mark talks about what you can when you’re aligning type to a baseline grid, but smaller type seems to have too much leading. I actually use this often for larger type, too: if you can fit your larger type in one grid line, you can set the leading to two or three units — or a unit and a half, for example. The point is: even if you “fall off” the grid, you always get yourself back on.
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YATP: Typogrify for Textpattern
I’m so excited to see Christian’s Typogrify being ported to all these popular publishing platform. The web is getting prettier every day!
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typography-helper for Rails
A port of Christian’s typogrify for Rails. Since my post about typogrify here, I think it’s been ported to just about every web development language under the sun. Awesome.
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PHP port of Typogrify for WordPress
Hamish Macpherson has ported Christian’s awesome set of Django filters over to PHP for use as a WordPress plug-in. Nice.
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Widon’t and SmartyPants Helpers for Rails
After Typogrify for Django, the Rails camp wants good typography, too. :) The widon’t here won’t work on chunks of HTML like the Django variant will, but it’s still a lot better than nothing. Support good typography!
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Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn’t suck
Ever since I’ve worked at the Journal-World, I’ve lamented the fact that the typography on our sites left something to be desired. Straight quotes, widows all over the place, and so forth. And even though our programmers do care about typography (one of them is even quite the type nerd!), I had trouble getting the matter at the top of anyone’s (very long) priority list. I said I’d buy several beers for the first programmer to make John Gruber’s Smartypants a default piece of Ellington, the publishing system we develop and sell. Even that wasn’t enough of an incentive.
That is, until we hired Christian Metts, a designer who also happens to be quite a good programmer. Christian must have really wanted those beers, because he went way above and beyond my request and created a library of Django template filters that is almost certainly the best thing to happen to web typography since Matthew Carter crafted Georgia. It’s called Typogrify, and it’s available at Google Code.
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Authors reveal their favorite fonts
This is a fun piece in Slate. Authors discuss their favorite fonts to compose in. Unsurpringly, the most commonly named typeface is Courier and it’s variants, with Times and Century Schoolbook also getting a few nods.
The most insightful answer (well, in my opinion, goes to Caleb Crain, who noted that “obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh.” Hah. He goes on to select Hoefler Text as his favorite current typeface to compose in — which is a brilliant choice, if I do say so myself.
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BBC News: Helvetica at 50
A nice article on the typeface and it’s devotees and detractors over at the BBC. The article itself is pretty good, but the comment thread is really hard to read. It’s astonishing how many “laypeople” simply don’t understand what graphic design is. Also, why is the lead photo credited to the AP? That’s a screencap of the intro to the Helvetica film — surely the AP doesn’t have a right to call it their own?
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Elegant Web Typography: Slides from my FOWD workshop
130 slides on web typography. Enjoy! (2.4MB PDF)
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C'mon — who wouldn't have taken this picture?
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C'mon — who wouldn't have taken this picture?
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A List Apart: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
Wilson Miner’s first A List Apart article has been posted, just in time for me to cop all the ideas for use in my upcoming workshop on web typography in London.
Wilson’s been working on this for quite some time, and it shows. The topic — aligning text to a baseline grid — is something I’ve been working on a lot myself lately. It’s not quite as simple on the web as it ought to be, but Wilson shows you how it can be done with the minimal amount of pain. And the result — well, the result is just a much more professional-looking page. It really makes a big difference.
Wilson ends the article with a note on sizing text in pixels, which bring me to a slightly related topic. Did you know you can actually resize text set in pixels with IE6? Yup, you can. You can have turn on the “Ignore font sizes…” option in the accessibility dialog, but it can be done. This led me to wonder (again) how much responsibility should fall on users (especially those with unique needs) to learn their tools. In a comment on Roger’s site, I said this:
I have neck and back problems, myself. Because of that, I have to buy a decent chair and take the time to configure it for the optimal support. If I don’t, I’ll end up in pain when I’m reading a book at my desk. If I choose to sit in a crappy chair, or I choose not to configure my chair the way that is best for me, or I simply don’t learn how my chair works — whose fault is that? I’d say it’s my fault. You can maybe make an argument that it’s the chair manufacturer’s fault, because they didn’t make it easy enough for me to use my chair properly. But I don’t see any way in hell you can blame it on the book I’m reading. Do you?
Go read Wilson’s article. It’s really great.
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Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark
The International Herald Tribune has a nice short piece on everyone’s favorite typeface (or at least mine). If you’ve never quite gotten why Helvetica is so popular, this is a great read. If you already are a Helvetica-loving typo nerd, you probably won’t learn anything new here.
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The Elements, take two
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The Elements, take two
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The Elements
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The Elements
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What’s wrong with music notation?
A lengthy article on why programatic music notation, especially that output from Finale, is less-than-perfect. Good stuff, especially if you’re into typography (as this is basically musical type).
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Mark and Richard’s “Web Typography Sucks” audio
The podcast is now available for one of my favorite sessions at this year’s SXSWi. Follow along with the slides as you listen.
I made a couple of comments at the end of the session, and was surprised to find out, when I listened to it back, that I’m actually not completely appalled by the sound of my voice.
I now dread hearing the podcast of my own panel that much less.
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Letterhead Fonts embraces DRM
The foundry (which has long been a favorite of mine for display type), has added DRM for their fonts, and placed ludicrous restrictions on them, such as the inability to embed them in PDFs and incompatibilities with font management programs like Suitcase. Sad, really sad. These guys do great work, but if they really believe this will help their business instead of hurt it, they are downright crazy. It’s one thing to try to stop the rampant font piracy. It’s another thing entirely to not let me embed your typeface in the most popular digital format in existence.
This help no one. It won’t stop piracy (music has shown us that), it makes paying customer’s jobs harder, and it’s going to drastically cut into sales for Letterhead.
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22 different fonts used on front page of LA Times redesign
Cartoonist Daryl Cagle counted 22 different fonts in use above the fold on the front page, and decided it looked more like a ransom note than a newspaper. Unbelievable.
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Subtraction: Oh Yeeaahh!
Khoi has a post up about he and Mark’s terrific SXSW presentation about grid-based design. Slides, screenshots of his Yahoo! redesign,and more included. If you weren’t at SXSW, this is a must-see.
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Helvetica Screening at AIGA Kansas City May 1&2
I’m there. I missed it at Southby and everyone has been saying how wonderful it is. Doesn’t look like you can buy tix yet, though.
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Wilson MIner: The problem with pixels
Wilson reacts (in agreement) to my point from the SXSW typography presentation about why it’s not so bad to size text in an absolute unit (like pixels) instead of a relative unit (like ems). He also outlines a philosophy he’s been using lately, which I think is perfect:
The principle I’ve been operating from recently is to design for the first page load in an ideal environment, while allowing for flexibility in non-ideal, unintended and user-modified environments.
Love it. Welcome back to the blogosphere, Wilson.
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Clarifying comments I made in the typography panel at SXSW
At the end of today’s great session Web Typography Sucks by Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter, I made a couple of comments on the mic that have resulted in a few questions from people who heard them. Just thought I’d take a minute to clarify…
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Animals eaten
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Animals eaten
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Chipotle!
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Chipotle!
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Hip-Hop
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Hip-Hop
Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, 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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