Phaeton Typeface by Kevin Cornell and Randy Jones : The always-entertaining Kevin Cornell: If you’ve ever made a font, you know how much work it is. Fortunately, I don’t. Because I was lucky enough to have teamed up with Mr. Randy Jones in the creation of Phaeton, which made it significantly more fun and less stressful. It was a good match-up, because brains are like chewing gum. I shall explain. … Read the rest here
Is CSS the New Photoshop? : John Nack, Photoshop’s principal product manager: As people can do more and more in code, it makes sense to ask whether even to use Photoshop in designing Web content. I think Adobe should be freaking out a bit, but in a constructive way…. As for Photoshop, we could either teach the app to speak HTML natively (via live HTML layers ), or we could translate Photoshop-native artwork into HTML (e.g. ‘copy this button/text as HTML/CSS’). It’s not yet clear to me, however, how such code would smoothly integrate into one’s projects… Read the rest here
Tuning Condensed Fonts with Typekit’s WebFont Loader : Jason Santa Maria: With all the webfonts available for use on websites, we have to deal with something we haven’t had to worry about before: condensed fonts. Most of your standard typographic guidelines will still be the same, but the biggest difference is sizing and font stacks in your CSS…. I’ve solved this problem on my personal site where I use Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova Extra Condensed by incorporating some of the events in WebFont Loader to adjust the size of my text when @font-face isn’t supported [or FOUT occurs]. I’m currently running into this exact issue with a project. Impeccable timing, Jason. … Read the rest here
I’m extremely proud to say that two weeks ago Fontdeck opened its doors to the type-loving public. It’s been a long time in coming – too long I’d admit – but Fontdeck is now live and I’m hugely excited about what’s to come. To the uninitiated, Fontdeck is a webfont service, that is to say it hosts fonts licensed for use with @font-face font linking. This means is that web designers finally have an alternative to the standard web fonts of Georgia, Verdana, Arial et al, and can now safely choose from hundreds of fonts to use as real text on a website; no images, no Flash, no JavaScript required. Jon Tan and I had the idea for Fontdeck back in early 2009. Speaking together at a SkillSwap in Brighton, it transpired we shared the same notions on how webfonts might be delivered. … Read the rest here
The DODOcase, made by hand in San Francisco. As much as I love technology, my love for handcrafted goods probably exceeds it. To merge the two together is like bacon wrapped in bacon . The DODOcase for iPad is made by hand in San Francisco, California. It blends materials such as bamboo and fabric to create a Moleskine-inspired cover for your iPad, complete with elastic strap to keep the case closed. … Read the rest here
Visual Designer Needed at Tandem Diabetes Care : Having a son with diabetes , I’ll readily and happily suggest you consider this opportunity. It’s a 3-month position (possibly longer) involving research and user interface design for the company’s products. Incidentally, Suzanne and I are considering an insulin pump for our son, which appears to be what Tandem Diabetes Care specializes in. … Read the rest here
American Apparel Shares Sink to 52-Week Low : Oops. Advertising scheme not going as planned, AA? I’ll continue to stand happily where I’m at . … Read the rest here
After a return to freelancing , move across the country , adjusting to family life with diabetes , launching a major realign , and wrapping up a colossal poster project , I’m taking a proper time out with the family this week. It’s the first in months. I’ll be back in the saddle next week. … Read the rest here
In October 2009, the hashtag #lessconf began showing up repeatedly in my Twitter stream. The tweets were remarkably positive for something I’d heard nothing about previously. It turns out Steven Bristol and Allan Branch of Less Everything , the bright minds behind LessAccounting , were hosting a conference. Crush It! author Gary Vaynerchuk, Wufoo founder Kevin Hale and others spoke, and nearly 200 of you attended. This year’s LessConf 3010 resumes in Atlanta, Georgia, May 21–22… Read the rest here
Moonbird Lamp by Yukio Hashimoto : This is absolutely gorgeous. But with a price tag nearly as steep as my 13” MacBook Pro, it’s unlikely I’ll have one of these sitting on my desk anytime soon. … Read the rest here
Dribbble , masterfully crafted by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett , went live over the weekend. I don’t recall all the details, but probably sometime in 2008, Dan Cederholm and I had a conversation about an app he was considering building. Fundamentally, the idea was to build a community loosely based on the same concept as the “ Screen Grab Confab ” posts on my site. (Remember those?) The concept was simple, embracing the brevity and utility of Twitter and adding to it visuals: Share a snippet of what you’re currently designing, but only a snippet. Let others reply. Dan asked if I had any issues with the idea… Read the rest here
Mobile Web Design (iPad Version) : I’m honored my self-published book was available within the iBookstore the day of iPad’s launch. However, the formatting is less than stellar, admittedly. This is because Lulu , who handles the printing and distribution of the book, informed me that I wouldn’t need to do anything—they or Apple or both would handle the re-formatting of the book. Whatever engine they funneled my PDF through didn’t spit things out as nice as I had hoped. … Read the rest here
Relink: MEX Manifesto Predicts “Multi-Platform” Experiences : With the iPad arriving at many U.S. households tomorrow, it’s an appropriate time to revisit something I posted in November 2009: Each year, MEX, the Mobile User Experience conference, publishes a manifesto to frame the content and discussion for the year’s conference. Traditionally these manifestos have focused on mobile devices, operators/carriers, and the like. However, this year’s manifesto speaks repeatedly of “multi-platform” experiences. … Read the rest here
The Score: Advice to Young Composers : I had aspirations of becoming a film score composer growing up. Of course, that dream hasn’t materialized (yet). But if you’re on the same path, consider Annie Gosfield’s advice, which may even be applicable to other creative fields: Make sure you’re always doing some work that is yours and yours alone—not composed for the approval of teachers or colleagues. There’s a chasm between writing in school and writing in the real world. … Read the rest here
“Pre’s Hardware is the Xbox 360 of Smartphones (in a Bad Way)” : ArsTechnica’s Jon Stokes on the unfortunate demise of Palm: I’ve only met one Pre owner in-person who hasn’t sent at least one phone back, but I’ve met many people who have sent multiple Pres back. When you pull out your Pre somewhere and another Pre user spots it, the odds are close to certain (in my experience) that that person has sent at least one unit back because of some kind of issue. Every single reviewer that I know of sent at least one Pre back in the beginning. Sadly, this is only one of several reasons for the demise that Jon mentions. I’ve been rooting for Pre to become a formidable iPhone competitor since the announcement in January 2009, and it’s clear those days are over… Read the rest here
ColosseoType.com, An All-HTML5 Endeavor : The site for the Colosseo poster is my first production-ready website with HTML5 under the hood. I’ve coded sites semantically with HTML5 class names before (see Jon Tan’s article ), but this is the first with legitimate HTML5 elements such as and in the markup. IE doesn’t yet recognize HTML5, so I’ve added Remy Sharp’s HTML5 shiv script , which forces IE to acknowledge the new elements. Granted, the Colosseo site is a one-pager, but hey, it’s a start. Update: It looks like Firefox 2.x doesn’t play well with HTML5, either. Here’s another article from Remy Sharp on getting Firefox 2 to recognize HTML5… Read the rest here
The malware attack(s) that my site suffered in recent weeks put into motion a series of changes which have been planned for some time now—some for a few months, some for a couple years. What follows is a detailed explanation of the changes. New Design Over Christmas Break in 2007, I started two redesigns: One for Authentic Jobs and another for this site. The premise for this realign encompassed a concept that wasn’t original, but one that I felt better suited my style of blogging. You see, I’ve always enjoyed posting links as much as I’ve enjoyed posting articles. … Read the rest here
After just a couple weeks of testing, I gave up on the Canon HG10 w/35mm for shooting HD video. Not only was the quality not stellar, but it’s a hack that’s cumbersome and really difficult to work with. Following an enormous amount of deliberation and questioning if so many dollar signs were really worth it, I bit the bullet and sprung for a Canon EOS 7D and some quality lenses. No mistaking, this thing shoots incredible photos and equally impressive 1080p HD video. I still have plenty to learn about the camera and photography in general, but so far I’m really pleased with it… Read the rest here
It’s been said before that web inspectors—Firebug, Dragonfly, the inspectors in Safari and Chrome, and so forth—are not always entirely accurate. A less charitable characterization is that they lie to us, but that’s not exactly right. The real truth is that web inspectors repeat to us the lies they are told, which are the same lies we can be told to our faces if we ask directly. Here’s how I know this to be so: body {font-size: medium;} Just that. Apply it to a test page . Inspect the body element in any web inspector you care to fire up. … Read the rest here
It’s been said before that web inspectors—Firebug, Dragonfly, the inspectors in Safari and Chrome, and so forth—are not always entirely accurate. A less charitable characterization is that they lie to us, but that’s not exactly right. The real truth is that web inspectors repeat to us the lies they are told, which are the same lies we can be told to our faces if we ask directly. Here’s how I know this to be so: body {font-size: medium;} Just that. Apply it to a test page … Read the rest here