The Origins of ABC
The Origins of ABC : I Love Typography’s exhaustive, illustrated overview of our written language. I’ve not yet read the entire piece (saved to Instapaper for now), but it’s clear this is worth finishing. … Read the rest here
Posts Tagged language
Clarification
HTML5. You keep using that word. In a comment on one of Jeffrey’s blog posts , Tantek wrote: We as a community that is learning/relearning/teaching all this stuff need to vigilantly clarify what’s what rather than calling things “HTML5″ that are not actually HTML5 (e.g. CSS3, Geolocation, etc. etc.), and correct the marketing messages being shouted from various rooftops so we can better understand and reliably build HTML5 websites and web applications that use HTML5. Jeff Croft argues just the opposite : Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind… Read the rest here
So
So Anand Giridharadas has written a piece about the word so , tracing its ascendency as a sentence-opener to Silicon Valley: And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process, proceeding much in the way of software code — if this, then that. This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Where “well” vacillates, “so” declaims. It declaims. … Read the rest here
Coding Cheat Sheets by Dave Child
Coding Cheat Sheets by Dave Child : A collection of free, printable quick references for a variety of languages and web technologies—PHP, CSS, Subversion, Ruby on Rails, Microformats, etc. … Read the rest here
Soulver for iPad
Soulver for iPad : I don’t own this app as I question just how much I’d really use it, but the concept is intriguing: Write equations using natural language and let the app do the calculating. Somewhat similar to WolframAlpha , I suppose. … Read the rest here
Apple Acquires Personal Mobile Assistant Siri
Apple Acquires Personal Mobile Assistant Siri : They’re not just acquiring an iPhone app, but all of the smarts behind its mega-aggregator connecting to services such as Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp, TaxiMagic, OpenTable, and so on—just about anything a user could ask for with a natural language query. Watch the demo and you’ll probably be as impressed as I am with not only the query data but the user experience, too. … Read the rest here
iPad Ready Websites
iPad Ready Websites : Apple: iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards—including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Here are just a few of the sites that take advantage of these web standards to deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad. They’re speaking our language. I’m listening. /via Daring Fireball … Read the rest here
Beautiful truth
I’ve tried to articulate my feelings about data preservation, digital decay and the loss of our collective culture down the memory hole. I’ve written about Tears in the Rain , Magnoliloss and Linkrot . I’ve spoken about Open Data , The Long Web and All Our Yesterdays . But all of my words are naught compared to a single piece of writing by Joel Johnson on Gizmodo. It’s called Raiding Eternity . … Read the rest here
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services
A fascinating post detailing the creation of a consistent visual identity of the BBC ’s online presence. Also, worth reading is the response from Paul Robert Lloyd . The use of big clunky Verdana for headings seems to have been phased out – hurrah! Comment on this … Read the rest here
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services
A fascinating post detailing the creation of a consistent visual identity of the BBC ’s online presence. Also, worth reading is the response from Paul Robert Lloyd . The use of big clunky Verdana for headings seems to have been phased out – hurrah! Comment on this … Read the rest here
Screencast: Converting OTF or TTF to EOT
In case you hadn’t noticed the lovely titles on this page, they’re League Gothic . Well, they should be if you happen to be using the latest version of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer. However, it took much trial and error to figure out exactly how to get there. There are a number of pieces to the puzzle but in the end, I got something to work. The assumption here is that you are on a Mac (as I am) but I believe these tools work the same on PC… Read the rest here
Make Yourself Presentable
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
My first time speaking professionally in public was back in 2005 at the first An Event Apart in Philadelphia. While not my first time speaking in front of a big audience, it was the first time I had to prepare a slide deck and use Keynote. Before and after view of a slide deck. On the left, you can see the bright red used to slides that need work, as well as black and grey for title slides, and blue for quotations. Two basic rules: simple and big When I use images, I almost always use them full screen and free of distraction. Keep your title slides to a few words, then speak through the rest of the story… Read the rest here
HTML5 And You
I mentioned in my previous post that I “had come away with my head reeling from the massive length and depth of the often-changing specification”, which is entirely true. Printouts of the current draft of the HTML5 spec can reach, depending on your operating system and installed fonts, somewhere north of 900 pages. Yes: nine hundred . There are unabridged Stephen King novels that run shorter. You might well say to yourself: “Self, is it just me, or are the people doing this completely off their everlovin’ rockers… Read the rest here
Updates
While it’s been a fairly quiet summer around these parts, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve been slacking off. Let’s run down the list. New Chalkwork Icons & Search Back in June while sitting around recovering from some minor surgery, I spent a weekend producing a new free icon set for payments and ecommerce called, naturally, Chalkwork Payments . It highlighted a fairly obvious deficiency in the collection, so immediately after I set to work on a much larger commerce set. Creatively named Chalkwork Commerce of course. Due to the growing size of the overall icon family (2500+ now), I decided a better way to find a specific icon was in order. … Read the rest here
The debate over page zooming vs. text scaling
After posting my reasons for switching back to px for font-size citing page zooming as the primary justification, it was apparent that enthusiasm for page zooming wasn’t as unanimous as I had thought. As a refresher from the article, low-vision users (or anyone) can alter their browser’s text size by changing the default text size permanently via the browser’s settings, or on-the-fly using the keyboard commands Ctrl+ / - (Windows) or Command+ / - (Mac). Until recently, these commands would cause all major browsers to scale up or down the size of the text while retaining the formatting and layout of the page, commonly called text scaling or text zooming . Now, however, recent versions of every major browser now default to page zooming instead of text scaling for Ctrl+ / - and Command+ / - commands AND for the “Zoom” option in the browser’s menu. … Read the rest here
What’s Golden
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
The rule of thirds and ratios such as the golden section are fantastic methods for achieving designs that feel cohesive. The problem is these principles don’t really apply to web design. Golden Ratio: When the ratio between two numbers is the same as the ratio of the sum of those numbers and the larger number. Basically, a+b is to a as a is to b . Also referred to as the “divine proportion” from its frequent occurrence in nature. … Read the rest here
Dyson ball
When I was in Japan last year, I noticed that most advertisements don’t mention URLs . Instead, they simply show what to search for. The practice seems to be gaining ground over here too. Advertising for the government’s Act on CO 2 campaign didn’t include a URL—just an entreaty to search for the phrase. The current television advertising for the latest Dyson vacuum cleaner finishes with the message to search for “dyson ball.” Sure enough, the number one search result goes straight to the Dyson website …for now. That might change if Google were to implement any kind of smart synonym swapping. … Read the rest here
Switched
Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said : retraining myself not to /> close img, input, and meta tags. It’s an uphill battle. Which received an instant string of responses asking, in a nutshell, “why?” So I clarified : because I’m done with XHTML is why. … Read the rest here
Digging in the Mud
There’s something about the Diggbroglio that has left me scratching my head: how is it that so many people are up in arms about the DiggBar when they’ve had nothing to say about the framing bars of StumbleUpon, FaceBook, etc. etc.? Now, please note that I’m not saying the DiggBar, or any other framing bar, is cool and we should all love it. I’m not. I absolutely, completely, totally get all the reasons why framing bars are bad for breaking bookmarking and navigating and search engines and copyright and hijacking content and so on. … Read the rest here
Exploring Cufón, a sIFR alternative for font embedding
Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón , which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together. sIFR , as many of you are aware, is a means of replacing “short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems” using a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Shaun Inman , Mark Wubben , Mike Davidson , and several others put in many long hours developing and refining IFR and sIFR, and we all owe them our gratitude for moving forward in a big way the state of typography on the web. These efforts continue today, as evidenced by this Web Typography mini-site from a SXSW 2009 panel. For many of us, however, the Flash part of these technologies makes it difficult to set up and use… Read the rest here