Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Just in case you were under the impression that type design or typography are easy, I suggest you try out Kern Type and Shape Type , two fun game from Mark MacKay for Method of Action . Each game tasks you with correcting default and malformed spacing, and then ranks you against the correct solution. It’s instructive and humbling! Hug your designer today. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Wood Type Revival is the brainchild, and subsequently successful Kickstarter project , of Matt Griffin and Matt Braun from Bearded . Their aim is: …to acquire ten fonts of rare historic wood type representing faces that are not available in the world of digital typography. The faces will be printed on an old Vandercook proof press, scanned, and digitized as opentype fonts. Those fonts will then be for sale as digital downloads on this site. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
From Christian Annyas , who also heads up the wonderful Movie Title Stills Collection , comes a survey of fire insurance maps from 1885 to 1921 by the Sanborn Map Company. While fire insurance maps may sound like a big snoozefest, don’t be fooled! Christian has great posts of New York maps and images of the different permutations of Sanborn’s own logo on the maps. The lettering on these covers is just beautiful. Sanborn Map Company began creating fire insurance maps in 1867. They were created to assist insurance agencies in assessing the fire risk of properties. Detailed maps, showing building use, sidewalk and street widths, layout and names, property boundaries, distance between buildings, house and block numbers, location of water mains, hydrants, piping, wells, cisterns, and fuel storage tanks… Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
This year marks my site’s tenth birthday online, so I’m celebrating with a new design edition. This is number five! I noticed something with my last site a little while ago. The custom designed articles I was posting (and that I loved to post) were keeping me from writing more regularly. It had nothing to do with the time involved to design those article, I usually kept things simple and got to be pretty fast at it, but more the presentation that bugged me. In order to post something, I felt it couldn’t be short or just a quip on a topic, it had to be substantial. I fell into a design trap I unknowingly set for myself. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
There’s strong evidence that Times New Roman wasn’t designed by Stanley Morison, but by William Starling Burgess, a wooden boat designer from Boston: Burgess — in 1904, when he was only 26 — had a brief and brilliant flirtation with typography. He wrote to the U.S. branch of the Lanston Monotype Corp. requesting that a font be made to his specifications. … Read the rest here
Film Sessions vol. II is now available for listening. I’m really pleased with how it came together, much the same as vol. I . Here’s the description I provided with the mix: This mix paints a narrative as if it were the score to a single movie. Dreams yield to mystery and suspense and then evolve into hope. … Read the rest here
Web Typography for the Lonely : “…aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.” Complete with downloadable code, and cleverly written by Christopher Clark. From the Coolinate page: I am very aware that Coolinate is a dumb name for anything ever. Sadly, my other ideas— Line-shadowify, Manystuffify, and Bloginate — all seemed dumber. There weren’t many options really. Putting some lines under text isn’t an activity that conjures epic war-hero-style action verbs… Read the rest here
Live The Language: Paris : Je t’aime le type in this lovely video (part of a series ). … Read the rest here
Remember when I said that the Ampersand conference was going to be great ? Yeah, well, I wasn’t wrong. If anything, I underestimated how great it would be. Make a venn diagram of web nerds and type nerds; Ampersand was all about the intersection of those two circles. There was something special about having so many domain-specific nerds in one place at one time. … Read the rest here
Codex : A Flickr photoset showing the cover and spreads of the upcoming Codex , “the journal of typography”. Stunning. … Read the rest here
Blake Allen , a man with impeccably good taste in music and the founder of Designers.MX, has just posted my mixtape: The Film Sessions, Volume One . I’m a film score nut. For a short time during college I was a music major with aspirations of becoming a composer for films. Obviously, I never made the cut, so I live out glory days gone by through collecting and arrange scores that others have composed. Sure, I enjoy indie rock as much as anyone else while working, but I also enjoy relaxing instrumental pieces as a soundtrack to my workday. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
If you think your site’s content doesn’t matter, then you are sorely mistaken. Granted, the argument for content strategy has always mystified me. Not because I think we can do without content strategy, we can’t, but I’m amazed that we still have to make the argument. Folks care very much about appearances; what their websites look like means the world to them. But why don’t they care just as much about what their sites are saying? … Read the rest here
Typography in Rome : A Flickr photoset by Paul Soulellis. Faves: 1 , 2 , and 3 . /via @ kmwaite … Read the rest here
I wrote an article about creating an animated, image-free button with CSS3 and Typekit type and it’s been published today over at the Typekit Blog . Thanks to Mandy Brown for coordinating and editing it. In a way, the article is an extension to a lot of the stuff I talk about in CSS3 For Web Designers : using the experience layer as a place to fully embrace the pieces of CSS3 that have decent support today amongst modern browsers. Buttons are a perfect place to experiment that way—and embedded type makes them all the better, while remaining flexible. … Read the rest here
Feltron 2010 Annual Report : Visually stunning, as always. Except this year’s is different: The 2010 Annual Report is an encapsulation of my father’s life, as communicated by the calendars, slides and other artifacts in my possession. The text is set in H&FJ’s Gotham and Tungsten . Update: Photo showing some of the source materials . … Read the rest here
Typefaces of the World Poster : The second poster by Shelby White that I’ve linked up this week. Keep it up, Shelby, and I’ll keep pressing the post button as often as needed. … Read the rest here
That was a nice 10-day break from blogging. I’m back after turning my attention to some projects that needed full-time attention. Accordingly, I’m growing convinced that, unless one works late nights and weekends like a Bay Area startup, it’s difficult for an independent team of two or three to move much faster than a corporate team of twenty. The team of twenty has quantity on its side — more hands and specialists to execute the work. With that, of course, comes all the red tape, political baggage, and countless meetings that accompany such teams and the organizations that employ them. … Read the rest here
On Hiring Front-end Engineers : Speaking of freelance gigs and jobs, Chris Zacharias, former YouTube engineer (I believe), authors some thoughts on what to look for in front-end engineers. On scripting: Bad front-end engineers are dependent on jQuery and other libraries. Good front-end engineers make use of libraries like jQuery to empower themselves, but are not beholden to them. On art: Nearly every first rate web developer I have worked with had some kind of extracurricular, no matter how casual, that focused around some form of art. … Read the rest here
Because I was so busy, the two-year anniversary of Huffduffer passed unnoticed back in October. Two years! It’s hard to believe. It seems like just yesterday that I launched it. It’s been ticking along nicely for all that time and I’ve been tweaking it whenever I get the chance. … Read the rest here
Ampersand, The Web Typography Conference : Scheduled for next June in Brighton (UK). I have high hopes for this. … Read the rest here