Webdesigninformer.com

Hicksdesign Go to the source

On the same day that the latest font catalogue from Netherlands foundry Typotheque arrives in the post, I discover the exciting news that they’re about to launch their own Web Font service . As far as I’m aware, this is the first foundry to setup their own web distribution – rather than using a 3rd party such as Typekit. It feels like the flood gates of web fonts are suddenly about to open! What also peaked my interest, was the incredible piece of work that is Typotheque’s History . Based on a skeleton of Roman inscriptional capitals, History includes ’21 layers inspired by the evolution of typography’. These layers are designed to be combined, which means that you build up your own style of typeface using layers of serifs, swashes and other decorations. It can be a chunky slab serif, or a light sans with delicate swashes, while maintaing the same strong typographic base: Mixing these layers can be done with their own ‘History Remixer’, but for web it requires a bit of javascript tomfoolery … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Talk of South by Southwest seems to come around quicker each year. I’m already looking forward to heading back to Austin, not least of all because I may get the chance to be on a couple of great panels (please cast a thumbs up if you like the sound of the panels). First up is Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck? with Alan Colville , Jon Tan and Giles Colborne . … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

As SXSW 2006 came to a close, I was having lunch with friends at the Moonshine Grill and ranting about typography, as I am wont to do. I was complaining about how there are so many wonderful typefaces, but no decent way to find them. Sites like Flickr had already revolutionized the way we shared and discovered photography; why isn’t anyone taking advantage of the web for the sake of type? “I should do that,” I murmured. My friends offered up a shared response: “Well, do it.” Today, I’m very pleased to announce the launch of a new site I put together with the generous help of friends called Typedia . At its simplest, Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

In doing research on Italian type, I stumbled across a wonderfully inspiring resource published 460 years ago, possibly on or about the typography work by Giambattista (or Giovambattista or Giovanni Battista) Palatino, the master Italian calligrapher. A Google translation doesn’t provide a lot of clarity as to exactly what the book is about or why it was created, but the source from which I discovered the resource describes the book as follows: This jewel of a book was published in 1550 by Antonio Blado asolano in Rome. It is now available on the web and contains of complete alphabets, from chancery scripts, to blackletter and roman. There are also greek, hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian, Arabic and other alphabets. Below are a few snippets from the book… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

In doing research on Italian type, I stumbled across a wonderfully inspiring resource published 460 years ago, possibly on or about the typography work by Giambattista (or Giovambattista or Giovanni Battista) Palatino, the master Italian calligrapher. A Google translation doesn’t provide a lot of clarity as to exactly what the book is about or why it was created, but the source from which I discovered the resource describes the book as follows: This jewel of a book was published in 1550 by Antonio Blado asolano in Rome. It is now available on the web and contains of complete alphabets, from chancery scripts, to blackletter and roman. There are also greek, hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian, Arabic and other alphabets. Below are a few snippets from the book. You can browse the online version containing scanned images of all 128 pages… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

A compilation of resources, products, and inspiration spotted before, after, but not during knee surgery. Los Angeles Times gets a makeover A rather nice overhaul of the latimes.com site. (Here’s what it looked like in February 2008 .) Oliver Kavanagh A rather audacious, springboard-style home page that leaves me wanting to try something similar. DIY ring light with LEDs …and other DIY camera mods using LEDs. The 6 brand naming styles Josh Levine: The 6 naming styles add context so you can see the full landscape of choices… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

As you can probably tell from the Huffduffer logotype, I like ligatures . Most ligatures are formed by the combination of the lowercase letter f and a subsequent letter—although the gorgeous Mrs Eaves typeface includes a few more unusual ones. There’s an old letter that looks a lot like the lowercase f and that’s the long s . ſ Up until the 19th century, this was the default way of writing the letter s at the beginning or in the middle of words. Our letter s—called the short s—was mostly used when a word finished with an s or when an s followed an s (the word Congress on The Declaration of Independence matches both criteria). … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Jason Santa Maria , AKA Stan , is the man. Here’s here at An Event Apart in Boston to talk about Thinking Small . He’s my warm-up man. He begin in the 1980s; Christmas day in the Santa Maria household—Jason gets Castle Greyskull. One Christmas, his parents played a cruel joke on him. Instead of getting him toys, they got him books. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

The font-stretch property was introduced in CSS 2.0 over ten years ago, but was culled in the transition to CSS 2.1. It now languishes in the CSS 3 Fonts module. The property instructed browsers to select a ‘normal, condensed, or extended face from a font family’. Its removal from CSS 2.1 was due to a complete lack of implementation by browsers. Unfortunately this leaves us with a gaping hole regarding font support. Many professional typefaces are designed with extended and condensed styles. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

It was my pleasure to be interviewed last night by Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney, two self-proclaimed extremely passionate design students from the Savannah College of Art & Design, for their Read Between the Leading podcast. We had a nice chat about where I got my start, from school to my first job, and a good bit about the state of web design and where we’re headed. Thanks very much to Aaron and Matt for having me on! Be sure to check out a few of the past episodes with some of my favorite designers: Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of UnderConsideration, Stephen Coles of Typographica, John Boardley from ILoveTypography, Mark Simonson , and Antonio Carusone of AisleOne. You can listen (or download) my interview from the site. Enjoy! … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Youworkforthem have released a free version of their handset Skute Pro font , that’s crying out to be used on a record cover (such as they are these days). A.M. Cassandre produced the typeface Bifur for Peignot in 1929. Bifur broke from rigid typographic forms by combining Art Deco principles of obsessive geometry with the line and stroke of letter forms. Skute picks up Cassandre’s spirit and carries it onward in YWFT hand set fashion. And we are happy to give it out to you. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Lionel Schriver’s piece in the Standpoint called Dashed Bad Form is a witty affair, comparing and contrasting the semicolon and the em dash . Alas, the self-describing nature of the article is completely lost in the online version—though presumably not in the print edition—having suffered the all-too-common fate of emdashculation; every instance of an em dash in the article has been converted into a plain ol’ hyphen. Oh, the irony! …proper irony too—not that confused Alanis Morissette kind . It’s probably a CMS issue. But, hey, it’s as good an opportunity as any to point to the classic article on A List Apart , The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) . … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I recently received a wireframe from a potential client outlining their plans for a new homepage, which in itself was pretty impressive. It showed that the client had knowledge of the industry as well as a good understanding about the importance of planning. To produce this wireframe our prospective client had used a relatively new tool called Balsamiq, which aims to capture the sketchy nature of hand drawn wireframes with the utility of a GUI application. On the surface this seems like a really good idea and it obviously allowed the client to produce something relatively quickly with little or no prior experience. As such, I think a tool like Balsamiq does have a place in the non-professional market… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Back in January I was part of a double bill with Jon Tan , entitled Skillswap goes typographic . It went down really well so I thought I’d better tie it all together here. My talk was on “Facing up to Fonts” the blurb for which went as follows: Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

I was proud to be a part of the Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ & Get Your Glyph On! panel at SxSW 2009, along with Jon Tan, Ian Coyle, Elliot Jay Stocks and our super moderator Samantha Warren (photo above by Keith Muth ). Thanks very much to all those attendees who tweeted and contributed to the discussion with some great questions (including Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS no less). Apologies to the many folk who couldn’t get in. Typography panels are always really popular at SxSW, so it’s a shame we ended up in a relatively small room which had filled to capacity about 10 minutes before the start. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

I was proud to be a part of the Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ & Get Your Glyph On! panel at SxSW 2009, along with Jon Tan, Ian Coyle, Elliot Jay Stocks and our super moderator Samantha Warren (photo above by Keith Muth ). Thanks very much to all those attendees who tweeted and contributed to the discussion with some great questions (including Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS no less). Apologies to the many folk who couldn’t get in. Typography panels are always really popular at SxSW, so it’s a shame we ended up in a relatively small room which had filled to capacity about 10 minutes before the start. Still, at least there was a choice of 18 other panels to attend at the time [ahem]. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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. (I personally have not opened Flash on my computer in literally 4 years, and I hope to keep that run alive.) Cufón, on the other hand, can be set up and run on your site in about 5 minutes. … Read the rest here

Design Melt Down Go to the source

Nostalgic designs can take on many forms. Sometimes through classic typography. Sometimes through the visual language of an era like retro pop 1950’s elements. In this case the color combo forces such an appeal onto the design. Combine this with other classic elements and you have a recipe for success…. Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

My first job was as a dishwasher, a job title I’ve had at three separate times in my life. During high school I worked at a local restaurant where I washed dishes and did some light cooking. When I quit to attend college, the head cook lashed out with his wisdom, “Art?! As soon as there’s a war or recession, art will be the first thing to go. And when that happens, you’ll be right back here washing dishes. … Read the rest here