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
Routinely I’m afforded the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to redesigning vs. realigning . However, not since July 2004 have I done so in a forum so public as this. Here goes… … Read the rest here
The MyFonts January 2009 newsletter reports on their Top 10 Fonts of 2008. The list highlights the year’s most successful fonts in each genre, based on sales numbers. Sitting pretty in that list (based on sales numbers, remember) is a free font family: Museo and Museo Sans , which were the year’s top geometric display fonts. Designer Jos Buivenga offers three out of the five Museo weights for free, along with 2 out of the 10 Museo Sans fonts, but on the strength of the paid weights alone, the Museo family still made it to the top of the list. Jos specifically allows use of the free weights for @font-face linking, but it’s clear this was no deterrent to people forking out hard cash for the full family. … Read the rest here
Wonderful use of illustrative typography in the campaign for this years Grammy Awards . … Read the rest here
The CSS 1 font-weight property is used to display text with a Bold or Regular weight. This is achieved using font-weight:bold and font-weight:normal . So much so CSS 101. But there’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just bold and regular. There’s Ultralight, Extralight, Light, Thin, Medium, Book, Semibold, Demibold, Extra-bold, Heavy, Black, Extra-black, Ultra-black, and more besides. Since its inception in 1996, CSS has provided a way of displaying these other weights through use a numerical scale with the font-weight property. … Read the rest here
I’ve had in my possession for some time now a copy of FontBook . Created by FontShop International, it’s labeled as “the most complete digital type reference in the world.” They’re right. I don’t know of any other font or typeface reference as complete as this. It’s even a juggernaut merely in weight — at nearly 3″ thick, the thing weighs more than 6 pounds (3kg). (Insert joke here about weight lifting.) With 1,760 pages, 32,000 type samples from 90 foundries, and edited by Mai-Linh Thi Truong, Jürgen Siebert, and Erik Spiekermann, to say FontBook is an impressive piece of work would be a terrible understatement. It’s far more than a reference. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
R eading is one of my great loves in life, a fact that is sometimes at odds with my smock wearing tendencies. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly affirmed self-education despite the lack of a classroom. This helps me stay sharp and challenge my notions about design and the stuff I make everyday. Good books are tough to find, so I’ve begun keeping track of notable ones. I still get a lot of emails asking about graphic design reading recommendations, so when I relaunched this site, I decided to dedicate a section to others like me where I could keep a list of books that I’ve found helpful. I don’t provide these as a comprehensive canon, but as a source of books I’ve vetted as worthwhile for those wanting to keep learning. … Read the rest here
This Friday, 24th October 2008, I’ll be presenting as part of Head , a three-day global web conference. My talk is entitled Facing up to Fonts . I 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. Head is a fascinating conference as it is indeed truly global. I will be presenting in the local Brighton hub , but my talk will be broadcast across the net for attendees to tune into wherever they happen to be. Head is a web conference with all of the traditional elements… Read the rest here
My geek social calendar has been quite full over the past few days. On Saturday, I—along with half of the web developers in the land—went to Maidenhead for Drew and Rachel ’s wedding. Just as with Norm!’s wedding a few weeks ago, ‘twas a lovely, heartwarming affair. The pièce de résistance was the wedding “cake”: a tower of the finest British cheeses. Needless to say, I took many pictures and dutifully tagged them with the official wedding tag . … Read the rest here
Firstly, let me define web font embedding, or so-called web fonts, as I see it. I mean using @font-face to point to regular TrueType or OpenType font files on a web server. In terms of support, the current state of affairs is such that Safari 3.1 supports web fonts , it is scheduled for Firefox 3.1 and it is currently available in a development release of Opera . It’s true to say that Internet Explorer has supported web fonts since version 4, but only by way of EOT files which are currently proprietary. It’s true that Microsoft is trying to get the W3C to make EOT a standard, but EOT is a form of DRM requiring pre-processing of regular fonts and as such is not acceptable to me, despite Bill Hill’s protestations (the condescending tone and content of which not unreasonably got the Joe Clark treatment ). So. … Read the rest here