Typography

TypeCon2010 in Los Angeles was my first typography conference. It felt good. I was made welcome, made new friends, renewed old acquaintances and learned a lot.

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.

At Typ09, FontShop put together Webfonts Week, a series of interviews with leading type designers. There is universal support for webfonts now, even from those who were dead set against it a year ago.

I’m on two proposed panels for SxSW 2010 – please cast a thumbs up in their favour! Also, some typography and other interesting looking panels that caught my eye.

The font-stretch property was removed from CSS 2 in the transition to CSS 2.1. Unfortunately this leaves us with a rather gaping hole in overall font support.

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.

I’m proud to have been part of the Web Typography panel at SxSW 2009 alongside Jon Tan, Ian Coyle, Elliot Jay Stocks & Samantha Warren. I’ve jotted down some of the topics we discussed, and some we talked about beforehand but didn’t have time for.

A free font has made it into MyFonts’s top ten list of best selling typefaces. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

There’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just Bold and Regular, but almost no browsers follow the proper CSS 1 way of specifying Light, Semibold, Black and other weights. There is a workaround, but it’s nasty.

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 in which I get to talk more about web typography for the first time in ages. Update: Win a ticket!

A call out to font foundries to stop fretting about web font embedding and instead make it work in their favour.

The CSS 3 font module has come back to life, and web designers have been asked for the their wish lists. Here’s mine.

On presenting web typography in Slovenia, my hospitable hosts, and discovering Zemanta, a clever blog enhancement tool.

A fantasy proposal for a website which automatically generates font stacks based on community input.

I’ve been an avid reader of A List Apart for many years. It’s been a long-standing source of information, inspiration and even spiritual guidance. And so it is with immense pleasure and pride that I can finally say that I am an ALA author.

Thomas Phinney, Adobe’s Fonts Product Manager for & Global Typography has posted a survey asking Web designers/developers about different implementations of @font-face.

Earlier this week it was announced that WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. There has been a mixed reception in some quarters, but this leap forward (for that’s what it is) has to be a good thing.

There’s been some fascinating and handy blogs, articles, tools and references surfacing recently.

Widgets on my Mac OS X dashboard.

Following on from yesterday’s post regarding Opera’s probable support of web fonts, there comes a timely press release from font publishers, Ascender.

Håkon Wium Lie recently intimated that the forthcoming release of Opera will support downloadable fonts. Great news for web designers, but is it bad news for type foundries?

HTML Entity Character Lookup is a little free webapp and comes a Dashboard widget too, which is super-handy.

The latest issue of Design Edge Canada magazine – a publication for Canada’s graphic design industry – was a web typography special for which I contributed top ten tips for web typography.

Interest in Web typography has really picked up over the past year. One subject in particular has piqued people’s interest: vertical rhythm and alignment of baselines. Here’s a compilation of tutorials on the subject.

So Mark and I gave our presentation yesterday at South by Southwest. The slides and some references are online, along with a recording of the session and its transcription.

First thing on Tuesday morning, I’ll be presenting Web Typography Sucks with the venerable Mark Boulton. Also that day is Helvetica the Movie. And on Saturday there’s the Great British Booze-up.

The Web Typography project continues to proceed, albeit at a glacial pace. One of the reasons for the slow progress is guidelines such as this: “verse quotations should be centered on the longest line”.

Just recently Jeffrey Zeldman was bemoaning the sub-standard state of text rendering in Firefox on a Mac. And the sad truth is he only skimmed the surface; Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino may render even the same font differently.

Getting work with governmental bodies frequently involves a tedious, time consuming, tendering process with spurious clauses bad for the soul.

Underworld recently put out some 12” singles and I’m loving the type-based artwork.

This year, SxSW Interactive is enabling attendees to vote for panels to be featured in the conference. I’m hoping to present a talk with Mark Boulton called Web Typography Sucks. The Panel Proposal Picker Round Two is now live, so get your votes in!

The availability of fonts for use in Web typography, or more specifically the lack thereof, has been getting some welcome attention recently.

I’m really pleased to finally announce the release of a brand new website, The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, or Web Typography for short.

Unicode Font Info is a really handy free application for OS X. Essentially it’s a font inspection tool with full support for Unicode 3.2, allowing you to easily navigate huge fonts with tens of thousands of supported glyphs.

I’ve just come back from a week with Her Indoors in the West Country. While there I bought five books, all of which were Penguin paperbacks, one of which proved to be particularly fascinating.

[See my A List Apart article for more up-to-date info] Text for the screen is sized with CSS in terms of pixels, ems or keywords. Pixels is easy, keywords are well documented. That leaves ems. I will now attempt to show you how ems can be as quick and easy to use as pixels.

Typographers divide words using hyphens to increase readability. All books and newspapers of any quality use this technique to ‘justify’ their text, yet it is not a tool available to Web designers in any useful form.

Why and how Web designers should be using font-family in a more adventurous manner: there are some great typefaces out there – let’s use them. The Visibone survey is an invaluable aid in typeface selection.

Mastication is Normal has started an occasional series of book cover reviews.

Clagnut now uses a slightly customised version of Dean Allen’s wonderful Textile. Textile provides speedier text input (without having to mark up the input into my CMS) and formats the text nicely, with proper “typographer’s quotes” and so on. There…

Epizootic is to animals as epidemic is to people. And a brief exploration of putting Unicode characters into Web pages.

Why is the humble apostrophe so regularly misused and why are hairdressers so often the culprits? Ladie’s perm’s at half price (As the Guardian readers’ editor points out, journalists who should know better also get it wrong.) Apostrophes have two…

The Guardian UK weblogs competition results are out. Obviously I didn’t win, however Scary Duck did. Highly commended were iMakeContent and Greenfairydotcom; runners up were blogjam, LinkMachineGo and Plenty of Taste. Congratulations to all the winners, all the entries…

Scene 360 asks the question of twenty three top zines and design portals: Why do you do it? A beautifully put together piece with some fascinating insight into how the likes of K10K and Design is Kinky think. The Evolution of Type, a fine introduction to the origins, evolution…

Jakob mourns the demise of the text sizing buttons IE but fails to point out that it won’t have any effect on a Windows machine if text is sized in pixels. Microsoft have stopped giving away their free web fonts.

Survey of installed fonts on different platforms, Mark Newhouse’s real world CSS and the Polar Bear 2 is in beta.

Behind the typeface: Cooper Black – a brilliant satire. A cry for help with a smart quotes algorithm. Typography links including designing logos from ligatures. And how close to the real thing your wireframes should be when presented for user testing.

Frames and nested tables bemoan their demise: “NESTED TABLE: is there a place for us, for us maligned remnants of earlier html? We who are cast off by maturing web designers like the velveteen rabbit?” And a fine explanation of the correct use of quotation marks.…

I’ve just come across the best website I’ve seen this year: Public Lettering – a walk in central London. The site is based on a walk by Phil Baines for his graphic design students. It examines the typography of larger examples of public lettering on and in…

The Z-man pointed us to webactivism.org today. And a fine blog it is too with some great typographical postings, particularly on the value of Arial and Bringhurst. And this coincides nicely with the latest Cre@teOnline magazine which has an errant focus on typography. I shall…

Mozilla 1.0. Stick a fork in it. It’s done and looking good. Posted a few pikkies from the Mini Rally recently held in Brighton. Check out those wonderfully ridiculous chopped cars – why have a small car when you can have a tiny one? Like me, Owen Briggs has been…

It is with much regret that I have to inform you of the demise of linesandsplines. A beautiful intellectual web log dedicated to the joys & aesthetics of typography. Often way above my amateurish knowledge of the subject – but that was the point for me – how…