Typography

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.

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…