Search for typography

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 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.

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

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.

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…

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.

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.

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 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…

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…

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.

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

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…

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

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

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!

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

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

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”.

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

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.

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…

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

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…

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

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.…

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…

I’ve finally got around to redesigning clagnut.com.

Why I haven’t been blogging much recently and what I’ve missed over the past few weeks. Highlights include Todd Dominey’s PGA Open Championship and Phantom Power, the new album from Super Furry Animals. Also a brief critique of the new Pixelsurgeon site.

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.

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?

The Design Council has published a detailed look at what information design is and what is expected from information designers.

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

As part of the Open & Closed Project, Joe Clark has released a new site, Captioning Sucks, to highlight the shoddy state of captions in broadcasting. Check out the Comic Sans goodness.

Widgets on my Mac OS X dashboard.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Web Standards Awards have just launched tp celebrate and encourage CSS-based design. The emphasis will be on commercial sites which is definitely a good thing as the Web design world as a whole has a lot of catching up to do.

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

Technorati recently released cool charty goodness for any keyword search, and what’s more you can post the graphs right into your blog. And then there’s egoSurf.

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.

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

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

It’s still August and SxSW is already appearing over the horizon. You can buy tickets now, but the big news is that this year’s panel picker is now live. Also, we’ve got sage advice for getting the most out of dConstruct 2007.