Blog Archive

  • JOGLE Day 08 – Preston to Shrewsbury

    Day 8 of our ride from John o’Groats to Land’s End took us from Preston to Shrewsbury. Nothing too see, until we met family at the end.

  • All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS

    Automatic hyphenation on the web has been possible since 2011 and is now broadly supported. There is however far more control available to designers than just turning on hyphens. Updated January 2023.

  • Top Tunes 2018

    Back after a decidedly long hiatus, here’s a compilation of favourite songs I bought this year, and a damn fine year it was too.

  • Upcoming changes to the CSS you need for variable fonts

    Two weeks ago I was invited to Berlin for a CSS Working Group meeting. One afternoon was dedicated to resolving issues with the CSS Text and Font modules. Two resolutions in particular will affect the CSS we need to work with variable fonts.

  • How to use variable fonts in the real world

    Using variable fonts in the real world turns out to be tricky. This post explains how we achieved it for the new Ampersand website and what we learned along the way.

  • Getting started with variable fonts

    Variable fonts are a new font format offering unprecedented flexibility. They will be landing in web browsers and native operating systems within 12 months. Learn how to try them out now.

  • The importance of putting your champions on a pedestal

    A champion is the person in your client’s organisation who can pinpoint the barriers to a great solution going live. Champions are obstacle clearers, problem insulators and praise singers. Find them and treat them with the reverence they deserve.

  • Choco Leibniz

    In a rare excursion we delve in some Friday political commentary from Half Man Half Biscuit. It’s National Shite Day.

  • Chrome just got darker

    A couple of days ago, my installation of Google Chrome updated itself from version 49 to version 50. The timing was fortuitous and relieved me of a growing text rendering headache.

  • Use rems for global sizing, use ems for local sizing

    An unedited extract from my forthcoming book, Web Typography. This chapter is quite technically focussed and hopefully stands well on its own. The other chapters I’ve written contain much higher proportion of typographic theory.

  • Conference diversity from an organiser’s perspective

    Clearleft we know we have a responsibility to the industry to help redress the gender balance, and that means putting together diverse line-ups at our conferences. This is much easier said than done, but difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

  • Back my Web Typography book

    I’m writing a book on Web Typography which I’m hoping to crowdfund on Kickstarter. It’ll be a handbook for designing beautiful and effective typography in modern websites, and I hope it’ll be available in time for Ampersand conference this year.