Web Typography is now open source

In December 2005 I launched Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, a practical guide to web typography using Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style as a basis.

The site has been referenced and linked to many times over the subsequent 8 years, which has been wonderful to see. At the moment however, the whole site is in need of updating and completing (in as much as completion is actually possible). It’s also suffered a number of outages and database losses, and while I believe the design still holds up, it could probably do with a bit of responsiveness (at least it was liquid from the start).

For these reasons, I have now committed the site to open source, so if you feel inclined to contribute in any way, you can fork it on GitHub, as the saying goes.

In preparation for opening up the source, I’ve reworked some of the guts of the site to remove the need for a database. It still uses my ropey PHP and much of my 8 year old CSS, but it works, and frankly I’m far more interested in the content being updated. I will continue to maintain the site and apply changes, merge forks, etc as they happen. In fact the whole exciting process of open sourcing the site has given me renewed enthusiasm for the project, so I hope to be making plenty of updates myself.