Design with flair — on the Web!

A startup called Typekit allows freedom to design with any font you want online &mdash as long as you own the font itself. How groovy is that? Finally, we are free! No more Verdana, Arial... headaches, heartbreak.

via Slate.com

The I Love Typography Blog

While perusing WordPress implementations, I found this blog. And on this blog I found this page.

Flickr Found Type

Quite pretty and interesting. Maybe there's food for the muse here.

IN, OUT, UP, DOWN

Okay, you just have to see this one: Axel Peemoeller - Eureka Carpark Melbourne.

via Daring Fireball

It’s not Helvetica

Roland forwarded me a link to Font Conference, a video from CollegeHumor. Like most things CollegeHumor, this video is hit and miss, but you might be able to tease something out of it to enjoy.

From Roland’s email: “…some type humor, except it glorifies the wrong typeface.”

But is it Garawood, or Zebramond?

Not terribly hot off the presses (April), but this is a funny entry on an interesting blog I just found from a type designer/manager at Adobe... Typblography.

"Garamond and Zebrawood walk into a bar, they have a few drinks and one thing leads to another… (yes they were hanging out at the same bar, believe it or not)."

"Create from scratch, the typographic love child of:
Garamond and Zebrawood"

See what Christian Robertson and other type designers came up with, on Typophile.

&

Personally, I don’t care for ampersands. Too fanciful, maybe? Regardless, Hoefler & Frere-Jones (there’s that ampersand again) have an ampersand-history-riddled post on their site, typography.com. You can read about (and see) the different typographic properties of ampersands in different fonts at “Our Middle Name.”

via Daring Fireball

Really clean typography…

…on a Web page.

And, it’s all in HTML and CSS.

That’s right, people. We can have elegant typography on the Web.

I have no idea what this Seed Conference is about, but just looking at their Web page gives me hope for the future of Web design.

via Daring Fireball

Ever want to wear XRAY specs?

What would you see if you looked at your web page? Its skeleton? In this case, its CSS backbone.

If you edit or create your own style sheet, study other style sheets, or just wish you had started knowing what that was all about already, you must check this out.

XRAY

There's info about browser compatibility, but I can tell you it's seamless on today's Safari for the Mac.

See that XRAY button in the middle of the page? Drag it into your Bookmarks Bar. Yeah. Really. Then go to a page you want to XRAY. Pick any page, it really doesn't matter. Then click on that Bookmark Bar XRAY link.

A window appears. Follow the instructions. Suddenly you're in a world where code talks to you while showing you what it does.

Click the x in the upper right hand corner of the dialog box to come back to the world of the living.

Everyone’s a typographer

Or, at least everyone knows what fonts are.

Since everyone and their brother (or sister) has a computer with Microsoft Word and Print Shop Pro Publisher Deluxe, we’ve all become skilled typographers, right?

Uh, no.

In an effort to educate the general Microsoft Office-using public, The Sacramento Bee offers What’s your type? (<-- This link is to the Printer version of the article, which apparently doesn’t force you to register in order to read the entire piece. You’ll have to click [Cancel] when the print dialog box comes up though.) In any case, give the article a read and get a glimpse of how the general populace views and uses fonts.

Reminder: Helvetica this weekend at YBCA

More information:
• This weekend's showings
• Helvetica web site
• Clips and trailers
• AIGA interview with director Gary Hustwit
• Previous DA post

Dr. Copperplate and Mr. Gothic

via Daring Fireball

Like many of us (I hope), I look back on much of my early graphic design—or, to tell the truth, desktop publishing (gasp!)—career with varying degrees of sheepishness and downright embarrassment. My greatest regrets: bad layouts and bad typography.

I used to chalk up my clunky typography to the clunky fonts at my disposal when a Macintosh IIfx, LaserWriter II, and PageMaker 3 were the high-end tools of the DTP trade: Avant Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Symbol, Times, Zapf Dingbats and Zapf Chancery. Later, I blamed my failure with Lithos on MTV’s beating of that typeface into the ground. Then, a long stint with what is now the US’s largest commercial bank left me irrationally angry at Futura Bold.

But, after reading through Armin Vit’s “Dr. Copperplate and Mr. Gothic”—a considerate view of Copperplate (another one of my font nemeses)—I’ve had to rethink the issues I’ve had with all the fonts in the past.

Maybe I just suck at setting type.

Typesetting in the 70s, Part One

For those who weren't there to see it in all its glory, here's a chance to get a glimpse of what the 70s looked like, by and large, graphic-design wise. Creative Pro just posted the first of a series and I think the images and the technical background he offers about why things looked the way they did is fascinating.

Scanning Around With Gene: Part 1 of That '70s Type!



Some of you may know that I think there is a dearth of understanding amongst the younger digirati of what design really entailed before PostScript. I think I'm secretly soliciting stories from the trenches from those who know what collodion is. I didn't. At least not until a heart to heart with an elder pressman at the press check on Monday. And Scitex?

What do you guys think? When the car was invented, did we really need to teach our children about the details of horse husbandry? Or did we say, let bygones be bygones and let the knowledge fade into the ether?

You've probably seen it a thousand times today. Why?

Fan's of type foundries may already know that this year is the 50th birthday of this Supremely Ubiquitous Font. Join today's BBC News magazine in a meditation on its influence, for good or ill. (Also impressive are the design-savvy Brits in the comment section.)