Georgia pro & Verdana Pro
You know them and you love them. As everyone else I suppose. Now Georgia and Verdana come in a Pro version. And both of them look fantastic!
There are new weights and widths, there are new glyphs, even new numerals.
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Aria – a typeface
If you start our day watching a video like this, everything will go a bit better. Typography at its best.
Find a quite space, go full screen and your speakers on.
Kern Type
A blog post about typography. Yes, again.
Kern Type is a beautifully designed, short, online game about kerning (If you have an iPad, you’ll enjoy the game even more). And what’s kerning?
According to Wikipedia:
Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.
We shouldn’t confuse kerning with tracking.
Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a range of characters.
I enjoyed Kern Type so much that I decided to brag a bit. Here’s my score:
Erik Spiekermann and Elliot Jay Stocks talk about typography
I think Erik Spiekermann is one of the most, if not the most, important person of our times when it comes to typography. Elliot Jay Stocks is a very talented, a very clever, an absolutely fantastic Web designer. But you already know that.
Here they are together, talking about typography. What’s more to ask for?
Featured on the official Expression Engine blog
Each week, the official Expression Engine blog introduces us new add-ons, tutorials, important news, site launches etc.
This week, the relevant post talks about this website, porcupine colors. Thank you Expression Engine!
Steve Jobs. 1955-2011.
He changed the way we work, our profession, the way we communicate and ultimately our lives like nobody else.
We’ve got to do something with what we saw, what we touched and what we learnt from this man.
The Problem With Online Ads
In the world of online advertising, I feel we’ve gone too far away from what everybody knows as “common sense”. I can’t undersrtand why we keep running a model that it is obviously sick.
I predict that in 2050, we’ll look back at the first 20 years of the web and shake our heads. The craptacular design! The hallucinogenic business models! The privacy nightmares! All because entrepreneurs convinced themselves that they couldn’t do what inventors have done for centuries: Charge people a fair price for things they want.
Clive Thompson, WIRED
Redesign
New porcupine colors. Redesigned.
What’s new in this version? First of all more HTML5 love. Now the layout uses native HTML5 tags as the main containers of content. To do so I had to add some JavaScript in order not to break it in older browsers. Speaking of browsers, I left Internet Explorer 6 and 7 behind. For good.
This fresh design is better defined on the screen and it focuses on the projects which were stupidly neglected. Once again, this new approach takes readability very seriously. I think now there are more reasons to stay here, see more pages and enjoy them.
Regarding responsiveness, yes, this is a responsive design. I created 5 different layouts according to various screen resolutions. Responsive designs work better when you start from the content out.
The platform wich fuels this website is Expression Engine of course. It’s a very simple installation with only one add-on.
Last but not least, this new version, has more content, better written and edited.
I hope you like it. Welcome.
iA Writer, Lion edition
I have many times thought I shouldn’t write anything about iA Writer, because everything has been already told. On the other hand I’m unique, just like everyone is, so I’m eligible to add a word or two.
Now that the new Lion version has been released, there are more reasons to do so.
And I have to fight the notion “tools don’t make the pro/designer/writer/whoever”, which is right. But once in a while… boom! Something happens and you get a tool that makes everything easier. And better. And more intuitive. The more experienced (some say “older”) you become the less possible is to meet such happy accidents. Serendipity. But serendipity isn’t only accidental, it happens to the people who seek for it. Anyway, iA Writer is one of that tools.
Yes, it’s another app that takes your screen up and lets you write without any distractions. You get an off-white background, a dark color for your text and a font. And a blue cursor? So what?
Not exactly, because this isn’t any background, any color and any font. The application is wisely designed, so wisely that the people behind it dared to provide us no preferences. That’s it. Take it or leave it. I took it.
Of course iA Writer isn’t for anyone. You need to take writing seriously in order to get the most of it. I personally have worked for months with Writeroom and Byword and they’re really decent apps. So iA Writer needed to overcome some great competitors. I think it’s better, I think it’s excellent.
Some people talk about the price of it. They say it’s not cheap. What is cheap and what’s expensive has to do with so many parameters, it’s a relative notion. In a word it all has to do with what it gives you back. I find the price fine.
Now, the new edition of iA Writer supports Greek. As a Greek I do welcome it. However, I need to mention that not all Greek glyphs are perfect, there’s room for progress. Kerning also needs some work. You see, dear iA Writer, you spoiled us. The typography part of you is perfect and you made us seek for perfection everywhere inside you.
If there’s one extra I’d like to ask from the app, this would have to do with the wise Markdown language: while it supports it very well, I need the “Select all and copy Markdown” function. It’s hardly a feature, it’s a hurdle less.
Last but not least, I got to say that I was a happy beta tester of iA Writer, Lion edition. So I had the opportunity to contact the nice people of Information Architects. This is what they are: nice. And polite. And down to earth. Not to mention their expertise and they way they treat customers.
All in all iA Writer is the guy you can trust if you want to write things on a computer. It’s highly recommended. And of course, this piece is written in there.
Typography, hyphens and CSS3
At last! Hyphens are here. It’s a small step for the CSS3 specification and a huge step for typography.
As the blog of Fontdeck tells us, Safari 5 and Firefox 6 already support hyphens. And it’s quite simple:
p {
-webkit-hyphens: auto;
-moz-hyphens: auto;
hyphens: auto;
}
Until now the best solution was hyphenator.js, which brings Javascript to the game. A JavaScript approach for such issues is not a priority as long as it concerns me. Now, with CSS3, we can reach a more delightful destination. Actually, I enabled hyphens in this website and it looks cool.
Illiterate people still aim to justify text. Which is not good of course because full justification forces words to reach the end of a line. This way words change their inner distance and the so called “rivers” begin to emerge and make text hard to read.
CSS3 and hyphens is a painkiller. Yay!