Interesting article on features to look for in a good UI/screen-legible typeface. Apparently it’s pretty important that there be two-story lowercase as and gs.
I’ll leave you to read his conclusions yourselves. Though I don’t necessarily agree with all of them*, I must mention that I do agree with his recommendation of PT Sans; I’ve recently become quite enamored of this humanist sans and will probably be using it in a future incarnation of this site’s template.
I’m from Chicago. So you may think I’m just being spoiled when I say this, but aside from the occasional painted lady, I find San Francisco architecture uninspiring at best.
Not so the slew of new buildings going up in and around the future UCSF Mission Bay campus. That area contains some of the most interesting examples of modern architecture I’ve seen outside of magazines. The new Madrone residences have extensive rooftop gardens, and there are innovative uses of material everywhere. Even the parking garages look cool. I’d love to see the neighborhood when the work’s all finished, but that’ll take years yet.
If you live in SF and dig architecture, the next time you have a free hour or so, do yourself a favor and walk around down there. There are far worse ways to spend your time. Oh, and be sure to check out the Chihuly in the lobby of the Nektar/Bayer building. Nice.
If you’re a geek, you’ve probably seen this already. If you’re not, here’s the deal: Internet Explorer 9 will support WOFF, the Web Open Font Format, a technology that allows embedding real fonts in websites. Microsoft commissioned a website from some of the best designers around to showcase the typographic possibilities of the web, and this is it. Simply spectacular. My favorite was Atlantis.
Loving the Miller High Life rebranding—it’s stripped out all the cruft and left the essence behind. Very nice.
Despite my traumatic memories (shudder), I love this.
Speaking of good web fonts, my new theme (troublesome thing) has lots of C-font goodness going on. Here’s what I’m using:
- Charis SIL for the heading and body text, with Calluna (using TypeKit) as a fallback.
- Calibri with Helvetica as a fallback for the buttons and date text (oh, if only CSS would allow you to use
text-transform on numerals as well as letters).
I’ve also significantly increased the base font size and obsessively adjusted the spacing for improved readability and cleanliness. The post footers have shed some unwelcome weight—Does anyone really care whether the links at the bottom are tags or categories? I didn’t think so.—and are now enjoying a more svelte, more elegant appearance. You can tell me if you feel there’s been an improvement; for my part, I’m feeling pretty good about it.
Keep this one in your back pocket.
Simply stunning. And the first in a series!
Embedding no longer works, so this is now a tumble.
of type foundry exljbris, which offers a number of high-quality, beautifully-crafted fonts for free. Designer Jos Buivenga just announced his latest release, a gorgeous serif text face called Calluna. Calluna includes ligatures, old style and lining figures in both proportional and tabular styles, superiors, anteriors, and a number of other goodies, all using OpenType wizardry to take (much of) the guesswork out of typesetting for non-professional typographers. Also make sure to check out iLT, where Buivenga wrote about his inspiration (Museo) and design process for Calluna.
