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.
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.
Today is the 5-year anniversary of the day I started blogging. Woo!
I thought about doing a retrospective, or linking to interesting posts, but I’m too lazy. I figure you can navigate around just fine all by yourself, so have at it if you so desire.
In other news, here are some cool things I saw recently:
- Typedia is a new site like Wikipedia, for type. To get started, check out this article (with pictures!) about the anatomy of a typeface. Now you, too, will be able to tell a finial from a terminal, or a bowl from a counter.
- Type Daily is an aggregator of type-related content from across the web, brought to us by iLT. Super terrific!
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.
H&FJ will be numbered among the recipients of the 2009 National Design Awards. Well, they better. Gotham was used in the Obama campaign branding.
I’d been using the same basic layout for quite a while with little modification, so I thought I’d change it up and take the opportunity to remove as much cruft as I could from the sidebar. The leaner, hungrier sidebar now only has the stuff that’s actually useful to most users (I think).
Less important browsing information like archives, categories and tags has now been moved into the expanded footer.
For those who are curious, the masthead font (and the heading and date font, if you happen to have it installed) is Sentinel (semibold italic in the former).
The color scheme was generated using the aid of Adobe’s neat-o kuler site—check out my public schemes. Note that Flash Player 10 is required.
From the latest FontShop newsletter: Alternatives to Comic Sans.
It’s the typeface that designers love to hate. Websites have been built to mock it and campaigns mounted to ban it. Unflinching, it continues to show its ungainly face on flyers, signs, and anything meant to be “fun” simply because it’s the only casual font that comes with Windows. Here are some more professional ways to have a good time.
Hallelujah, I say.
Oh, woe is me. I am seriously struggling with temptation—the newest H&FJ offering is a lovely slab serif called Sentinel, which is the first multi-weight, text-suitable, with-italics version of one of my favorite fonts, Clarendon. And what’s more, the entire family of twelve styles comes at the quite affordable price of $200 for a single license.
Typography geeks should make sure to read the fascinating history section, as well.
Another object of desire: Gotham Narrow. Gorgeous.
In other typography news, this is a bit late, but here is Typographica‘s compilation of the best typefaces of 2008.
of great stuff over at iLT these days—check out the last couple of weeks in type—but here are some items I especially enjoyed:
Neat-o.
