What the haps are
It turns out that having a job means having no reason to maintain this silly blog. Greetings to those of you out there in RSS Land who haven’t cleaned out your feeds in the past year or so.
I’m easing back into some designerly thoughts. I have some ideas for the next Gig Matrix refresh that involve killing the d-pad-and-face-buttons nameplate. But before I can start on a project like that, I need to put some time into a wedding site. Hoping my client/fiancé isn’t difficult to work with.
January 23, 2012The League of Moveable Type releases League Script #1
I don’t have much use for scripty typefaces, but it’s nice to see the League hasn’t been dissolved.
October 19, 2010
An afternoon with CSS text rendering
It turns out that including text-rendering: optimizeLegibility in your CSS isn’t going to magically make all your text look professionally set. Darn. But not surprising.
I started playing around with text-rendering right after I read about it a couple weeks ago. On this site, the only noticeable effect was some tiny letter-spacing adjustments in the League Gothic headlines. All the Georgia was untouched, including obvious potential ligatures.
That holds true on this test page I made. Georgia does contain fl and fi ligatures, but optimizeLegibility doesn’t seem to make use of them. Nor does it kern problematic letter pairings (like roman T-a and italic g-h) in Georgia. But kerning pairs are tightened up in some other standard web fonts, such as Arial and Impact. And the setting doesn’t do anything — to any typeface — in my Windows XP VM’s browsers (IE8, Chrome 5.0.375.99, Firefox 3.6.6, Safari 5), which is really where type legibility needs a hand up.
Is Georgia untouched because of its hand-hinting? If so, why does Verdana, which was supposedly hinted by the same guy for the same purpose, see some benefit? I’ll admit that I’m focusing on Georgia because I like it; no other “core font” combines utility and attractiveness like it does. But optimizeLegibility’s apparent caprice is really the issue here.
I think you’ll get the most of optimizeLegibility if you pair it with good, “real” fonts. It’ll use ffi ligatures (see right) and other fancy stuff if they’re available, but Comic Sans and Trebuchet aren’t going to get that particular job done.
I’m leaving it enabled for my own sites for now, because the slight benefits it imparts don’t carry a noticeable performance hit. But those benefits are indeed slight.
July 13, 2010
Got my copy of HTML5 For Web Designers
It finally showed up this past weekend (hooray, endangered Saturday mail delivery). I’m not past the first chapter, which I read back in May on A List Apart, but everything I’ve heard about the rest of it has been positive. And it’s well-designed, of course; the size, the weight, the flex of the paper all feel right. It’s fun to flip through.
July 13, 2010Reuben Pro Deluxe '98
I don’t really mind the personal branding stuff that much. Makes it easier to keep up with the doings of your favorite Internet Smart Guys, I suppose. But it’s all a big marketing pitch, right? And I do so hate to market myself. But how can people buy what you’re selling (that is, yourself) if you don’t package it and put it on the shelf and hire one of those sign-spinning guys to hang out at a nearby intersection?
So this is web enthusiast/designer me, as opposed to grammar me or hockey me or video game me or whatever other mes might be out there. Let’s move some product.
June 25, 2010
The birth of a personal brand
I have a blog on this site now, ’cause that’s what you do. I have bloggings elsewhere, of course — Gig Matrix, Tumblr, the Twitter — but here’s where I make myself into a product that people will buy. I’ll write about HTML5 and link to Daring Fireball and argue against SEO. I’ll post pictures of the flashcards I found on the sidewalk and write about how they’re actually great design. I’ll post a Vimeo clip of sparrows hopping around on my porch in super slo-mo. I’ll get JQuery to append a class to an <li>, pack up the source, and post that.
It’s going to be so rad guys you don’t even know.
June 24, 2010