From the floor of An Event Apart Seattle 2011:

“Mobile is huge. The iPhone, iPad, and Android are huge. On the one hand, they are standards-facing, because they all support HTML5 and CSS3, so you can create great mobile experiences using web standards. You can create apps using web standards. On the other hand, there is also the temptation to go a proprietary route. In a strange way, although the browsers are much more standards compliant, it seems like we are redoing the browser war. Only now, it’s not the browser wars, it’s platform wars.”

Video interview, plus transcript: Interview with Jeffrey Zeldman on the State of Web Design. Thank you, Michael Slater.

Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, An Event Apart, better-know-a-speaker, Code, Community, conferences, content strategy, Design, Designers, DWWS, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, industry, Interviews, ipad, iphone, IXD, Standards, State of the Web, The Essentials, The Profession, type, Typekit, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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HEY, YOU WITH THE STARS in your eyes. Yes, you, the all too necessary SXSW Interactive attendee. Got questions about the present and future of web design and publishing for me or the illustrious panelists on Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel at SXSW Interactive 2011? You do? Bravo! Post them on Twitter using hashtag #jzsxsw and we’ll answer the good ones at 5:00 PM in Big Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center.

Topics include platform wars (native, web, and hybrid, or welcome back to 1999), web fonts, mobile is the new widescreen, how to succeed in the new publishing, responsive design, HTML5, Flash, East Coast West Coast beefs, whatever happened to…?, and many, many more.

Comments are off here so you’ll post your questions on Twitter.

The panel will be live sketched and live recorded for later partial or full broadcast via sxsw.com. In-person attendees, arrive early for best seats. Don’t eat the brown acid.

Filed under: Announcements, Appearances, Authoring, Best practices, Brands, Design, Designers, development, E-Books, editorial, events, glamorous, HTML5, industry, Interviews, Luls, Microauthoring, Microblogging, microformats, Micropublishing, Molehill, New Riders, Platforms, plugins, podcasts, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Responsive Web Design, software, Standards, State of the Web, Tempest, The Big Web Show, This never happens to Gruber, twitter, type, Typekit, Urbanism, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Websites, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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Departures: Five Milestone Font Families by Emigre

Filed under: Design, Fonts, type

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Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset carried out the graphic design for Pioneers of Change—a festival of Dutch design, fashion, and architecture which took place on New York’s Governors Island in September 2009. The design system, which included a website, printed programs, and wayfinding elements, made prominent use of Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed

Nick Sherman discusses a smart application of my favorite font, Franklin Gothic, in the virtual pages of what might be my new favorite design website, Fonts in Use.

Fonts in Use: Pioneers of Change

Filed under: Design, Fonts, type, Typography

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MANDY BROWN (@aworkinglibrary) is our guest today, Thursday December 23, 2010 in Episode No. 32 of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and recorded at 1:00 PM Eastern before a live internet audience.

Mandy is co-founder and editor for A Book Apart and a contributing editor for A List Apart for people who make websites. A veteran of the publishing industry, she spent a decade at W. W. Norton & Company, an independent and employee-owned publisher, where her work involved everything from book design to web design to writing about design. She serves as Community and Support Manager for Typekit and writes frequently on the Typekit blog.

Named “Video Podcast of the Year” in the 2010 .net Awards, The Big Web Show covers “Everything Web That Matters” and records live every Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

P.S. This is the last Big Web Show session of the year. We’ll be off next week. (Something about Christmas and New Year’s.) Thank you for watching and listening. We love you bunches!

Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, Authoring, Best practices, Big Web Show, Design, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Standards, The Big Web Show, type, Typekit, webfonts

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For nearly fifteen years, if you wanted to set a paragraph of web text in a serif typeface, the only truly readable option was Georgia. But now, in web type’s infancy, we’re starting to see some valid alternatives for the king of screen serifs. What follows is a list of serif typefaces that have been tuned—and in some cases drawn from scratch—for the screen.

Stephen Coles, December 6, 2010:
Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Tools, type, Typekit, Typography, webfonts, webkit, Websites, webtype

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TrueType font embedding has come to iPhone and iPad, Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. That is to say, Mobile Safari now supports CSS embedding of lower-bandwidth, higher-quality, more ubiquitous TrueType fonts. This is huge. Test on your device(s), then read and rejoice:

The Typekit Blog: iOS 4.2 improves support for web fonts

iOS 4.2 is also the first version of Mobile Safari to support native web fonts (in TrueType format) instead of SVG. This is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher.

Ryan N.: Confirmed: TrueType Font Support on Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2

Thanks to Matt Wiebe for mentioning the rumour that Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2 supports TrueType fonts and providing a handy link to test.

TrueType

TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes. With widely varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.

More about webfonts

If you’re coming late to the party, the following bits of required reading and listening will get you up to speed on the joys (and occasional frustrations) of “real type” on the web:

1. Bulletproof @font-face syntax, Paul Irish, 4 September, 2009
2. Web Fonts at the Crossing, Richard Fink, 8 June 2010, A List Apart
3. Big Web Show Episode 1, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype with Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit
4. Big Web Show Episode 18, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype, screen resolution, and more with Roger Black

Thanks

My thanks to David Berlow of Font Bureau for waking me from my Thanksgiving stupor and alerting me to this exciting slash overdue development.

Filed under: CSS, CSS3, Design, type, Typekit, Typography, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Websites, webtype

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Movie poster captured by Heather Shaw. There are several variations, all equally baffling. I’m hoping there’s a concept behind it—that it’s bad design to make a point.

Filed under: Design, Layout, type, Typography

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A List Apart and .net magazine have long admired each other. So when .net editor Dan Oliver did me the great honor of asking if I wished to guest edit an issue, I saluted smartly. The result is now arriving in subscriber post boxes and will soon flood Her Majesty’s newsstands.

In .net magazine Issue No. 206, on sale 17th August in UK (and next month in the US, where it goes by the name “Practical Web Design”), we examine how new standards like CSS3 and HTML5, new devices like iPhone and Droid, and maturing UX disciplines like content strategy are converging to create new opportunities for web designers and the web users we serve:

• Exult as Luke Wroblewski shows how the explosive growth of mobile lets us stop bowing to committees and refocus on features customers need.
• Marvel as Ethan Marcotte explains how fluid grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries help us create precise yet context-sensitive layouts that change to fit the device and screen on which they’re viewed.
• Delight as Kristina Halvorson tells how to achieve better design through coherent content wrangling.
• Thrill as Andy Hume shows how to sell wary clients on cutting-edge design methods never before possible.
• Geek out as Tim Van Damme shows how progressive enhancement and CSS3 make for sexy experiences in today’s most capable browsers—and damned fine experiences in those that are less web-standards-savvy.

You can also read my article, which asks the musical question:

Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a newer, more mature, more ubiquitous web?

Today’s web is about interacting with your users wherever they are, whenever they have a minute to spare. New code and new ideas for a new time are what the new issue of .net magazine captures. There has never been a better time to create websites. Enjoy!

Photo by Daniel Byrne for .net magazine. All rights reserved.

Filed under: A List Apart, An Event Apart, Announcements, Appearances, Applications, architecture, art direction, Best practices, Browsers, chrome, Code, CSS, CSS3, Damned Fine Journalism, Design, Designers, editorial, Education, engagement, glamorous, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, industry, interface, ipad, iphone, launches, Layout, photography, Press, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Responsive Web Design, Standards, State of the Web, The Big Web Show, The Essentials, The Profession, This never happens to Gruber, type, Typography, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Websites, webtype, writing, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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Starting in the fall of 2010, the Continuing Education Department of The Cooper Union, in conjunction with the Type Directors Club, will offer a Certificate Program in Typeface Design.

More information about this remarkable program is available at coopertype.org.

The gorgeous typefaces used on the Coopertype website are FB Franklin Web (Benton Sans) designed by Tobias Frere-Jones & Cyrus Highsmith, and Farnham, designed by Christian Schwartz. The site design is by Nick Sherman of Brooklyn and Font Bureau.

Filed under: Design, Education, Fonts, type, Typography

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