“A collection of David Berlow’s prolific typographic work as co-founder of Font Bureau is showcased in this impressive booklet, a celebration of him receiving the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SoTA) Typography Award in 2007. Specimen pages show styles of each family for easy comparison of weight, width, copyfit and aesthetic.”

From Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat?

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Typography, type

Via instantshift.com

Pulling the trigger just got easier. Now anyone can have a beautifully designed, standards-compliant WordPress site. The 60-plus recently created free WordPress themes (AKA template collections) listed by InstantShift’s Daniel Adams are categorized by function and style: “Clean and Minimal,” “Artistic and Fancy,” “Magazine Style,” “Portfolio Style,” “News and Social Media Style,” “Showcase and Galleries Style,” “E-Comerce and Shopping Cart Style,” “Domain Parking/Coming Soon Style,” and “Other.” Something for everyone.

Not everything here is a winner or will appeal to every taste, but there is plenty of great work to be had here. If WordPress is your CMS (it’s mine), even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.

Posted via the web from Does This Zeldman Make My Posterous Look Fat?

Filed under: Design, Themes and Templates, Tools, Typography, Web Design, wordpress

In Behance Gallery: Find the latest FontFont Releases at the FontShop (50 and 51) or download the 64-page FIFTY|1 Release Magazine.

Filed under: Fonts, Typography

If the geek on your list loves playing The Rather Difficult Font Game by Kari Pätilä, and if that geek owns an iPhone or iPod Touch, she will adore The Font Game app, created by Kari Pätilä (game designer, web stuff), John Boardley (ilovetypography founder), and Justin Stahl (iPhone development). With 657 font samples, three levels of difficulty, and the ability to post your results to Twitter, it’s the perfect way to test or show off your type chops, or just learn.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3309

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Genius, Gifts, Typography

This is a bookmarklet made for web designers who want to rapidly check how different fonts and font styles look on their screen without editing code and refreshing pages. 

Download the amazing and oh-so-practical Soma FontFriend bookmarklet.

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Tools, Typography, Web Design, Web Standards, software, webfonts, webtype, widgets

Our classic orange avatar has turned blue to celebrate the release of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition by Jeffrey Zeldman with Ethan Marcotte. This substantial revision to the foundational web standards text will be in bookstores across the U.S. on October 19, 2009, with international stores to follow. Save 37% off the list price when you buy it from Amazon.com.

• What’s new in the 3rd Edition
• Mini-site

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2730

Filed under: 3e, CSS, DOM, DWWS, Design, HTML5, Publications, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Typography, Usability, User Experience, Web Design, Web Standards, XHTML, Zeldman, books, development, javascript, webfonts

In this installment: a free tool to create EOT Lite webfonts; An Event Apart interviews CSS web comic creator; Apple is exonerated of censoring iPhone dictionary; and “a new breed of documentary photographers.”

“A New Breed of Documentary Photographers”

Curated by photographer/photo editor Geoffrey Hiller, Verve Photo presents “photos and interviews by the finest young image makers today.” Case in point: Joni Sternbach, and her amazing 8″ x 10″ Unique Tintypes of surfers.

Schiller Responds Re: Ninjawords and App Store

Daring Fireball follows up on its previous Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple, exhonerating Apple of censorship and suggesting that “Apple’s leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform.”

An Interview With the Creator of “CSSquirrel”

CSSquirrel is both a person and a web comic. Both are profoundly geeky. Picture a comic where, to understand the punch line, you have to follow the politics of the development of the HTML 5 specification or be conversant with the details of RGBa color notation, and you’ll know why we love the subject of this interview.

Ascender Corp. introduces tool to create EOT Lite fonts

In their own words:

Ascender has made a proposal for a subset of the Embedded OpenType (EOT) format with two features removed:

• MTX font compression
• URL Binding (root strings)

…In order to help type designers, foundries and font vendors create an EOT font without these two features, Ascender has developed a simple software utility called the “EOT Lite Wrap Tool.”

This GUI-based tool is compiled to run under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Features in the tool include:

• Wrap a single font or a batch of fonts
• View the EOT font header information

Ascender is offering a free license to this tool to qualified type designers, foundries and font vendors for use to create EOT versions of their own fonts.

Please review the Read Me file and EULA before requesting a copy.

Tags: webfonts, apple, censorship, ascender, EOTLite, documentary, photographers, photographs, blog, CSS, CSSquirrel, webcomics, aneventapart, interviews

Filed under: An Event Apart, CSS, Fonts, Interviews, Typography, Web Design, creativity, photography, webfonts

Comments off.

Over the weekend, as thoughtful designers gathered at Typecon 2009 (“a letterfest of talks, workshops, tours, exhibitions, and special events created for type lovers at every level”), the subject of web fonts was in the air and on the digital airwaves. Worthwhile reading on web fonts and our other recent obsessions includes:

Jeffrey Zeldman Questions The “EOT Lite” Web Font Format

Responding to a question I raised here in comments on Web Fonts Now, for Real, Richard Fink explains the thinking behind Ascender Corp.’s EOT Lite proposal . The name “EOT Lite” suggests that DRM is still very much part of the equation. But, as Fink explains it, it’s actually not.

EOT Lite removes the two chief objections to EOT:

• it bound the EOT file, through rootstrings, to the domain name;
• it contained MTX compression under patent by Monotype Imaging, licensed by Microsoft for this use.

Essentially, then, an “EOT Lite file is nothing more than a TTF file with a different file extension” (and an unfortunate but understandable name).

A brief, compelling read for a published spec that might be the key to real fonts on the web.

Web Fonts—Where Are We?”

@ilovetypography tackles the question we’ve been pondering. After setting out what web designers want versus what type designers and foundries want, the author summarizes various new and old proposals (“I once heard EOT described as ‘DRM icing on an OpenType cake.’”) including Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland’s .webfont, which is gathering massive support among type foundries, and David Berlow’s permissions table, announced here last week.

Where does all of this net out? For @ilovetypography, “While we’re waiting on .webfont et al., there’s Typekit.”

(We announced Typekit here on the day it debuted. Our friend Jeff Veen’s company Small Batch, Inc. is behind Typekit, and Jason Santa Maria consults on the service. Jeff and Jason are among the smartest and most forward thinking designers on the web—the history of Jeff’s achievements would fill more than one book. We’ve tested Typekit, love its simple interface, and agree that it provides a legal and technical solution while we wait for foundries to standardize on one of the proposals that’s now out there. Typekit will be better when more foundries sign on; if foundries don’t agree to a standard soon, Typekit may even be the ultimate solution, assuming the big foundries come on board. If the big foundries demur, it’s unclear whether that will spell the doom of Typekit or of the big foundries.)

The Power of HTML 5 and CSS 3

Applauding HTML 5’s introduction of semantic page layout elements (“Goodbye div soup, hello semantic markup”), author Jeff Starr shows how HTML 5 facilitates cleaner, simpler markup, and explains how CSS can target HTML 5 elements that lack classes and IDs. The piece ends with a free, downloadable goodie for WordPress users. (The writer is the author of the forthcoming Digging into WordPress.)

Surfin’ Safari turns up new 3-D HTML5 tricks that give Flash a run for its money

Just like it says.

Read more

• Web Fonts Now, for Real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau publishes a proposal for a permissions table enabling real fonts to be used on the web without binding or other DRM. — 16 July 2009
• Web Fonts Now (How We’re Doing With That): Everything you ever wanted to know about real fonts on the web, including commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding; which browsers already support @font-face; what IE supports instead; Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS, on @font-face at A List Apart; the Berlow interview at A List Apart; @font-face vs. EOT; Cufón; SIFR; Cufón combined with @font-face; Adobe, web fonts, and EOT; and Typekit, a new web service offering a web-only font linking license on a hosted platform; — 23 May 2009
• HTML 5 is a mess. Now what? A few days ago on this site, John Allsopp argued passionately that HTML 5 is a mess. In response to HTML 5 activity leader Ian Hickson’s comment here that, “We don’t need to predict the future. When the future comes, we can just fix HTML again,” Allsopp said “This is the only shot for a generation” to get the next version of markup right. Now Bruce Lawson explains just why HTML 5 is “several different kind of messes.” Given all that, what should web designers and developers do about it? — 16 July 2009
• Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
• In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
• XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

Tags: @font-face, berlow, davidberlow, CSS, permissionstable, fontbureau, webfonts, webtypography, realtypeontheweb, HTML5, HTML4, HTML, W3C, WHATWG, markup, webstandards, typography

Filed under: Advocacy, Applications, Blogs and Blogging, Browsers, CSS, Code, Compatibility, Design, Fonts, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Tools, Typography, W3C, Web Design, Web Standards, art direction, business, conferences, content, creativity, development, industry, software, spec, stealing, style, webfonts, webtype, wordpress

David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard.

My April 21, 2009 A List Apart interview with Berlow explains how a permissions table would enable type designers to support @font-face without DRM or intermediary hosted licensing. A press release provides more detail:

Future web users will not want their browsers clogging the workings of their Operating Systems with fonts, or the browsers’ presenting the users with web content that the user cannot read. In addition, web users do not want imprecisely or un-aesthetically presented content where a simple type-bearing graphic would suffice. Lastly, users do not want fonts to be able to give fraudulent users the unique corporate appearance of a genuine company.

So far, the browsers allowing use of the @Font-face font linking are installing and removing fonts in an invisible way, but future browsers may need to more intelligently manage web fonts for users as more sites employ them. Here, the proposed table can help by containing the links from which the fonts came, and determining their cacheability based on the user’s browsing history. More importantly, the recommendations section of the proposed table could allow a browser to offer reconcileablilty of any font treatment in conflict with a user’s ‘preferenced’ desires in areas such as sizing of type, presentation of line length and potentially dangerous type treatments such as rapid text blinking.

The Permissions Table proposal will be announced tomorrow on newsgroups and forums frequented by type designers.

Read more

• Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
• Web Fonts Now (How We’re Doing With That): Everything you ever wanted to know about real fonts on the web, including commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding; which browsers already support @font-face; what IE supports instead; Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS, on @font-face at A List Apart; the Berlow interview at A List Apart; @font-face vs. EOT; Cufón; SIFR; Cufón combined with @font-face; Adobe, web fonts, and EOT; and Typekit, a new web service offering a web-only font linking license on a hosted platform; — 23 May 2009

Tags: @font-face, berlow, davidberlow, CSS, permissionstable, fontbureau, webfonts, webtypography, realtypeontheweb

Filed under: Browsers, CSS, Design, Fonts, Real type on the web, Standards, Typography, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, spec, webfonts, webtype

Download beautiful, free, type-themed & type-inspired iPhone and desktop wallpapers. Or create your own: submissions are welcomed. Visit iphone & desktop wallpapers for font freaks & typenuts.

Tags: design, typography, desktops, wallpapers, iphone

Filed under: Design, Desktops, Typography