Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report » Typography

The Web Comes of Age – DIBI Keynote Address by Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:21:50 +0000

Jeffrey Zeldman – The Medium Comes of Age from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

Advanced web design links

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:19:29 +0000

The Heads-Up Grid is an overlay grid for use during in-browser website development, built with HTML + CSS + JavaScript. http://t.co/EcgTkcD #
Golden Grid System – a folding grid for responsive design. h/t @malarkey http://j.mp/mZnVJi #
Nice responsive redesign! Well done, Meltmedia! http://t.co/tQQGW8J #
RT @jasonsantamaria: I’m writing a book about typography for @abookapart! Lucky number 7: http://t.co/7CkSz0l #
I love how everything Apple does, even slipping on a banana peel, is perceived as strategic. #
Paul draws a napkin map of London. http://t.co/p4co2ZM #

Okay, that last one isn’t a web design link and the Apple comment could go either way, but that’s how I roll. Follow me on Twitter for more snarkeractive funucation!

An Event Apart Seattle 2011

Jeffrey Zeldman — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:21:37 +0000

I’m enjoying An Event Apart Seattle 2011 and you’re not. Despair not, help is available:

For real-time Twitter aggragation, watch afeedapart.com.
Enjoy AEA Seattle photos in our Flickr group.
Watch Luke Wroblewski dance.
Watch An Event Apart dance for Luke Wroblewski.
Nod along to the interstitial audio playlist.

Franklin Goes Dutch (Fonts In Use)

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:12:22 +0000

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

Big Web Show Episode 34: Craig Mod on the Form of the Book

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:49:58 +0000

CRAIG MOD is our guest today January 13, 2011 in Episode No. 34 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and recorded at 12:00 PM Eastern (new time!) before a live internet audience.

Mod (craigmod.com, @craigmod) is a writer, designer, publisher, and developer concerned with the future of publishing and storytelling. Based in Tokyo for a decade, he is co-author and designer of Art Space Tokyo, an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world. Since October 2010 Craig has been working in the California Bay Area helping sculpt the future of digital publishing with Flipboard.

Craig speaks frequently on the future of books, publishing, and digital content design. In this week’s A List Apart he presents the initial release of Bibliotype, an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading released under the MIT License.

The Big Web Show records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern (new time).

Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

2010: The Year in Web Standards

Jeffrey Zeldman — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:02:55 +0000

WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.

It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.

CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.

Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.

Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, ~~open-source~~ liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.

Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.

Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.

Zeldman.com: The Year in Review

A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:

iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010: Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.
An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010: while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.
Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010: The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.
Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010: Like it says.
My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010: Like it says.
You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010: Like it says.
Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010: Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.

Outside Reading

A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:

The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine: 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 new web?
Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe: When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.

Happy New Year, all!

Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

Jeffrey Zeldman — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:20:55 +0000

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

Web type news: iPhone and iPad now support TrueType font embedding. This is huge.

Jeffrey Zeldman — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:06:48 +0000

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:

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

Weirdest Type Design Ever?

Jeffrey Zeldman — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:00:26 +0000

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.

Designer Flow Chart Picks Typefaces For Your Projects

Jeffrey Zeldman — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:53:25 +0000

Tired of staring at your font collection, wondering what a trained graphic designer would do with all those typefaces? Unsure whether Times or Miller is the more appropriate choice for that vaguely left-leaning newspaper you have to design? Want to make sure that info-graphic you’re designing looks hot? Then, friend, you need So You Need a Typeface, a large, hot-looking info-graphic suitable for printing and framing (or at least taping to the wall of your cubicle).

From the good folks at Inspiration Lab.

Episode 20: Designing Web Applications, Managing Teams, and Creating Readability

Jeffrey Zeldman — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:04:19 +0000

Rich Ziade, creator of the popular reading tool Readability, guests on ~~Thursday’s~~ today’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped before a live internet audience.

Richard Ziade is the founding partner of Arc90, a consulting firm, product shop, and idea incubator based in New York City. Arc90 has a reputation as one of the best web application design shops around. Alas, nearly all their web application design work is for private corporate clients. Thus most of us don’t get a chance to see and learn from Arc90′s work. Fortunately we can get a taste of what they’re about by visiting the Arc90 Lab, where the company shares ideas, tools, and the occasional experiment in web technology.

During ~~Thursday’s~~ Friday’s taping of The Big Web Show, we will probe Rich (if you’ll excuse the disgusting imagery) to find out where his ideas come from, how Arc90 manages the balance between product development and client services, and how to build a reputation when your client services agreements prevent you from having a public portfolio. I will also try to force Rich to tell our listeners if he has any awesome future plans for Readability.

Prior to Arc90, Richard worked in various roles crossing disciplines in design, technology and product management. Rich shares his occasional thought on design and technology at his blog: www.basement.org.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience ~~every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET~~ today at 2:00 pm! on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

I guest-edit .net magazine

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:16:56 +0000

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!

Minneapolis Remembered

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:39:05 +0000

The show’s over but the photos linger on. An Event Apart Minneapolis was two days of nonstop brilliance and inspiration. In an environment more than one attendee likened to a “TED of web design,” a dozen of the most exciting speakers and visionaries in our industry explained why this moment in web design is like no other.

If you were there, relive the memories; if you couldn’t attend, steal a glance at some of what you missed: An Event Apart Minneapolis: the photo pool at Flickr.

Next up: An Event Apart DC and San Diego. These shows will not be streamed, simulcast, or repackaged in DVD format. To experience them, you must attend. Tickets are first-come, first-served, and every show this year has sold out. Forewarned is forearmed; we’d love to turn you on.

Photo: Jared Mehle.

Type@Cooper

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:22:04 +0000

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.

Fink on Web Fonts

Jeffrey Zeldman — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:58:25 +0000

In Issue 307 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

Web Fonts at the Crossing

by Richard Fink

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps up with a how-to on making web fonts work today.

A List Apart: Web Fonts at the Crossing

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart