Web designer Joshua Lane, currently best know for doing fancy web stuff at Virb.com, has overhauled his personal site in ways that are aesthetically pleasing and visually instructive.

Like all good site redesigns, this one starts with the content. Whereas the recent zeldman.com redesign emphasizes blog posts (because I write a lot and that’s what people come here for), Lane’s redesign appropriately takes exactly the opposite approach:

There is a much smaller focus on blog posts (since I don’t write often), and a much larger focus on the things I do elsewhere (Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm etc). Individually, I don’t contribute a great deal to each of those services. But collectively, I feel like it’s a good amount of content to showcase (as seen on the home page). And something that feels like a really good representation of “me.”

Not one to ignore the power of web fonts, Lane makes judicious use of Goudy Bookletter 1911 from The League of Movable Type, an open-source type site founded by Caroline and Micah, featuring only “well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.” (Read their Manifesto here.)

The great Barry Schwartz based his Goudy Bookletter 1911 on Frederic Goudy’s Kennerley Oldstyle, a font Schwartz admires because it “fits together tightly and evenly with almost no kerning.” Lane inserts Schwartz’s open-source gem via simple, standards-compliant CSS @font-face. Because of its size, it avoids the secret shame of web fonts, looking great in Mac and Windows.

But considered type is far from the redesigned site’s only nicety. Among its additional pleasures are elegant visual balance, judicious use of an underlying horizontal grid, and controlled tension between predictability and variation, ornament and minimalism. Restraint of color palette makes photos, portfolio pieces, and other featured elements pop. And smart CSS3 coding allows the designer to play with color variations whenever he wishes: “the entire color scheme can be changed by replacing a single background color thanks to transparent pngs and rgba text and borders.”

In short, what Lane has wrought is the very model of a modern personal site: solid design that supports content, backed by strategic use of web standards.

Filed under: CSS, Code, Design, Fonts, Standards, State of the Web, User Experience, content, content strategy, creativity, style, type, webfonts, webtype

There’s a new Franklin in town. It’s TeeFranklin, designed by Tomi Haaparanta for T26. Haaparanta specializes in what we used to call grunge fonts, but you’d never know from his Franklin, which is classic and pure. In terms of available weights and styles (not to mention fanatical attention to detail), Haaparanta’s new font can’t compare to Font Bureau’s ITC Franklin, but TeeFranklin is a nice and clean, and comes in 14 weights, which may be enough. Better still, according to reader Ethan Dunham, it is licensed for @font-face embedding.

Filed under: Fonts, Web Design, Web Standards, type, webfonts, webtype

m.nicewebtype.com is a light yet essential mobile site for people who design websites, love type, and struggle to keep up with the dizzying world of web fonts. In it, Tim Brown, author of Nice Web Type, creator of Web Font Specimen (what’s that?), and latterly type manager for Typekit, curates the Design Twitterverse to share the latest insights, innovations, quips, and controversies regarding everyone’s favorite new web design fetish.

Don’t leave home without it.

Filed under: Web Design, Web Standards, Websites, links, webtype

Three, count ’em, three days of design, code, and content. That’s what we’ve got lined up for you in beautiful Seattle, Washington. Including a special one-day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3, led by Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm (pictured above, extolling the virtues of caffeine and CSS).

The complete schedule for An Event Apart Seattle 2010—including A Day Apart with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm—is now available online for your listening and dancing pleasure.

Photo: Warren Parsons.

Filed under: An Event Apart, Announcements, Appearances, CSS, HTML5, Happy Cog™, Web Design, Web Standards, webtype

My friend, the content strategist Kristina Halvorson, likes to call content “the elephant in the room” of web design. She means it’s the huge problem that no one on the web development team or client side is willing to acknowledge, face squarely, and plan for….

Without discounting the primacy of the content problem, we web design folk have now birthed ourselves a second lumbering mammoth, thanks to our interest in “real fonts on the web“ (the unfortunate name we’ve chosen for the recent practice of serving web-licensed fonts via CSS’s decade-old @font-face declaration—as if Georgia, Verdana, and Times were somehow unreal).…

Put simply, even fonts optimized for web use (which is a whole thing: ask a type designer) will not look good in every browser and OS.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
22 December, 2009
24 ways: The Advent Calendar for Web Developers

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3319

Filed under: Standards, State of the Web, Tools, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Zeldman, spec, webfonts, webtype, writing

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

Real type on the web. All the kids are doing it. But maybe we’re doing it wrong. After testing several CSS @font-face syntax variants, including one used on this site, Paul Irish says the following is clearly best:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Graublau Web';
  src: url('GraublauWeb.eot');
  src: local('Graublau Web Regular'), local('Graublau Web'),
         url('GraublauWeb.otf') format('opentype');
      }

Read more: “Bulletproof @font-face syntax” at paulirish.com.

Filed under: CSS, Design, Real type on the web, webfonts, webtype

FontShop announces that they are ready to deliver their font library as web type:

[S]tarting today, Typekit users can pick from dozens of FontFonts, including FF Meta, FF Dax, and FF Netto. Plus, the Typekit service lets you test any of those FontFonts on your page before you publish.

And tomorrow?

Typekit is just one piece of a holistic strategy for FontFonts on the web. The library should be licensable in a more traditional way too. That’s where WOFF fits in. … Soon anyone will be able to license and download for their website the same professional quality FontFont they use in desktop applications, but crafted specifically for the new medium.

Hat tip: Jason Santa Maria

This has been a belated part of Web Type Day.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3023

Filed under: Fonts, Web Design History, Web Standards, Web Type Day, webfonts, webtype

Ellen Lupton and Jeffrey Zeldman talk about web fonts, part 2. That is all.

This has been a belated part of Web Type Day.

Filed under: Design, Web Type Day, Zeldman, webfonts, webtype

Today in Print, Ellen Lupton interviews Jeffrey Zeldman (that’s me) on web typography, web standards, and more. Part one of a two-part interview.

Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She is the author of numerous books and articles on design, a frequent lecturer, and an AIGA Gold Medalist.

This has been a nutritious part of Web Type Day.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2932

Filed under: CSS, Design, Fonts, Press, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Web Type Day, better-know-a-speaker, creativity, industry, webfonts, webtype