Freight family bows
Joshua Darden’s Freight Family of typefaces is now available:
The Freight family includes a Text series for extended reading in periodicals and data-intensive documents, a Sans series for text, display and wayfinding, and a slab-seriffed Micro series for inclement text conditions on screen and in print. Each series features an extensive character set, comprising roman, italic, small caps, italic small caps, and old style and tabular figures, in five precisely tuned weights.
We were lucky enough to beta test Freight when creator Joshua Darden first developed the family. Darden is detail-obsessed; quality and aesthetics are high in every branch of the new family.
The slab serifs are tasty and extremely screen-friendly, even at small sizes: Egyptians that stay crispy in milk. We’ve used them for navigation in an upcoming site. They are ideally suited to small-screen design, where a Clarendon-like face is desired.
The Sans and Text families are elegant and well balanced. Besides their obvious use in screen-based graphic design, they make interesting default web browsing fonts: try them in place of Times, Verdana, and Georgia.
View or buy Joshua Darden’s Freight from GarageFonts.
Is that a baton in your pocket?
Several netizens have tried to pass me the musical baton, but young Anakin asked first; it is at his command that I fulfill my destiny:
- Total volume of music files on my computer:
- 8.75 GB (iTunes; does not count music I wrote and produced)
- Last CD I bought was...
- Frank Black: Frank Black. (Get it from Amazon or
iTunes.)
- The inversely eponymous solo debut of the Pixies’ Black Francis, Frank Black ranks with such all-time rock greats as Armed Forces, London Calling, and Let it Bleed. Musical, lyrical, and performance genius. Yes, you heard me. Bought to replace an earlier copy that went missing.
- Song playing right now:
- None. I can’t write and listen to music at the same time. A lot of people can, but a lot of writing sucks.
- Five songs I listen to a lot these days:
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- “Girl in America,” by Blinker the Star
- “Naughty Hula Eyes,” by Andy Iona & His Islanders
- “Oh!,” by Sleater-Kinney
- “She’s Got Soul,” by Nick Lowe
- “He Needs Me,” from Punch Drunk Love by way of Popeye
- And the baton moves to...
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- Capgemini redesign
- Capgemini is a worldwide consultancy that improves process and reduces cost by treating its clients as collaborative partners. Working with Stopdesign, Happy Cog not only redesigned but actually reconceived Capgemini’s site to reflect the company’s commitment to collaborative partnership.
- ALA 199: More about Custom DTDs
- In Issue 199 of A List Apart, for People Who Make Websites, the W3C Quality Assurance Team say not so fast to the notion of crafting a custom DTD for the sole purpose of validating pages that contain non-standard elements. Killjoys. (Kidding aside, A List Apart is pleased to have key team members of the World Wide Web Consortium writing for us.)
- Talk, talk, talk
- Now that Happy Cog’s and A List Apart’s latest announcements are out of the way, let us note a new feature of zeldman.com: namely, MP3 versions of each day’s Report, thanks to our new pals at Talkr.com (“letting blogs speak for themselves”).
- Although the fledgling service already works well, zeldman.com presents special challenges due to its crusty hand-coded nature. In short, you may run into a bug or two. No need to tell us; just try again later, and consider yourself a hardcore early adopting daredevil among geeks.
Apple listens
Refer to Thursday’s sub-post (No Tiger page at Apple.com) noting how Apple failed to anticipate the contingency that its Tiger-happy fans might type apple.com/tiger into their browser address bars.
That was Thursday, this is now. Now go to apple.com/tiger/ and watch it redirect appropriately to apple.com/macosx/.
That’s what I’m talking ’bout.
- File under: user science
- Tags: contingency design, usability
Stronger than dirt
Old-school zeldman.com banner ads from the 1990s are once again available for your viewing and downloading pleasure.
- AJAX: Stronger Than Dirt
- This ad jingle from the 1960s takes on new relevance now that a certain type of standards-based construction has been given a catchy name. Zipped AAC file, 544KB, requires iTunes.
- Web Essentials 05
- Back. Bigger. Better.
- No Tiger page at Apple.com
- www.apple.com/tiger/ = 404 not found. Seems odd not to have covered this contingency.
- Bearskinrug One-Offs
- Over 100 visual gags by illustrator Kevin Cornell of Bearkskinrug.
- xScope upgrade
- “xScope is a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts.” We use it every day.
- 10 questions for Joe Clark
- Brilliant. Relevant. Read it.
- 10 questions for Jason Santa Maria
- Brilliant. Relevant. Read it.
- Baby loves it
- Our 7+-month-old baby daughter adores the Junior Senior “Move Your Feet” video. So will you. For best results on Mac, download Quicktime 7 (free) and upgrade to Pro. (There are many reasons to upgrade to Pro, but this should suffice: very high-quality full-screen presentations even from crummy source materials. No idea how Apple does it.)
- Playlist: Downloads
- Free and legal audio downloads. We liked Sleater-Kinney (like a punkier B-52s), Caffeinated Senor, Nick Lowe’s cover of “Poor Side of Town,” “Oh My God” by Kaiser Chiefs, and lots more. Really a nice selection. And free. And legal.
- Talkr debuts
- New service converts text-based blogs to audio podcasts.
- Philly Web Design Score Card
- Philadelphia design agency Pixelworthy decided to see how their competitors stacked up in terms of standards compliance. Dishearteningly, they found that almost none of their competitors seemed to know or care about “clean” HTML or CSS. You would probably get the same results in New York, Rome, or Beaver Valley.
- Tiger Beat
- Robot Johnny installs Tiger, opens its built-in dictionary, and discovers a definition of blog so ludicrously narrow it almost seems like it was intended to provoke a blogospheric storm.
- Today’s front pages
- 385 newspaper front pages from 41 countries; updated daily. Swiped from Veer.
- Happy Cog: Strategic Partner: Eric Meyer
- Did you know? Now you do.
Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II
In “Tag Clouds are the New Mullets” (Daily Report, 19 April 2005), I claimed that the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati was about to cross a permanent shame threshold because of overuse. My comment suggested that the only sin of tag clouds was popularity. But the problems with tag clouds run deeper.
In the 1960s, Steve Reich created a new kind of music by playing identical audio tapes on two players and letting them slowly drift out of synch. Ten years later, Brian Eno generated much ambient music by putting tape loops to a similar use. Eno, an accomplished pop music composer, said at the time that he had become more interested in process than product. Eno didn’t compose Discreet Music, the technology did (or so he claimed). This once avante-garde reliance on process works better as art than as architecture.
We who make websites must strike a fine balance between guiding our users and allowing them to lead us. We listen but we also synthesize and invent. We conduct user research but we interpret the results. We ask what users want but we decide what they are really telling us — and we, not they, determine how best to fulfill the needs they didn’t necessarily realize they were articulating.
Tag clouds remove the guidance and artistry from our side of the equation, offloading all the work to our users. What’s popular? What’s important? Users decide. This might be okay if the process did not create a false intellectual equivalence between high- and low-level topics, and if it did not skew toward popularity at the expense of findability.
The idea behind tag clouds is that users know best. Their actions determine how other users navigate. Their choices leave a trail. Typically, though not always, the “important” topics get big while those considered less important (which in this case only means less popular) get small. Once they get small enough, they disappear.
In Flickr and Technorati, users create their own tags (“design,” “cats,” “California”). When enough people have used the same tag, it begins to show up in the cloud. Once a lot of people have used it, it becomes a visually dominant element, encouraging others to click it — and subtly discouraging them from creating their own tags.
As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on.
Instead of a hierarchy based on user-centered classification systems, the tag cloud “hierarchy” is based on raw usage. If several citizens of Detroit view a collection of photos tagged Eight Mile, upload their own photos of that street, and tag their photos Eight Mile, then Eight Mile becomes an important — and visible — category. If no one visits what would ordinarily be a “master” topic page such as Cities or United States, then those master categories shrink in size until they are invisible.
The intellectual problem is that tag clouds create a data world where subtopics are detached from their parents; where the very notion of parent/child relations no longer exists. The counter-argument is, who cares? If everyone digs Eight Mile, let’s make Eight Mile easy to find. Instead of relying on humans to mine the data every three months and have long tedious arguments about how to update the navigation, let’s allow software to do it in real time, based on actual user behavior. Let the process create the music. There is merit to this view, especially on the community sites from which it sprang. (There is no merit to it on single-author sites, where one person creates all the content and all the tags. If you don’t have a clear purpose for your site, who does?)
The less brainy and more pressing problem is that with tag clouds, topics either gain immediate, widespread traction with the public, or they disappear from the cloud. Once they disappear, it is as if they no longer exist. Few users will ever find them. Network effects being exponential, what is immediately mildly popular quickly becomes artificially very popular, while what has yet to become popular never will be.
In an ordinary IA structure, if a photo site contains pictures of Istanbul’s Taksim area, a user can find those pictures by clicking through a taxonomy based on the way folks look for such stuff (Turkey: Istanbul: Taksim). What are the odds of finding Taksim in a tag cloud? Unless the site is devoted to Istanbul nightlife, it’s unlikely that any user will ever find those photos, because they will not be popular enough to show up in the cloud. If the site’s goal is to let only the most popular stuff float to the top, then tag clouds work like James Brown. But if its goal is to offer a better way of letting users find any content they desire, then tag clouds are as wrong as the Patriot Act.
The same problem plagues any web content mining service powered by popularity. Popularity sometimes promotes quality but it is often a finder of mindlessness: extreme leftist or rightist rants, passed-out co-ed photos, embarrassing videos of people who can’t dance trying to dance and people who can’t sing trying to sing.
Every blogger knows of a half dozen services like Blogdex or Daypop that list “hot” posts in the selective ring of small publications some of us inaccurately choose to call “the blogosphere.” A post becomes hot when two people with somewhat visible blogs link to it. Once it appears in Blogdex or the Daypop Top 40, a hundred more bloggers will link to it, either because it interests them or just to signify their membership in the tribe.
Thanks to the exponential nature of such linkage, our lucky post soon has 500 links. Some people link to it without even reading or looking at it, simply because a trustworthy blogger like Kottke linked to it first. Less fortunate articles and discussions wither and die, unnoticed.
Tag clouds harness all that mindless accidental randomness and make it the driving engine for navigating deep, ever-expanding content troves. Older ways, based on library science, undoubtedly suffer from the disadvantage of not being new. But they help people find what they need. And that is what navigation should do. (Discuss.)
Destination moon
- Huh?
- Huhcorp (“We do stuff™”) is the world’s most dynamic e-business marketing, design and consulting agency. They have a meeting room with a big, round, expensive table. They offer revolutionary, cross-market convergent e-savvy solutions.
- Searchscapes Manhattan
- I only link to Shockwave-based web presentations when they are special. This is a link to Searchscapes Manhattan. Enough said.
- CandyBar 2.5
- Panic and Iconfactory’s CandyBar 2.5 update supports Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. As in previous versions, this essential app lets you replace OS X’s unsightly, depressingly photorealistic icons with sexy pixels of your choosing.
Trick out your Trashcan. Decorate your Drives. Mix up Mail. CandyBar 2 lets you change the Mac OS X icons you usually can’t!
- CandyBar 2.5 is a free upgrade for registered CandyBar users.
- This week in The New Yorker
- In Green Monster, architecture critic Paul Goldberger takes on Charles Gwathmey’s new luxury apartment building in NYC’s Astor Place, explaining how “high-gloss modernism, preferably attached to the signature of a famous architect and dropped into an old industrial streetscape, became the hottest thing in Manhattan apartment architecture since Emery Roth invented the foyer” — and why Gwathmey’s new building fails where Richard Meier’s meat district towers succeed.
- Goldberger is the author of The City Observed: New York, a 1979 masterpiece that remains the best guide to Manhattan and its architecture of any ever written by anyone. He is also the author of Gwathmey Siegel Houses, and was for many years architecture critic of The New York Times.
- Pix in stock 1
- As new as a baby duckling, The Art Bureau is a royalty-free stock photo house for creative professionals with a difference:
This site is designed with Web standards.
- During its launch-time promotion, the fledgling service is offering a “buy four, get one free” deal.
- Pix in stock 2
- The newly launched Photos to Go Unlimited is an extremely low-cost photo subscription service. Instead of paying per image, as you would with most royalty-free services, you subscribe to the service for six months at a cost of US $99. In turn, you get access to over 55,000 royalty-free stock photos. And quality is good. Not Veer good, of course, but plenty good enough for many small business and design project needs.
Fantasticus vs. the Collossalers
- Solipsistic
- Remember when visiting sites was like discovering that a magical world lay hidden behind the false wall of your closet? When the very word “web” carried a whiff of the underground? And sites were strangely beautiful, all hidden corners and surprises?
- Solipsistic will bring back that feeling, or introduce you to it.
- There is no themeline. No About page. No profile. No blogroll. Nothing to appease your curiosity or ease your angst.
- Secret, haunted, and abandoned — like a long-shuttered rag and bone shop — the site offers music, pictures, moving pictures, and diary entries that seem to have been written by Kafka’s grandfather after listening to Singles Going Steady.
- Part of a family of cryptic sisters, Solipsistic is powered by Luma, standards-friendly blogging software you are apparently encouraged to use. Beautiful, deep, and archly knowing, Solipsistic will reward your time.
- Parental Advisory
- For your MP3 listening pleasure, ni9e.com offers only the explicit parts of Dopeman and other NWA classics:
This is the entire N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton album edited down into just the “explicit” content. ... Support the arts and enjoy curse words.
- For example, Dopeman is 19 seconds of only foul language.
- “Classic 6”
- In The New York Public Library Digital Gallery: “Classic 6:” New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s
More than 1,300 digital images depict elevation views and floor plans for middle and upper class apartment buildings from New York City's pre-World War I residential building boom.
Linkos. The freshmaker.
- “Dogs Playing Poker” sells for $590,400
Although his name is not commonly remembered today, Coolidge’s images seem permanently seared into the American public conscience. They are among our most important and endearing images of American popular culture and stand beside the icons of other illustrators such as Rockwell, Flagg and Wyeth.
- Gruber deconstructs Adobemac PR spiel
- Gruber takes the piss out of a PR flack’s spin and a page out of Dean Allen, past master of deconstructive jocularity.
- How to Include Web Standards in an RFP
- Incorporating web standards in your company’s functional specs.
- Five simple steps to better typography
- First of five.
- PostSecret
- Project d’art.
Tag clouds are the new mullets
Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply. Damned clouds are everywhere.
- Kalsey might have been the first blogger to make the meme his own. (At any rate, he was the first blogger to wonder aloud if he was the first blogger using tag clouds.)
- Playground Blues, a standout in last year’s May 1st Reboot competition, made tag clouds a centerpiece of its 2005 redesign.
- Nicholasjon was an early adopter: in January 2005, tag clouds formed the focus of his blog’s fourth design. A scant three months later (16 April 2005), his blog’s fifth design runs from the clouds — a sign that the tag clouds train has left Rock City, heading for Assville. (See Nicholasjon’s 7 January post for an adoration of tag clouds and tips on how to let various free tools generate them for you.)
It’s not just blogs that are using weighted tag clouds. Businesses are shoveling them into interface makeovers, with predictably mixed success. Thus Lulu, a company that helps people publish their own books, CDs, and other products, offers a half-hearted tag cloud to help customers browse categories.
It is of course wrong to compare weighted tag clouds to mullets, mood rings, and similar instances of mindless pop-cultural detritus. Tag clouds are not dumb. Their smartness is why so many have rushed to use them. But ubiquity and repetition quickly turn sweets to ashes. Kopy Kats Kill Klouds?
The big roundup
- The Web: A Work in Progress
- Q. How many web pages have gone live with placeholder text?
- A. Loads, as Jim Heid discovers in a smart, funny piece that will embarrass more than a few web pros. (Sample.)
- Reboots are Made for Walking
- Each year on 1 May hundreds of sites redesign for the sake of creative refreshment and to express community solidarity. May 1st Reboot is the trigger for these transformations, and the event site is once again soliciting entries. (The fifth anniversary Reboot site’s nifty, Susan Kare-like icons are by Simona; Paul did the rest.)
- I am once again among the judges, and I once again urge content-oriented, standards-based sites to join the many Flash sites competing for attention and awards. But this year I do not have to my urging alone. There are already quite standards-based entries thanks to B. Adam Howell’s evangelism. See CSS Reboot for details on how to submit your site.
- Style Master CSS editor unveils educational pricing
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Students, teachers and faculty members can get a 50% discount on Style Master, Westciv’s professional CSS editor “for hand coders and designers,” and an equal discount on the company’s Platinum course bundle, which teaches...
- HTML & XHTML for CSS
- CSS Level 1
- CSS Level 2
- Color & Graphics
- The Complete CSS Guide
Westciv are not newcomers to the cause of web standards; their tools and their teaching are as good as it gets.
- Lines of Desire
- “Desire lines are the paths people make when they cut across a grassy area instead of following the prescribed walkway.” Rather than discourage such activity, landscape architects study it, and alter their architecture accordingly. The analogy to what web designers do is obvious, but it goes deeper. Tanya Rabourn’s short, pithy blog post will keep you thinking for days.
- Apple Should Hire John Gruber
- I’m linking to John Gruber’s recent post, “Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers,” because it is witty, incisive, well-reasoned, and fair, and because you might enjoy reading it. But I could have linked to almost anything John Gruber has written at Daring Fireball in the past couple of years to make the point indicated by this entry’s title.
- A while back, Microsoft was smart enough to recognize that Robert Scoble’s chronic blogging could be used to put a human face on their huge, all-powerful software company. Scoble is the best thing to happen to Microsoft since they killed Clippy.
- Gruber does not write as fast or as much as Scoble — nobody does — but what’s there is cherce. Gruber can make kernel panics sound good. Most important of all (because it underlines his credibility as an Apple spokescritic) Gruber consistently criticizes Apple’s few shortcomings, such as the inconsistencies and contradictions that still plague the OS X Finder.
- Could Gruber be as effective on Apple’s payroll as he is off it? Apple should hire him and find out.
- (Unofficial) Apple blog moves and redesigns
- Speaking of Apple and blogs, congrats to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which has a new URL and an improved new design. (See the old design for comparison.)
- Acid 2: Putting Browser Makers on Notice
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WaSP Drew McLellan’s summary of recent Web Standards Project CSS activity is too good not to quote:
Those with long memories will remember ABBA. The rest of us may just about recall the good work of the CSS Samurai when they launched the Acid Test back in 1997 and challenged makers of browsers world-over to improve their support for CSS 1. Well, dammit, we’re at it again. ... Acid2 is a brand new test designed to push the limits of HTML, CSS, and PNG support in browsers and authoring tools. ... Early feedback is coming in from the likes of Safari developer Dave Hyatt over at Apple. [Hyatt has already used Acid2 to isolate and fix two CSS bugs in Safari.]
