Category: Typography

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Real type on the web?

A proposal for a fonts working group is under discussion at the W3C. The minutes of a small meeting held on Thursday 23 October include a condensed, corrected transcription of a discussion between Sampo Kaasila (Bitstream), Mike Champion (Microsoft), John Daggett (Mozilla), Håkon Wium Lie (Opera), Liam Quin (W3C), Bert Bos (W3C), Alex Mogilevsky (Microsoft), Josh Soref (Nokia), Vladimir Levantovsky (Monotype), Klaas Bals (Inventive Designers), and Richard Ishida (W3C).

The meeting started with a discussion of Microsoft’s EOT (Embedded OpenType) versus raw fonts. Bert Bos, style activity lead and co-creator of CSS, has beautifully summarized the relevant pros and cons discussed.

For those just catching up with the issue of real type on the web, here’s a bone-simple intro:

  1. CSS provides a mechanism for embedding real fonts on your website, and some browsers support it, but its use probably violates your licensing agreement with the type foundry, and may also cause security problems on an end-user’s computer.
  2. Microsoft’s EOT (based on the same standard CSS mechanism) works harder to avoid violating your licensing agreement, and has long worked in Internet Explorer, but is not supported in other browsers, is not foolproof vis-a-vis type foundry licensing rules, and may also cause PC security problems.

The proposed fonts working group hopes to navigate the technical and business problems of providing real fonts on the web, and in its first meeting came up with a potential compromise proposal before lunch.

Like everyone these days, the W3C is feeling a financial pinch, which means, if a real fonts working group is formed, its size and scope will necessarily be somewhat limited. That could be a good thing, since small groups work more efficiently than large groups. But a financial constraint on the number of invited experts could make for tough going where some details are concerned—and with typography, as with web technology, the details are everything.

I advise every web designer who cares about typography and web standards—that’s all of you, right?—to read the minutes of this remarkable first gathering, and to keep watching the skies.

[tags]web typography, typography, standards, webstandards, W3C, fonts, embedded, @fontface, EOT, workinggroup[/tags]

Categories
Design Typography

Postage stamps by type designers

Neville Brody, Wim Crouwel, Adrian Frutiger, Eric Gill, Erik Spiekermann, and Hermann Zapf are among the creators of postage stamps by type designers on display at Kat Ran Press.

[tags]design, typography, postagestamps[/tags]

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A List Apart Design Typography Usability User Experience UX work writing

Mental models. Yipes! Stripes!

In Issue No. 267 of A LIST APART, For People Who make Websites…

Look at it Another Way

by INDI YOUNG

Before you can solve a user’s problems, you must see them as that user sees them. Once you understand what drives people’s behavior, not only do new ideas flow freely, but the ideas that flow are appropriate and useful. Indi Young tells how to get out of your own way and hear what your users are telling you.

and…

Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case

by JESSICA ENDERS

As designers or marketers, we share a desire that our tables and forms be easy to scan, read, and use. Does the widely practiced shading of alternate rows help, hurt, or have no effect? A previous study proving inconclusive, designer and researcher Jessica Enders has tackled the conundrum again, coming up with statistically relevant data and a set of recommendations.

[tags]jessicaenders, indiyoung, mentalmodels, zebrastripe, zebrastriping, alistapart, ALA, happycog, publications[/tags]

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An Event Apart Fonts Typography

Jubilat!

Darden Studio has relaunched its website and released Jubilat, a fabulous slab serif. We’ve been beta-testing Jubilat all year; it’s my principal typeface for An Event Apart in 2008. (Last year’s principal An Event Apart typeface was Darden Studio’s Freight Sans.) New to Joshua Darden’s work? Try Birra Stout, a free font.

[tags]fonts, typography, darden, dardenfonts, joshuadarden, joshdarden, aneventapart, design, conference[/tags]

Categories
Design nytimes spec Standards Typography

Dear New York Times Mobile

Dear New York Times Mobile Edition:

While we applaud your use of typographically correct punctuation—a cause we ourselves have long advocated—we’d appreciate it even more if you would do it like professionals. Author in Unicode, the cross-platform standard.

Please stop using proprietary Windows characters in a bumbling, amateurish attempt to generate typographically correct open and close quotation marks. It doesn’t work cross-platform. Instead of nice quotation marks, the reader sees ASCII gibberish, making content harder to understand, and casting doubt on the credibility of the excellent reportage.

For less than you spent on WordPress, buy an iPhone or two, and let your editors and producers see what they are foisting on the public.

If you don’t know how to set quotation marks, we have tutorials.

If you know how, but your CMS is wrecking things, maybe it’s time for a new CMS.

[tags]nytimes, mobile, nytimesmobile, typographically, correct, typography, web, webtype, webtypography, unicode, windows, characters[/tags]

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