August 20, 2008
Plagiarism Today has published an interesting CCS technique to counter or at least frustrate anyone who is scraping your site. Check out the article Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft.
Jonathan Bailey of the Blog Herald has written and excellent article about some of the issues to consider when looking of a host in 10 Rules for Finding Good Domain Hosting
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz have listed their Top Ten Web Typography Sins
August 19, 2008
FontStruct is a Flash-based interface which allows you to build and construct fonts. As a tool is intuitive and fun to use.
Once you have joined the gallery allows members to share their fonts and comment on other people’s fonts. Better still however is that FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, which can be used on any Mac or Windows application.
April 2, 2008
Can you tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial?
Quoting directly from this quiz site “Once there was a typeface called Helvetica. It was extremely popular. Later came a software company called Microsoft. They “borrowed” Helvetica for their operating system and called it Arial. This inferior typeface is now on millions of desktops all over the world. Can you tell the difference between the original and the rip-off in these ten examples?”
March 28, 2008
Readable text is accessible text. A Guide to Web Typography: The Basics is an excellent article from John Boardley of I love Typography. Key design points such as contrast, size, hierarchy, and space are covered concisely but well.
October 10, 2007
Briar press is a great resource for enthusiasts of the letterpress or anyone interested in book arts. The Museum section covers the main presses and their history with 200 antique letterpresses and other print shop machines on display. If you are not a letterpress buff and get a bit bamboozled by printing terms there is a glossary and an overview of print history.
The site houses a forum and a directory of links to associations, museums and websites that relate to the topic of letterpress and/or the history of printing.
The section that will attract many people is Cuts and caps. For those non print buffs – those ornate letters that often start a chapter in old books – or the decorative graphic at the end of a chapter are referred to as cuts and caps. Originally cuts and caps were cast in metal.
Briar press is now converted a good number of these to digital files that may be downloaded and used in projects. These are not bit mapped images but vector-based postscript files which means they can be re-sized crisply. You can import these files into a program like Adobe Illustrator and tinker to your hearts content.
May 24, 2007
Designer of the Firefox logo, Jon Hicks has created a quick, useful primer on typography for the web. The pdf file is here .
John Hicks also keeps a blog which is well worth reading if you are interested in interface design.
April 2, 2007
A note about Web safe fonts: they are
Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Times New Roman, Times, serif
Courier New, Courier, mono
Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Typography resources
In case you did not read it last week don’t miss
Web Design is 95% Typography
Counterspace: is a well designed site on Typography which has a great deal of information on type. This site contains information on the history of typography, the anatomy of type and a glossary. It also has a section under the title of Hotmetal that covers on screen type faces.
ABC typography – a virtual type museum The museum is divided into four sections -classical type faces, 20th century typefaces, contemporary typefaces, and unclassified typefaces with the aim of highlighting the individual history of typefaces
All Good Things Typography features articles on the history of type, a guide to classifying typefaces, font section, on page layout and design.
Web Page Design for Designers – Typography by Joe Gillespie who has written a number of articles about web design which you can find on his site Web Page Design for Designers
Good typography is just as important on a web page as it is in any other medium. The fact that it appears on a computer screen and not on a piece of paper is immaterial, it should still be pleasing to look at and easy to read.
Planet Typography is an online newsletter about type and current font design. A section of the site contains a museum of type. Articles explain the history of the font and a little about who designed it.
Typotopo: is a collection of works and exploration loosely themed around typography explorations of type by Peter Cho
Encyclopedia of Typography and Electronic Communication Comprehensive Glossary of terms.
Glossary of Typographic Terms provided by Adobe
Important note!
The first week after the mid semester break is Review week.
March 22, 2007
Legibility and Comprehension of Onscreen Type: Comparing the Legibility and Comprehension of Type Size, Font Selection and Rendering Technology of Onscreen Type (PDF) by Scott Chandler is a doctorate dissertation which contradicts many findings of prior studies.
This study considered the relationships between type size, font selection, and type rendering technology of legibility as indicated by speed of reading and comprehension when testing was performed on a computer with a CRT. The results offer an additional view on a new, under-researched area. The finding that there are optimal sizes onscreen will be an important concept to some. Evidence that the effect of anti-alias is highly contextualized based on type family and potentially specific typefaces could have an even more far-reaching impact. Clearly the role of reading on the computer needs to be better understood and explored through future research.
March 19, 2007
French Manuscript Illumination of the Middle Ages presents French manuscripts from the Getty Museum’s collection. This includes books spanning a period of over 700 years, from the mid-800s through the early 1500s.
March 5, 2007
Sensitivity to whitespace can increase legibility, and can associate a product or website with a feeling of sophistication. Mark Boulton illustrates and discusses the advantages of Whitespace .
