Tim Brown: Typography & Web Design

Notes & Bookmarks

• Get notified about new notes & bookmarks: RSS feed. More→

• Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3

  Ralf Hermann's screenshots of browser-typeset text with kerning and automatic ligatures.

  Fri, Jun 20

• @font-face survey results from Ralf Hermann

  "The new font embedding feature introduced with Safari 3.1 has already caused heated debates in the type industry. But what do web designers think about it? Do they want to use it? Will they be willing to pay for webfonts?"

  Sat, May 10

• Hypsometry. On tradition, harmony, pitch, the atonal, typography, Fibonacci, and coincidence.

  In the aforemarked OmniTI post, Tan mentions that he, "used a traditional scale," as explained here.

  Sat, May 10

• A Site for Sore Eyes: OmniTI

  Wonderful work from Jon Tan. Pay special attention to the short section on "Typography & Palette."

  Sat, May 10

• Vassar College is looking for another Web Designer

  Mini portfolio and job description. Vassar Web Development isn't a typical in-house shop - we have four web designers on staff already. You can be our fifth. Makes for awesome collaboration, and your specialties and interests help shape your projects. Apply!

  Tue, May 6

• Daring Fireball Linked List: April 2008

  John Gruber offers a great introduction to a Typophile thread in which folks react to Apple's claim that, "Web Designers Can Post ‘Any Font’ for Use With Safari."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Free fonts for @font-face embedding

  "Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. FDI fonts.info believes in the future of web fonts, so we decided to provide webdesigners with a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Beware the New New Thing

  Damian Kulash Jr. argues, "It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Font Creators Need To Make Up Their Minds

  Bill Hill, head of Microsoft's Typography group, urges the font industry to address for-web licensing, and makes a case for Microsoft's EOT embedding technology.

  Wed, Apr 23

• Figuring It Out: OSF, LF, and TF Explained

  The FontFeed's Ivo Gabrowitsch differentiates between oldstyle, lining, proportional, and tabular figures.

  Sat, Apr 19

• Speak Up - Ethan Bodnar, Underage Designer?

  Some very nice posters.

  Wed, Apr 16

• Textism: Renderance

  "Safari evidently has no trouble rendering [...] but it ignores the font’s metrics and kerns letter pairs. Firefox [...] won’t render [...], however the kerning seems to be respected."

  Mon, Apr 7

• Pattern Tap

  Subscribable sets & collections of website design patterns. "Find thousands of design solutions to inspire your work."

  Sun, Mar 16

• hCardMapper

  From a form page, allow folks to point to their online hCard to auto-fill the form. John Allsopp points out that it could be especially useful, "with mobiles, and other devices (like the Wii) where input is more of an effort."

  Sat, Mar 8

• Yahoo! Microsearch

  John Allsopp describes it as, "an experimental search engine that in addition to traditional search techniques, extracts microformats and other metadata (RDF and RDFa) from pages to help improve search quality." Try searching, "John Allsopp" to see microformatted results.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Preparing for HTML5 with Semantic Class Names

  Start using HTML 5 today (kinda) by using classes that will eventually be replaced by new elements: header, nav, section, article, figure, dialog, aside, and footer.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Universal Web Type

  Jon Tan argues that, "we don’t just need standards for layout and object rendering, but also a standard type library that is universally available to all." He also explains how it's a different issue than @font-face.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Smoothing out the Creases in Web Fonts

  Jon Tan delves into how core web fonts, "render differently on different operating systems." Includes a rich group of references at the end, too.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Compound Microformats

  Premasagar Rose made this demo to show, "how compound microformats can be used to progressively enhance HTML with semantic meaning." (Demo examples use some CSS3 selectors, so view with an appropriate browser for full effect.)

  Sat, Mar 8

• Typesites

  Kyle Meyer and others take, "a critical look at sites featuring interesting typography."

  Fri, Mar 7

• The Highly Extensible CSS Interface

  Cameron Moll's tips for, "designing and coding interfaces that are flexible enough to adapt in ways the designer or developer may not foresee when handing off coded templates."

  Fri, Mar 7

• Moving the Font Matrix forward | clagnut/blog

  Rich Rutter posits a tag-infused font matrix; as he puts it, "a website which automatically generates font stacks based on community input."

  Tue, Mar 4

• Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS

  "A rendering dilemma that browsers have to encounter, and gracefully handle, on a day-by-day basis with little, to no, standardization. [...] Which way do you round the number?" John Resig provides examples.

  Tue, Mar 4

• Resetting Again

  Eric Meyer explains a recent change to reset.css. He writes, "things like boldfacing and italics are some of the most obvious textual effects readers will see, and to have reset styles that treat them inconsistently across browsers doesn’t make sense."

  Tue, Mar 4

• UI-patterns

  Anders Toxboe's honest, thorough design pattern reference seems at least as useful for its summaries, usage scenarios, and rationale as for its numerous examples.

  Tue, Mar 4

Search provided by Rollyo.

Notes and bookmarks are somewhat ephemeral, but Ma.gnolia’s “saved copies” provide an extra layer of potential permanence. More→

About tbrown.org

This website is a product of Tim’s desire to organize and share ideas, resources and creative inspiration.

Notes & bookmarks are a Yahoo Pipes mashup of RSS feeds from Tim’s Ma.gnolia bookmarks and tbrown.org’s WordPress blog. In addition to visiting tbrown.org, you can subscribe to any of several XML feeds.

You might have noticed that tbrown.org uses microformats (which is a fancy name for common kinds of information marked up in common ways). Adhering to these small conventions allows specific details in a text to be drawn out and used by web services, search robots and visitors like you. Check the notes & bookmarks for more.

This site’s CSS suggests typefaces in the Lucida and Verdana families. Colors were inspired by Hermann Zapf’s Ein Arbeitsbericht. Content can be multi- or single-column to fit your browser. Dimensions are em-based to preserve text measure, try resizing the text.

Last, please note this site’s Creative Commons License.