19 Apr
A new way to share fonts for @font-face
Get a great inspiration fix from iLoveTypography.com’s interview with Jos Buivenga, one of the great new type designers that offer superb free typefaces. Jos’s work is a result of years of self-taught discipline and passion for type, and I highly recommend his typefaces and his blog any time you are in the mood for something beautiful.
Last year, the web generated a fiery discussion around the revival of @font-face, the nifty css way of including custom fonts in web pages. A List Apart has a great article about how you can use this old thing (@font-face has been around since css2, but no one implemented it, partly due to the copyright issues that it would have generated; or so I remember). Safari 3.1 is the first browser that implements this. The thing works in both the Mac and Windows versions and it looks really amazing.
I was reading Jos’s approach on licensing fonts for use with @font-face. He asks that a link to his website should be put in the css, next to the @import line. I thought of an alternative.
26 Mar
Typographic jargon
The wonderful iLT blog gave me a great idea with one of their recent Sunday Type articles. Johno summarized it rather brilliantly: “how about the word typography constructed from typographic terms?” Read the article to see that in context.
Now, I really liked this. I linked it with the fact that they’re now running a type terms series and… well, I just could not not do it. It was a challenge, and it took a while, but it’s done. And I’ve expanded my typo-cabulary. Each letter refers to a certain part of typography, and is built by words that describe it.
Here’s the full piece. The definitions for each word can be found on a separate page. Enjoy and comment away, I really like comments :)
Typography by Vlad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
26 Mar
Expressive words
I’m working on a piece for a few days, and it’s still not ready. Usually, I give up after a few tries, but this one is getting out really well. It’s a typography-related thing, so don’t miss out. Our favourite typography blog iLT inspired it and I almost finished it. Such a great feeling, the almost finished state: all the hard work is done, you fine tune, trying to perfect it, and soon you’ll get it out on the world.
Meanwhile, a few of typography’s friends started some sort of a thread: expressive words. The idea is to take a few words and use typography to express their meaning, without changing the letterforms. Check out these great exercises by Karly Barret, then Matt Jewel’s response and yet another one from Geof.
Now it’s my turn. I would like to say that I limited myself to Helvetica. I wanted to really stretch this to its limits. Maybe there’s someone to take the challenge?
I really liked “bloom” in all of the above. And I couldn’t do it. I was thinking to giving the impression of a flower; in the end, it really feels like a fountain to me, due to the lowercase m.
The next word I want to show to you is magic. I really can’t think of another more pleasant way to write this than Karly’s piece. But I did try, this one is a real challenge. At first, I wanted to emulate a magic number, and I ended up with the big m functioning like two cabins… abracadabra and the letters a and g get transformed into i and c. Do you perceive it as such? Maybe the other one is better, more subtle.
My take on jump is a bit boring. It’s close to what Matt did, but mine is horizontal.
The first word that I actually designed was lost. I wanted to end with it because I think it’s better than the others. The letter s is lost to the other three, being placed in another space. After a good night’s sleep, I realized that this idea would go so much better for a word like hidden. Although lost could mean hidden, it’s a bit of a stretch. So, I think of my lost as being more abstract :)
In the end, I decided I should get a totally random word. I remembered thefreedictionary.com has a Word of the day feature. Yesterday’s word turned out to be walloping. As a noun, it means “A sound thrashing or defeat.” I instantly saw the picture in my head, and here’s the result:
Please comment away! Any feedback is most welcomed.
26 Mar
Wordpress and a drop of genius
All you Wordpress users probably know this already, but I really want to write about it. Wordpress 2.5 is being designed by Happy Cog and will be released shortly. Everybody knows who Zeldman, Santa Maria and Danzico are, so naturally I’m waiting for it like it’s chocolate day. The word is on the streets from before the 19th of March, but well, I don’t care much about the Wordpress dashboard, so I haven’t seen it until today.
Do not fear though, as the new dashboard is one of the neatest features of 2.5. I’d say, it was about time. This, toghether with multi-file uploads, galleries, full-text feeds and cool one-click plugin updates makes the release interesting. But what makes it hot is the fresh take on design. More on this, when it’s done.
14 Mar
need::regulations
I’m constantly experiencing life without rules: I’m disastrous at organizing myself and everyone knows that. Chances are lots of people are like me, or, heavens forbid, even worse than me, but this is not a thing I take pride in. Honestly, I don’t see any reasons to look on the other side and try to see how green is their grass, since that does not help at all with solving one’s problems. What I do need is some rules. Yes, I need regulations.
I also think work is important, because it brings money. Therefore it needs to be efficient. From here, the paradox: work it’s not pleasant, but you always want more (money). So, naturally, I want to start by making some rules for my work.
25 Feb
Stories from the city, stories from the sea
There are places in the world you will never see, and even if the eyes will, the hands will touch them and the feet will walk near them you will not perceive their reality and you will stand before them and think that you can conceive them for what they are, but that would place you much farther from the truth than you could imagine. Such places do not exist into your world, and the journey required to connect your world and theirs would be too much to take on, the benefits too shallow. Thus, you are shallow, for judging things you cannot see, and it is a shame, as you are constrained by your world to do so and cannot, by any means, act otherwise.
8 Feb
Waiting for the win
EDIT: Ok, I did win. Not the book, I will buy it! But I’ve been featured on FontShop, which is a great win by itself. Now I should add FontBook to my wishlist. Oh, and start posting some real stuff. And finish the design.
Instead of thinking about posting some real useful/interesting stuff, I’m populating this website with things that pass. Not that they are not great, because indeed they are. I just need some content to fill this up a bit, so I can finish my design.
I’m waiting for the results of the FontBook competition over at iLT and I think I might win. In the meantime, I won a Helvetica Film DVD copy in a contest on kupuk.com and I want to thank Paul (again). The documentary is great and I will enjoy the extra 90 minutes of interviews.
4 Feb
iLT competition - win a type book!
iLoveTypography is a very interesting blog about type and its numerous faces. Type’s impact in today’s visual culture is rather invisible, though nothing is more ubiquitous, nothing more substantial, more changing than the form and arrangement of letters. Either paper or screen, the way typographers design and use their typefaces defines the space in which we create and distribute our ideas.
This week, iLT has a great contest involving movies and the latest FontBook from FontShop, a 3kg, $100 book of type specimens. The prize: nothing less than a copy of the bible itself: Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.
Although I was expecting the actual FontBook as a prize, I do appreciate the contest and I can’t wait to see who won. I’m posting my entry in the contest because I have to start this blog some other way than copypasting random snips from project gutenberg.