xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
14th April 2008

The Rather Difficult Font Game

Take a stab at identifying 34 different fonts in this online quiz.

posted in Typography | Permalink | Comments Off

14th April 2008

Monocle: design notes

“Visually, we wanted to make something that didn’t ape current design tropes - the boring, over-used and essentially art-less ‘web 2.0 look’ of bright palletes, gradient fills and rounded corners - but had a more classical view, as befitting something a little more grown up. Richard Spencer Powell said the magazine design draws from modernism, of course (especially North and Mittel European heritage) but also looks further back into the early 20thC, and beyond the simple serifs and vogue for ornamentation, but look at the engravings, section headers, cartographic styles etc.”

posted in Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

14th April 2008

GridFox - The Grid Layout Firefox Extension

“Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year… However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.

Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.”

posted in Software/Hardware, Web design | Permalink | Comments Off