True font control on the Web? It’s getting closer:
When we started Small Batch Inc. last year, our goal was to explore what’s now possible on the web. That exploration has taken many shapes: bringing together a community at The Start Conference, working with our friends at Twitter for a few months, and digging deep into data with Wikirank. Now we’re focusing on an entirely new idea, and we’d like to share that with you. It’s called Typekit.
We’ve been following developments in web browsers very closely, looking for new and smarter ways to build stuff. Last fall, we started seeing renewed interest in linking to fonts via Cascading Stylesheets. While the W3C working draft has been around for years, a new wave of browser support will finally offer designers more control over fonts on the web. A particularly cogent article from John Allsopp, followed by frequent conversations with him, helped us understand that there was a significant opportunity here.
Doing some work on xBlog for the next few days, including implementing a new theme, incorporating VISUALS, starting to publish new, original, content and more. xBlog is 10 years old this year and it’s time to grow up. :-)
Some links are broken and some layout is wonky at the moment but will be fixed soon. In the meantime check out the new bBlog.
—Bill
» Posted March 27, 2009 @ 9am PDT
» Archived in
XPLANE
“With our patented auto-swissification technology, making posters is a snap!”
“This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.”
“Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?”
“To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored. According to Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, though many people assume that the brain is inactive when they’re bored, the reverse is actually true.”
“Dear Members of the Cult of Done, I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.”
I love it all except the 2nd part of #5.
We’ve just finished a new project: Put It Out is an illustrated poster showing in no uncertain terms the lethal chemicals — including arsenic, methane and formaldehyde — ingested from each cigarette and what some of the harsh health facts are surrounding smoking.
“We are excited to announce that we have released Raven, the very first web-based vector editor, into the wild. Raven, Aviary’s online vector editor, is the first and only tool of its kind to be available online.”
“Painting’s influence on film has been remarked upon in film scholarship and criticism for at least half a century. Lots of ink has been spilled, for instance, on the impact that German expressionism had on the work of Murnau and Lang, not to mention the aesthetic of American film noir; Dali’s collaboration with Hitchcock on the set design for Spellbound’s lurid dream sequence is now part of the lore of art and popular culture. Filmmakers often arrive at the visual look, compositional style, and color temperature of their moving images by sourcing them in the work of master painters. Rembrandt and Edward Hopper have been important touchstones for any number of cinematographers, past and present. And many world-class directors (Raoul Ruiz, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Youssef Chahine, Derek Jarman, Mario Bava, and Walerian Borowczyk) trained as painters before devoting themselves to narrative film.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)
“A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence.
Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?”
» Posted February 24, 2009 @ 11am PST
» Archived in
Color
“Ever seen a great font in a magazine ad, poster, or on the web and wondered what font it is? Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont for iPhone will identify that font in seconds!” Yeah, I’m a little too excited about this.
Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:
I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)
» Posted January 15, 2009 @ 1pm PST
» Archived in
Art,
Books,
Business of design,
Communications,
Creativity,
Information design,
Learning,
Photography,
Visual thinking,
Weblogs,
XPLANE
“…Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor is a $49.99 extension for Adobe Dreamweaver. It includes two major interface
- The Web Validator validates your HTML and CSS and verifies the proper use of microformats, including hCard and hCalendar, for single pages or entire websites.
- The Web Standards Advisor checks for subtleties of standards compliance in nine different areas—everything from structural use of headings to proper ID, class, and
element use. Nonstandard practices are flagged and reported in the Dreamweaver Results panel for quick code correction. A full report with more details and suggested fixes is also generated.”
“Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 is a publication that’s been dropping through letter boxes over the last few days.
Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun.”