Category: Typography

Useful Links: Drive Me Crazy, Community Building, Mobile Design, Best Job

Links to top notch articles about what not to do on the web, how to build community, designing for mobiles, and finding the best job in the world.
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Drive me Crazy: The Web 15 from Reviewer X is spot on with things that drive user’s crazy. High school kids recognize what’s wrong with the web. Jakob’s been nagging us for years. Why don’t web sites reflect these things? Oh, hell, don’t even answer, I know the stinkin’ answer.

I Can Haz Community? at Think Vitamin is from the I Can Haz Cheeseburger site that has developed such a community and huge following. Tips for building a community around your site.

Mobile Web Design Trends for 2009 at Smashing Magazine is a good guide to designing for mobiles. It says a lot of the same things as my article Make Your Site Mobile Friendly at Think Vitamin, but this new piece at Smashing Magazine contains new ideas and many very helpful screen captures of mobile sites.

Best Job in the World has gone viral. I’m fascinated by this story and will be writing about it in more detail later in the week on BlogHer. It’s interesting because it’s a blogging job, and because of the way it’s gone viral. What is it about this story that captured the imagination and made it the latest viral phenom?

Useful Links: power in social media, ROI, web fonts

Social Media Breakfast Leverages Two Truckloads of Tyson Food Donation for Boston Food Bank! at Beth’s Blog is another story to add to the list of amazing things achieved with social media. In this case, blog comments were enough to raise 2 truckloads of food for a food bank in just 3.5 hours. How did we ever get anything accomplished before Twitter?

Web Standards: Where the ROI is from Molly writing at MIX online explains the business reasons for web standards. (MIX online has an interesting stylesheet, by the way.)

@font-face in IE: Making WEb Fonts Work is from Jon Tangerine. He says, “What we need to encourage designers and developers to use EOT today is a good tool to create EOT files in the first place. Perhaps even one hosted remotely, where we can buy a licence, convert the font to EOT, grab the same OTF subset for complaint browsers, and get the work using the typefaces we’ve always dreamed of. WEFT is not the tool right now to enable EOT usage. In fact it discourages it.”

Downloadable fonts with GlyphGate

There’s a change in the wind in terms of downloadable fonts. GlyphGate is part of the reason. GlyphGate isn’t for everyone. If you have control over your web server, you may be interested in installing GlyphGate. Your hosting company may have it installed (or will install it if enough people request it) so that you can use it. As GlyphGate describes itself:

GlyphGate is a Web server extension designed to enable use of fine typography, page formatting and languages across user platforms and browsers.

The GlyphGate plug in works with Apache, Windows and Solaris servers. It supports all languages defined in Unicode. It supports OpenType, TrueType, Type 1, Bitmap and vector fonts.

You write CSS declarations for the fonts you want and GlyphGate does the rest. However, there is a bit of a learning curve involved with writing the CSS. I’m not going to detail everything, because you’ll no doubt need to spend some time with the user’s manual before attempting to use GlyphGate yourself, but here are a couple of examples.

When the extension is installed on the server, a specific page on the server shows you which fonts are available. They are arranged in Unicode tables. Pick one and call for it using the a standard CSS rule like

p {font-family: Verdana;}

If you want to include all the characters in the font subset, you use an @font-face rule. Here’s an example from the GlyphGate user’s manual:

@font-face
{
font-family: Trebuchet MS;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
/* Include Latin + digits + punctuation + tm */
unicode-range: az,AZ,U+7C,U+20-41,U+A?,U+2122,U+99
}

You can do far more, such as set smoothing and kerning. The fonts available are far more interesting to typographers than the two rather common ones shown in the previous examples.

I learned about GlyphGate in the book Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous, a massive compendium of information on fonts and encodings.