Tag: TYPOGRAPHY

One of the most time consuming activities in graphic and Web design is the picking of fonts. It's basically a crap shoot: there's no way to see what text will look like until after you've selected a font -- and when you have a list of 200 fonts to get through, the process can be painstakingly tiresome. That's where Wordmark.it comes in; it's a Web app that scans your computer for installed fonts, ...

FontFonter is a neat tool from FontShop that lets you render a live copy of any Web page using FontShop's proprietary Web fonts. Font prices are in the hundreds of dollars (the "affordable" ones are around the $150 mark), so it's certainly nice to be able to preview what your site will look like with such a font before spending all of that money. It would be truly great (and magnanimous, even) ...

In the words of its maker, Typograph is "both an essay and a tool". As an essay, it seems to be a long, wordy treatise on the intricacies of creating a "visual rhythm" for a given piece of text by correct, aesthetic use of typography. As a tool, it's very cool: you get a bunch of floating tool panes surrounding the text of the article, and you can play with the spacing and size of the headings ...

Side View Generator is a clever little Web application that turns words into other words. So, ... what's so clever about that? You feed it with a word or two (up to ten letters), and it does its magic by taking your text and creating it in 3D. This is the tricky part, really: each letter is composed of multiple voxels, and each voxel is located at a certain point in 3D space. Viewed from one ...

Google Font Preview is a new way to play with Google's Web Fonts API. The API is already dead-easy to use: you just include a single line of text in your Web page source code, and you can use fonts in your CSS. But that's "ease of use" defined in web developer terms... What about the designer types who don't always feel like messing around with code just to see what stuff looks like on the ...

Type Folly is a tour de force, showing how far JavaScript and CSS have come. When I first openend the page I got a canvas with all sorts of text, which looks like an image. But then I clicked it, and discovered I can drag stuff around. Then I noticed the tool panes on the sides; they look like Photoshop tool panes, but are implemented in JavaScript and are fully functional. There are layers, and ...

Fonts Live is a service which lets you embed beautiful fonts right on your Web page. They have a catalog of 200 fonts, and they are all quite lovely. Does the idea ring a bell? Maybe it's because Google has a very similar service which is totally free! This is something that really astounds me. How can you offer a service for such rates and expect to make money, when a behemoth like Google is ...

When it comes to making web pages, I can whip up a rounded div or add a splash of gradient for a nice fade effect successfully with little trouble, but like many, when trying to deduce out why some stupid DIV is misbehaving, I can waste an entire day spinning my wheels. Checking out the various blogs and forums are of course a great resource, but probably my most useful and productive help ...

Every week, I abuse myself for your amusement by seeking out yet another horribly constructed web site and poking fun at its awfulness. Doctors and Optometrists write in each week to warn of the damage I'm doing to myself. My shrink is buying a new beach house on the expected revenue to be generated by my nervous breakdown. But still -- glutton for punishment that I am -- I continue to seek the ...

Ok, so maybe you don't have access to all the necessary equipment to pull this off, but if you did...It would look a lot like the contents of this Flickr gallery. Professional race driver Stef van Campenhoudt, typographers Pierre and Damien of PleaseLetMeDesign, and interactive artist Zachary Lieberman collaborated to create iQ font using a compact Toyota hatchback and an array of computer and ...

Typography on the web has always been a delicate topic, and the source of a lot of tension between web designers, type designers, and standards gurus. Websites should have quality type choices available for all of their readers, but type designers deserve to be compensated for their hard work. The appropriate standard and the appropriate license have been debated for years. Typekit, launching this ...

Finding free fonts on the net isn't really all that hard - the list of sites offering gratis typefaces is a pretty one. Good quality fonts? That's a slightly shorter list. Good quality free fonts that can be used commercially? That list is even smaller. Thankfully, the good folks behind Font Squirrel have worked their tails off putting together a large collection (currently 338) hand-selected ...

Looking for a fast, easy way to preview the fonts you have installed on your computer? It doesn't get much easier than visiting Flipping Typical. Head over to the site and within seconds it will render a table of all your typefaces. Initially the preview text will read "flipping typical," but you can delete it and enter whatever you like. To swap the primary font at the top of the page, simply ...

Looking for a unique font for your next gift card or ransom letter? Graphic artist/creative director Rhett Dashwood used Google Maps to discover natural and man-made (OK, mostly man-made) structures and landscapes resembling the letters of the alphabet. The project took about half a year, although it wasn't exactly a full time endeavor. All of the locations in Dashwood's alphabet were ...

Reading articles online can be a huge pain. Some sites have no sense of type design, or just have too much clutter to give you a pleasant reading experience. Readability is at least a partial solution to the problem. It's a customizable bookmarklet for all major browsers that lets you load a site in a text-only mode to make it easier on the eyes. Readability offers modes for everyone who reads ...