Archive for design

Typekit: Real Fonts on Your Website

// May 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Good things, Web 2.0, design

For years, designers have struggled with integrating interesting, expressive fonts into web pages. Until now, the general rule has been to stick to the commonly available font families — the default stuff installed on every Mac or Windows PC — and use images for anything out of the ordinary. This works ok, but (alt tags aside) search engines will not read your text-as-an-image. Not to mention the fact that it introduces yet another file to download, and increases the total weight of the page. 

A new project from Small Batch Inc. looks to change all that. Typekit promises to give you the ability to embed fonts on any web page with full fidelity and typographic control. 

typekit

Typekit is not yet available, but you can sign-up here to be notified as soon as it is.

The Extreme Google Brain

// April 28th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // design

Joe Clark writes on the culture of antidesign predominate at Google:

Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob Nielsen) may occasionally succeed in the marketplace, but they do so in spite of their antidesign, not because of it. Of course we can’t prove that; we can’t run a controlled experiment, let alone 41 of them with distinct shades of blue. It is merely one of those things a visually literate person knows. The fact that you don’t know it, or you deny it’s important, or deny it even can be known goes to show you really are better suited to programming a computer all day than dealing with actual human beings.