4 April 2010 •0 notes • Comments
Just submitted the Petit Mondrian theme to the Tumblr Theme Garden! Now I can stop working on it! I’ll let you know if it ever gets approved. ‘Til then, you can download the source code and install it by hand.

Just submitted the Petit Mondrian theme to the Tumblr Theme Garden!

Now I can stop working on it! I’ll let you know if it ever gets approved. ‘Til then, you can download the source code and install it by hand.

Filed under \ tumblr \ themes \ design \ web design \

31 March 2010 •0 notes • Comments
Web Fonts: The Shallow Hal Effect Last week, I got in (or rather, lost) an Internet fight with Merlin Mann. He talked up the virtues of his lovely new typeface. I decided to be a jackass and mocked him for spending $200 on what is essentially a free font.   It was a ludicrous allegation on my part—while I could indeed care less about the character sets, the subtle differences in glyphs (the tail on the a, t and capital R are the most important, for my money) are quite significant. Above all else, Clarendon is a notorious space hog and essentially unusable in text sizes at screen resolution in its standard weight.  What I should have said was that Sentinel is a $200 Georgia, because if you look at Kung-Fu Grippe, chances are pretty damn good that’s the font you’re going to find. @font-face, the most straightforward and elegant way of ensuring your visitors see the font you want them to see, cannot be used with the vast majority of typefaces, due to licensing restrictions.  Call it the Shallow Hal effect: web designers pick a font they love, and it makes their site look great. But for visitors don’t who already have the font installed on their computer—in the case of Sentinel, just about everyone—it just looks like the same tired set of typefaces on every other website. The sad thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of good looking open-source fonts out there (such as the one on top of this page) and plenty of interesting ways to style them with CSS3. Granted, it’s not a full set of weights, obliques and character sets, but you can console yourself that any visitors not using IE6 (or—for now—MobileSafari) will see your type the way you meant it to be seen. And it won’t cost you $200.

Web Fonts: The Shallow Hal Effect

Last week, I got in (or rather, lost) an Internet fight with Merlin Mann. He talked up the virtues of his lovely new typeface. I decided to be a jackass and mocked him for spending $200 on what is essentially a free font.  

It was a ludicrous allegation on my part—while I could indeed care less about the character sets, the subtle differences in glyphs (the tail on the a, t and capital R are the most important, for my money) are quite significant. Above all else, Clarendon is a notorious space hog and essentially unusable in text sizes at screen resolution in its standard weight. 

What I should have said was that Sentinel is a $200 Georgia, because if you look at Kung-Fu Grippe, chances are pretty damn good that’s the font you’re going to find. @font-face, the most straightforward and elegant way of ensuring your visitors see the font you want them to see, cannot be used with the vast majority of typefaces, due to licensing restrictions. 

Call it the Shallow Hal effect: web designers pick a font they love, and it makes their site look great. But for visitors don’t who already have the font installed on their computer—in the case of Sentinel, just about everyone—it just looks like the same tired set of typefaces on every other website.

The sad thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of good looking open-source fonts out there (such as the one on top of this page) and plenty of interesting ways to style them with CSS3.

Granted, it’s not a full set of weights, obliques and character sets, but you can console yourself that any visitors not using IE6 (or—for now—MobileSafari) will see your type the way you meant it to be seen.

And it won’t cost you $200.

Filed under \ fonts \ typefaces \ web design \ licensing \ open source \

29 March 2010 •0 notes • Comments
For a publication on web design, Smashing sure has issues w/Chrome display. Check out that left margin—1 or 2 RCH, tops.  Then there’s the fistful of Google ads between the header and the text. But we won’t go there.

For a publication on web design, Smashing sure has issues w/Chrome display. Check out that left margin—1 or 2 RCH, tops. 

Then there’s the fistful of Google ads between the header and the text. But we won’t go there.

Filed under \ smashing magazine \ web design \ css \ layout \ cross-browser \