Molly Holzschlag wrote a great article for .Net Magazine outlining seven things still missing from CSS. She gets into web fonts on #5, which is my favorite. I particularly liked this point: Fine control remains elusive – kerning, character spacing – controlling these aspects are both difficult to specify for numerous reasons. This is frustrating to designers who love typography and want to have that finer control. Huzzah! I couldn’t... Read more
I’ve noticed that just about every year or so I favor larger type for body / paragraph text. A while back I moved from 16px (100%) to 18px (112.5%) and today I decided to increase that to 20px (125%) for screens larger than 900px. I’ve been hesitant to worry too much about extra-large responsive views on this blog because I didn’t want to completely blowout the ideal range... Read more
I recently wrote a tutorial on texturizing web type for .Net magazine (Issue 221). One of my favorite CSS properties for text, mask-image, is covered in-depth from creating a semi-transparent texture in Photoshop to implementing it with HTML & CSS. To take things further, I added in a CSS transform to get that skew, then dropped in FitText to make it all scalable for use in your fluid/responsive layout.... Read more
After reading this Fontdeck Blog post a few of weeks ago, I dropped an exciting new CSS property into the stylesheet for this blog. Wanting to test hyphenation on all my posts and pages, I applied CSS hyphenation to all paragraphs: p { -webkit-hyphens: auto; -moz-hyphens: auto; hyphens: auto; } During a day or so of road testing I noticed some pretty funky widows, so I fine-tuned my... Read more
I eagerly backed this Kickstarter project from Matt Griffin and Matt Braun a few months back and was thrilled to see that funding was successful. They’ve been hard at work, providing updates on acquisitions and process along the way. Now, Wood Type Revival is live and fonts are available for purchase! I started by grabbing Gothic Open Shaded and French Clarendon Ornamented, though I’m not sure I’ll be... Read more
Since upgrading to Lion I’ve noticed a font rendering issue with Safari 5.1. Sites were randomly displaying some web-safe and web-served fonts with the Last Resort font, AKA “Block-A Characters.” These can appear for a variety of reasons, but I was getting them because Safari 5.1 has a compatibility issue when rendering fonts for those who use 3rd party font management apps. I use Font Explorer and love... Read more