I started by grabbing Gothic Open Shaded and French Clarendon Ornamented, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist getting all of the fonts they release. I’m delighted to see this come to fruition—a testament to the power of Kickstarter, our community, and a damn fine idea.
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 it, but after my old trick of clearing font caches proved unsuccessful, I took to twitter and got some good advice from Jason and Matt. I followed the steps outlined at this CNET post and got an immediate fix. Hooray! Web fonts and font management are still a thing!
Lately, I’ve been winding down the day with my favorite new iPhone/iPad game: The Last Rocket by Shaun Inman. I’m no video game expert, but the 8-bit graphics, soundtrack, and maniacal rage I feel when failing to complete a level fondly reminds me of Mega Man. Shaun’s last release, Horror Vacui 2, was fantastic, but this is indeed a step up as he exhibits his ever-widening video game crafting skill-set.
The present & future of web fonts is looking awfully bright. Quality and Quantity are increasing, though there are still a few fonts I have to pass over when designing for the web. While I don’t know if all of these are in the pipeline to become web fonts, I have to believe that all type foundries are moving in that direction so that their fonts remain useful. It’s important to note that this shouldn’t be read as a “what’s the holdup” post. Creating high quality web fonts is no simple task. The only thing worse than a font you can’t use on the web is one that can be used but renders poorly.
Case in point: I recently replaced Futura served by an unnamed service with the relatively new Futura PT from ParaType served via Typekit. There was a significant improvement in tracking as well as rendering. Here’s a short, non-comprehensive list of fonts I’d love to put on a webpage.
I love House Industries. Neutraface & United have both been long time favorites of mine, recently used here, here and here. Happily, the FAQ on their site mentions that a subset of the collection will be available in October of 2011.
Another foundry that is working to make their fonts available is Hoefler & Frere-Jones. I love Tungsten but am particularly interested in using Vitesse & Forza for both headline and paragraph text.
Ardoise from Typofonderie is a workhorse. Taking all the styles, widths and weights into account, you’ve got 45 options in the family. I also quite like Le Monde Courrier, which is already a web font.
Stag, another workhorse, is a unique slab serif with lots of companion families: sans, dot stencil, and sans-rounded. I dig them all.
Mark Simonson created Proxima Nova, a web font we use on the Paravel website. He also created a really nice script font called Lakeside. There’s something about it that just really jives with me, especially the alternate, extra-large titling caps.
Dispatch from Font Bureau comes in 16 styles, and I bet I could find a use for all of them starting with Extended Bold.
This year at Microsoft’s SXSW IE9 release party, I finally got the chance to meet Nishant Kothary. I was happy to have the opportunity to convey how appreciative I was of his role in making Lost World’s Fairs happen in person. He really turned the Operation Condor team loose and fully supported our vision from start to finish. Little did I know, he had Paravel in mind for an upcoming gig: Designing the follow-up to last year’s 10K Apart site, beautifully done by Things That Are Brown. But this year’s edition had to be different—the site and all of the app submissions had to be responsive!
After confirming that we’d be thrilled to provide design and front-end code in person, and again in numerous “OMG is this really happening?” emails, The [This year at Microsoft’s SXSW IE9 release party, I finally got the chance to meet Nishant Kothary. I was happy to have the opportunity to convey how appreciative I was of his role in making Lost World’s Fairs happen in person. He really turned the Operation Condor team loose and fully supported our vision from start to finish. Little did I know, he had Paravel in mind for an upcoming gig: Designing the follow-up to last year’s 10K Apart site, beautifully done by Things That Are Brown. But this year’s edition had to be different—the site and all of the app submissions had to be responsive!
After confirming that we’d be thrilled to provide design and front-end code in person, and again in numerous “OMG is this really happening?” emails, The](http://visitmix.com/) / Sunder Media / Paravel team rallied on Basecamp with lots of exciting work ahead of us. We’d already cut our responsivizing teeth on The Do Lectures site as well as this blog, so we were eager to put our ever-evolving responsive design process to work, building a site that looks great at any width.
We started by having Reagan guide us through selecting a direction for the design. True to Paravel form, a bunch of automotive user manual scans wound up in our mood boards, so we settled on a throwback “Responsive Toolbox” vibe. From there Reagan designed some fantastic full-width desktop views with that level of sensibility & restraint we lean on heavily for all our Paravel projects. You can read and see more on Reagan’s design process here.
Once our desktop views were approved we teamed up to build the alternate media-queried layouts in the browser, though this wasn’t by any means all improv. We designed elements at full-with with an understanding of how they would relocate as viewports narrowed without breaking the site hierarchy. My recent post, Content Choreography, summarizes a lot of the opinions & tricks we put into practice on this site.
Dave and I had a blast coding this site. The design is covered in subtle textures, and it’s got features like image rotators, functional hover states and forms. We were eager to prove to ourselves that each of these items could be made responsive easily, and I’m happy to report that they were. It further reinforced that responsive web design doesn’t have to break your brain, or the bank for that matter.
The day our front-end portion of the site was completed, Dave “cannot be stopped” Rupert decided to build a responsive app himself. Check out Colorrrs! Read about Dave’s role & the Colorrrs app here.
Gosh, I hope this isn’t the last project post I’ll write for a collaboration with the Mix Online team. The honest truth is that we couldn’t be happier with the work we get to do here at Paravel. A Texas-sized thank you to Nishant & Joshua for brining us on board and to Ian for his fantastic dev work.
I was thrilled to find myself looped into a few nominations for this year’s .Net Magazine Awards. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to work with my Paravel cohorts, Dave & Reagan, as well as Frank Chimero & The Do Lectures team. Thanks to the fine folks over at .Net for the continued support. It’s greatly appreciated. Here are the nomination categories:
David Perel from Obox asked us to design a video & photo WordPress theme a few months back, and now it’s live! Reagan and I went with a simple, type-centric layout in 3 color schemes (dark, beige and white). Each variation has a subtle grunge background texture. You can also build your own background with the included texture-maker .psd file. We had a blast working with David and the team at Obox. Thanks guys!
My Paravel cohorts Dave, Reagan and I had a great time conferencing at Converge SE this summer. If you missed it or want a refresher you can check out the example site from our Designing With Web Type workshop on GitHub, and view the slides from my talk, Controlling Web Typography on SlideShare.
Thank you to Gene Crawford, the ConvergeSE team and to the attendees. We had a fantastic time.
The #1 reason my wife and I travel? Food. Name any city we’ve been to and I can tell you my favorite meal from each. The fried oyster po’boy at Mother’s in New Orleans, squid ink pasta at Local 11ten in Savanna, and the diver scallops at the Roof Top Cafe in Key West made each destination worth the time and money it took to get there. But finding these places took effort. Maybe too much effort.
Carefully planning trips and restaurant destinations beforehand can work, but none of the restaurants I named were on our list until we started polling locals and wandering around. Locals know better than Yelp, Food TV, and even Google. That’s why I love Goodfoot.
A collaboration with Matt Thompson from Gowalla, Paravel’s first iPhone app, Goodfoot, sorts the most popular Gowalla spots (restaurants and otherwise) based on repeat user checkins, then displays them by walking, biking, or driving distance. Goodfoot happily relies upon the power of the Gowalla API, so be sure to remember to checkin when you’re at your favorite places.
Next time you’re headed on a trip, do yourself a favor and be sure you’ve got the app on your phone. After all, it’d be a shame to travel all those miles and find yourself stuck on the main drag or eating at a chain restaurant that can be found 5 blocks from your home. Travel well! Get on the Goodfoot!
