I’m proud of myself because this is merely a post about new fonts rather than a post about a blog redesign. The perfectly-dialed-in textures and vibe from Phil Coffman’s recent redesign nearly pushed me over the... read more
I’ve blogged about this before but wanted to post again now that the 4-season series has wrapped. A consistent detail throughout Mr. Robot was that the title cards seemed to capture the essence of the episode... read more
On a whim, I decided to switch from my typical serif blog type to Colfax, a lovely typeface designed by Process Type Foundry. I’d been using it for site navigational elements and was thrilled to see... read more
I’m adding Sharp Sans to my list of fonts I hope to find an opportunity to work with soon. A description from Village Type & Design: Sharp Sans injects some much needed humanism into the Futura... read more
Let’s just take a minute to bask in how cool everything associated with Stranger Things is. The synth tones of the opening credits and the appropriately evocative use of ITC Benguiat and ITC Avant Garde Gothic... read more
I’m a happy backer of the Kickstarter project to reissue the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual. Recently, Nasa released a PDF of the manual online. It’s great and it only makes me want the printed version... read more
I’m excited to see that James Edmondson has started OH no Type Company (via Nick Sherman). The full announcement can be read here. My favorite bit: Also, why are type foundries typically marketed in such a... read more
I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Simonson’s TypeCon2014 talk on the Romance of Offset. In it, he shares his earliest work as a graphic designer doing paste ups for his Mad-Magazine-esque school paper. You can watch the talk... read more
While preparing for my Ampersand Conference talk, I decided to learn more about how to use OpenType features on the web. I was delighted to find this online demo/sandbox built by the conference organizer himself, Richard... read more
I love what Gerry Leonidas says in his Ampersand Conference talk (at about 29:30) about making better use of stuff like Markdown to create a more browser-centric set of tools. We use so many apps for... read more
As a general rule I gravitate towards larger type not only for relative readability, but also to help with touch targets. Yesterday, Matt Griffin from Bearded posted on the desire to, at times, use a base... read more
Earlier this week the responsive website for Microsoft’s 2012 Build Conference went live. Happily, our favorite honey badger, Nishant Kothary, enlisted Paravel to assist with design and the front-end responsive code. Check it out! When someone... read more
Embracing the fluid & flexible aspect of responsive web design was an easy decision, but I’ve been less sure-footed when it comes to balancing that with setting type on the web. From a purely typographic perspective,... read more
One of my favorite documentaries is Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which tells the story of 85 year-old sushi master, Jiro Ono, who has spent his life honing his craft at a 10-seat restaurant in a Japanese... read more
Chris Coyier’s Icon Fonts are Awesome demo pushed me up to the edge, and seeing how fuzzy image icons look next to ultra-crisp retina display text threw me over. Now, I’m testing out an icon font... read more
Grab your wallets! Reagan just opened up the shop section of his website. He’s been designing & screen printing posters this spring, and two are available for purchase now. I’ve got both, but have to admit... read more
The fine folks over at Wood Type Revival asked me to design some specimens for their latest release, Grecian Light Face. After experimenting with a few different directions, I went with some of my favorite song... read more
I just backed this project on Kickstarter and think you should too. Vernaculartypography.com is a source of endless inspiration and does valuable work in documenting and preserving great examples of regional typography & signage. The project... read more
Today, Paravel launched the new responsive website for Typofonderie. We had a great time with the challenges that arose from building a font-selling, ecommerce-driven, responsive web site. We took extra care to scale things like category... read more
The time for New Adventures is nearly upon us! I’ve been building slides for my talk as well as prepping materials for my workshop on controlling web typography. The plan is to spend some time exploring... read more
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... 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... 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... 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... 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... 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... read more
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... read more
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... read more
I’ll be doing double duty this June at Converge SE, teaming up with my Paravel cohorts, Dave & Reagan, for a workshop called Designing with Type on Friday, and speaking about Controlling Web Typography on Saturday.... read more
My site is now responsive. The more I work with flexible images & grids and media queries, the more I appreciate what can be achieved. Any apprehension I may have had about whether or not a... read more
Lettering.js was built to solve a problem. As web typography improves, web designers want the same level of control print designers have. Just as we’ve moved beyond Helvetica and Times New Roman, we’ve begun to think... read more
We were thrilled at the Paravel office to see such a great use of Lettering.js on Twitter’s 2010: Year In Review site- specifically on the headline for The 10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010. Josh Brewer,... read more
I used 100 text-shadows to make the graphic below happen. Sure, it’s excessive, ridiculous and just plain silly. But why, at times, can’t the web be all of those things? I’m all for sensible, well-reasoned CSS,... read more
IE9 public beta is here, and I’ve had the fair fortune to be recruited by The Friends of Mighty to showcase its support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). A while back, Jason Santa Maria... read more
I’ve always been impressed by how generous Reagan is with his time and talent. Over the past few months, he’s helped Dave and me beef up our own identities and personal projects, leaving his own site on... read more
FontShop has done a lot for web fonts. Their latest contribution, FontFonter, lets you test an ever-expanding set of available fonts on any site you wish. Aside from being the easiest & lowest commitment way to test... read more
This morning I saw a couple of tweets from @seangaffney and @maxvoltar about the CSS text-rendering property, which is in the W3C Working Draft. Aesthetically Loyal has outlined the differences in kerning pairs and browser support... read more
Since launching and outlining the process for the latest version of this site, I’ve had a bit of a type adventure going on. After fielding a variety of questions on the subject, I thought it’d be... read more
The last version of this site lasted just under a year. That may seem like a short amount of time until you consider how quickly things change on the web. @font-face usage has been fortified by... read more
I’ve been following the progress Cameron Moll has made in designing his Colosseo Letterpress Poster on Dribbble for a few months now. Getting regular insights into what it takes to pull something like this off reinforces... read more