Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)I had a great time in the sessions at IndieWebCamp West yesterday! Today is project day, so I started the morning off listening to some chill tunes with other folks on the Zoom "hallway track" deciding what to work on. My blog post permalinks have been bothering me for a while, I feel like they are...
A type tool by Jeremy Church
How to Use
I like to enter the base font-size for paragraph text. Then I select from the surrounding values for headers and small text.
There are no rules. Just experiment and have fun. Try using the values for line-height, margins or whatever, and see what works.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say most participants in a study couldn't pick out the correct form of lowercase g, a letter shape most of us have seen millions of times. Play this game to find out if you can spot the right g.
The Museum of Science and Industry is renaming the museum to be the “Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry” Sounds pretty silly right? Look at how long that name is. Plus, Chicagoans notoriously hate renaming buildings. The Chicago Tribune ran an article with selected Twitter reactions from Chicagoans. A typical Chicago response: Me? …
Everything you wanted to know about dashes but were afraid to ask
Den McHenry (denmchenry.com)Not exactly, but who can resist writing a "considered harmful" article when you can get away with it?
The real harm is that you can very easily conceal the semantics conveyed by
font-weightdepending on the font that's rendered, which is not always in your control. This all depends on how you define the base weight to which your relative values refer, and (1) whether that base weight is actually available in the rendered font and (2) which value is substituted if it isn't.
Displaying charts in text without having to use code
Data can be hard to grasp however visualising it can make comprehension faster. Sparklines (tiny charts in text, like this: 123{10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100}789) are a useful tool, but creating them for the web has always required code and using them in word documents was previously impossible.
Sparks, now in its second release, is a family of 15 fonts (three variants in five weights each) that allows for the easy combination of text and visual data by removing the need for any technical know-how. By installing the Spark font you can use them immediately without the need for custom code.
Alonealastalovedalongthe (Toot Café)All the hand painted signs I find disused in sheds and basements make me sad. I don't think the ability to print signs with computers and digital fonts actually made the world a better place. Definitely didn't make it more beautiful. Logos like the coca cola logo are static, dead imitations of beautiful handwritten scripts shoved in everyone's faces as a reminder of what once was a living, human pursuit rewarded by society.
I fell into web design via books. When I was maybe six or seven I remember reading about polar bears and how they hibernated in a large compendium about all sorts of natural habitats and curiosities ranging from foxes hunting in the desert and wild horses running on the Mongolian plains to Emperor penguins shivering in the Antarctic. And to this day I still remember that giant, double page spread of a bear and her cubs. It was a wondrous illustration but what piqued my curiosity was how the writer described hibernation.
Sans Forgetica is a typeface designed using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember your study notes. It was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists from RMIT University. Sans Forgetica is compatible with both PC and Mac operating systems. Download it for free today, or keep scrolling to learn more about how it was made.
Sans Forgetica is a typeface that has been specifically designed by academics at RMIT University to enhance memory retention.
Download the font and Chrome extension, or hear more from the team who created Sans Forgetica, at: http://sansforgetica.rmit
Be creative and have fun, but remember the multiple audiences and communities who may not consume your content the same way you do.
A friend pointed me to a story on Medium called “Death to Typewriters,” by Medium designer Marcin Wichary. The story is about the influence of the typewriter on digital typesetting. It references my “excellent list” of typewriter habits.
Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth. On the contrary, the minimalist program—as it initially emerged in fine art of the 20th century—has been about diverting the viewer’s attention from overt signs of authorship to the deeper purity of the ingredients. ❧
This also sounds like a great way to cook!
Like all nonsense, it’s intended to be easy to swallow. ❧
You’re giving up far more than design choice. Mr. Williams describes Medium’s key benefit as rescuing writers from the “terrible distraction” of formatting chores. But consider the cost. Though he’s baiting the hook with design, he’s also asking you, the writer, to let him control how you offer your work to readers. Meaning, to get the full benefit of Medium’s design, you have to let your story live on Medium, send all your readers to Medium, have your work permanently entangled with other stories on Medium, and so on—a significant concession. ❧
You’re definitely not owning your own data.
Boiled down, Medium is simply marketing in the service of more marketing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for advertisers. It is, therefore, utterly superfluous. ❧
Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages
“Professionals and amateurs in a variety of fields have passionately argued for either one or two spaces following this punctuation mark,” they wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
They cite dozens of theories and previous research, arguing for one space or two. A 2005 study that found two spaces reduced lateral interference in the eye and helped reading. A 2015 study that found the opposite. A 1998 experiment that suggested it didn't matter.
“However,” they wrote, “to date, there has been no direct empirical evidence in support of these claims, nor in favor of the one-space convention.”
I’ll circle back to read the full journal article shortly.1
