A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen.

The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design. This article focuses on some of the tools we currently have at our disposal, mostly either freely available or from Adobe.

What’s this “design” you speak of?

Design is a multifaceted problem. How something behaves is interdependent on how it looks, sounds, reads, moves, and responds. We can’t separate these from the end result, but we can divide and conquer them during the creative process. Web design is not merely building. It’s not just designing. It’s not only the rest of the myriad disciplines and titles we all align ourselves with, but the culmination of all these things.

One process, or “how I work”

For over a decade, I’ve been designing websites. And I’ve followed nearly the same process for every one of them: once it’s time for visual design to happen, I typically start out in rough form (sketches, grey boxes), then move on to higher fidelity comps in Photoshop. I make these Photoshop comps look as real as possible, and continue to revise them for clients until they sign off on the designs. I make exceptions as needed depending on the problem at hand, but I rarely allow much visual design and layout to happen during coding. This includes painstakingly changing type styles and colors in Photoshop when revisions are needed. I’m experienced enough with making websites that I know what I can push off until coding happens, and how certain things will act when in use. I like spending my time this way because it helps me focus on the story I’m trying to tell with my design.

Our current toolbox

Every option out there has its tradeoffs. These are not intended to be knocks against the goals of these applications; they’re all powerful in their own right. The purpose of this brief audit is to highlight the gaps in the creative process.

Photoshop has high-fidelity design capabilities and image editing, but the type rendering isn’t true-to-browser and it’s lacking in layout capabilities. Each new release feels more bloated and directionless than the last.

Illustrator is great for drawing and working with vectors, but the type and image rendering aren’t true-to-browser and it’s ill suited for anything but the simplest layouts.

InDesign is capable of high-fidelity layouts and has advanced type styling features with stylesheets, but it’s primarily a print application and lacks the language and feel for screen-based designs.

Fireworks showed promise back in the hands of Macromedia, but it has taken a backseat under Adobe. It’s primarily a screen-based design app and is great for prototyping and image optimization, but it lacks true-to-browser type rendering, is flakey performance-wise, and feels neglected among the flagship Adobe products.

Dreamweaver is a hybrid WYSIWYG text editor with true-to-browser type and layout rendering, but it lacks flexible visual design capabilities, image editing, and typographic control.

Browsers are obviously the baseline for type and layout rendering as they are the platforms we’re designing for; but the design production is then transferred to hand coding in text editors. Hand coding isn’t the problem here; it’s the prospect of laying out a page without design production tools that’s difficult for many (myself included).

In recent years, a few indie image editing apps have hit the scene, including Pixelmator and Acorn. These apps, and others like them, are impressive achievements, and a good alternative for certain tasks like image editing. Unfortunately, they aren’t sophisticated enough to compete with the applications above when it comes to web design and layout. And that’s OK—I don’t believe they want to compete in this space; I only mention them for the purpose of discussion.

A wishlist

So what does an app that’s made for web design look like? What are the native and common attributes that keep popping up with every page we design? This is a start for the considerations I find myself making on nearly every design I work on.

Per document grids

Different designs require different grids. Currently, in an app like Photoshop, you are only able to set global grid settings. Meaning, if you want to use different grids for your documents, you need to change these settings each time. Many people I know (myself included) get around this by just drawing out a grid on a separate layer and placing it above all the other layers. The disadvantage of this is not being able to use any sort of snap-to-grid and alignment functions built into the program. Everything either needs to be eyeballed or placed mathematically through a measurement palette. Having this reside at the document level would allow a design’s grid to travel with it and stay intact for repeat uses (especially important when working as part of a team and sharing documents).

Page states

Webpages are living, dynamic spaces where the smallest interaction from a visitor can change the scope of an entire site. Menus can emerge and recede, system messages display and require action, page elements move, and the contents shift, all without the need for a page refresh. Because we’re not dealing with a static medium, we need to be able to design for interactions and the shifting landscapes of a webpage. This is probably heading into something akin to object-oriented design, but an application needs to see elements rather than blocks of color or text. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks have some low-level functionality in this regard, but the need for more dynamic and non-destructive handling is clear.

The Character and Paragraph Style palettes from InDesign are able to globally control type similarly to how we use CSS.

CSS-esque type styling (dynamic styles palette)

This one should come as no surprise. CSS saves loads of time when it comes to global changes to typography. Merely changing a link color or font styling for a headliness in a Photoshop file can be tedious because they aren’t centrally controlled. InDesign offers Character and Paragraph styles, which work like a charm. Something along those lines, but obviously geared a bit more towards CSS functionality, would be key. Additionally, being able to relatively link type styles (“make h2s 200% the base body text size”) would be very powerful.

Fonts

Fonts are exploding on the web in a big way. The ability to design with external fonts, or be able to use WOFF fonts safely, would help depict our designs better, and allow for quicker changes. Hell, being able to specify a font stack along with your styles—so you could quickly cycle through the visual changes that occur with fallback fonts—would be killer.

Page flow, text wrap, and fluidity

Every element on a webpage has the ability to affect the layout of other elements. We should be able to specify what actions to take (float, clear, wrap, etc.) when that happens. Additionally, a browser window is a fluid canvas; desktop design apps only work with a fixed canvas size, making comping a fluid/flexible design little more than a guess.

Knowledge of current browser interfaces

Using any of the desktop design apps for web design means having a bit of knowledge for the parameters of a browser window and screen sizes. Most of us probably work at what we consider a safe size (right now, likely around a 960px-wide viewing area). An application that can be configured to preview for a given screen size or the sizes of the different browser chromes (not unlike xScope’s “Screens” feature) could be really handy. Especially if the different views of a browser also carry with them the rendering styles, defaults, fonts, and more for the platform and browser version.

Forms

Form elements are part of the basic language of the web. I’m tired of taking screenshots of forms in various states just to comp into a page. These things are baked into the OS, and an app should be able to easily allow for their display, not as bitmaps, but as editable objects.

Mobile platforms

This is a big one, and an area I don’t think I’m as qualified to discuss. Design for mobile devices is a difficult problem; there are so many devices, most with unique software and hardware, and it’s the field with the most amount of movement. Perhaps these requirements would be clearer after some formulation of the above occurred.

Non-scientific chart:
The x-axis shows how true-to-browser rendering ranges from approximate to actual, while the y-axis depicts the scope of centralized control over layout and type from local to global. The sweet spot lies somewhere at the intersection of browser-like behavior for—and widespread control over—type and layout elements, while providing a fertile environment for creative thinking.

Options for the future

Why not design in the browser?

By now you must be saying, “hey moron, just design in a browser!” Well, I half-agree with you. In my article from a few years back about Fireworks I made the case for a new desktop app that could handle some of these functions. With how much things have changed in recent years, I’m more inclined to suggest the way forward probably lies with the help of a browser.

But I don’t think the browser is enough. A web designer jumping into the browser before tackling the creative and messaging problems is akin to an architect hammering pieces of wood together and then measuring afterwards. The imaginative process is cut short by the tools at hand; and it’s that imagination—or spark—at the beginning of a design that lays the path for everything that follows. Without it, you’re at best able to make a website that looks like a website—rather than a design that tells a story in the form of a website.

Can WebKit save us?

I’m asking for something that sits on the fence between all of this. I don’t think any of the current desktop apps or any given browser gets the job done. They all do a pretty good job at a few things, but no single one does well enough to really make it a solid prospect.

So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? I’m not talking about an in-browser AJAX toolkit for dragging elements around and changing fonts, but an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display. It could have accurate rendering and previews for the way page elements would look, but with some of the WYSIWYG tools desktop design apps have. We wouldn’t just approximate pixels in a flat comp, our CSS would be baked in to the layouts we draw and create on the page. And as Webkit grows, so too could this new app, always taking advantage of the latest and greatest functionality. Just like a browser, it could pull assets from remote servers; and just like a desktop app, it could make use of local processing power and OS-level functionality. This would allow it to effectively combine some of the best of both worlds, with a foot firmly planted in the web.

The advantages would be monumental, allowing a strong creative and explorative process, while seeing how things could react on a live stage. It would fulfill many of the items on my wishlist because these are already part of core browser functionality. We would essentially be designing with live page elements; not a picture of a text field—but a text field you could click into and start typing, and then drag to a different area of the page entirely.

I know I’m generalizing; I’m a designer first and most certainly not a developer, but I’ve been occupying this space and using these tools long enough to have a hunch for what works and what doesn’t. An application like this could change the process of web design considerably. Most importantly, it wouldn’t be a proxy application that we use to simulate the way webpages look—it would already speak the language of the web. It would truly be designing in the browser.

Special thanks to Mandy Brown and Liz Danzico for their always excellent editorial guidance.

The competition was put on by the wonderful folks at Webstock and pitted teams from New Zealand, Australia, and the US against one another. Our teams were each paired with a charity, who was only revealed when the competition started. From there, each team took whatever assets the client brought along (all in various states of completion, or, uh, viability); copy, photos, and loads of information, to make a complete functioning website in a single day. Whatever the case, we were tasked with giving them something to be proud of, and a way to reach their given audiences.

Team USA storms the halls in the wee hours of the morning, both as an intimidation tactic and a means to fight off sleep. Actually, this was just one of our hourly coffee runs.

Our Assignment

Our client was the Timaru Mental Health Support Trust, a mental health drop-in centre at the Victoria House in the south island that provides wellness programmes to people with mental illnesses. Our clients, Willian and Garbux, from the Victoria House were amazing; they weren’t that knowledgeable about what the web could offer them and didn’t have an existing website, but we’re completely open to collaborating with us and trying out some new approaches. Mental illness is a difficult topic to discuss and to depict, we knew we had a tremendous amount of work cut out for us from the get-go.

Luckily, I was fortunate enough to be on a team with some absurdly smart people: Jennifer Bove as project manager, Liz Danzico as user experience advocate/information architect, Karen McGrane as content strategist, Dan Mall as front-end coder, John Ford as programmer (as well as arm wrestling champ!), and myself as designer. We bought every American flag we could find in Wellington, and were ready to kick some ass.

Ready, Steady, Go!

I won’t talk too much about the process, Dan and Liz already did a good job of that, but will just say that things went surprisingly smoothly. Given the time constraints, any traditional process wouldn’t do, we were all doing work concurrently because we couldn’t sit around waiting for different phases to finish. Luckily, everyone on our team was so sharp that it just worked.

For my part, I was responsible for the website design. Our client had a somewhat confusing name, and one that most of their patrons never used anyway, so we renamed them the “Victoria House” and prepared a new logo. You can see a video of me here talking through their old logo and the new proposed direction. We brought some of their imagery to the forefront to put a human face to the Victoria House, and managed to work some colors from a print brochure into the site.

We rewrote much of their copy, gave the site a simple and flexible architecture, and some really tight markup. One of my favorite bits happened on the backend: we completely overhauled their events calendar, which is one of their largest forms of outreach, previously done as a intense Excel spreadsheet printed handout. We moved them into Google Calendar and set WordPress up to pull the contents of the calendar in and associate them with unique pages for the various events. Now they’re able to update one calendar and use it for the web or print.

The Long Haul

At the end of the 24 hours, hopped up on coffee and adrenaline, we somehow had a complete website (you can see the dev site here). Obviously, we weren’t able to do everything we wanted, but what we were able to accomplish in that time will make a tremendous difference to the Victoria House.

I am extremely proud of the work we did, and of the opportunity to work alongside some of the smartest folks I’ve met. The end results (from all three teams), were nothing short of amazing. And the effect of these three charities getting good, clean, functional websites to further their causes can not be overstated.

We may not have won, but the clients certainly did, and that was the most important competition of all in my mind; beating back the worries of money and time to deliver something truly good to truly good people. I remain humbled and enlightened by the entire experience, and wish all three clients the best of luck for the future.

Thanks to Mike Brown, Tash Hall Lampard, and all of the wonderful Webstock people. You did an amazing job organizing, covering the event (tons of great photos, videos, and blog posts), and keeping us all awake and caffeinated. New Zealand remains of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, just chock full of kind people, and every Webstock event is one for the history books. Congrats to the talented teams from New Zealand and Australia, and everyone involved, I won’t forget this experience anytime soon.

Also: I’m having complete flat white withdrawal.

“

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.

”

—Paul Rand paraphrasing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s quote:

It’s official: I’ve started a design studio called Mighty. I’ve been working under the name since earlier this year, and today I’m launching a small site for the endeavor.

The prospect with Mighty is simple: I want to work on stuff that matters. I want the things I make to benefit people, and whenever possible, the design work I do to have a lasting impact.

Here’s to new beginnings! Head over and say hello to Mighty. Many thanks to my talented friends: Jessica Hische for the logo design, and Liz Danzico for her help with the site’s content/manifesto.

Typekit

Another big career announcement today, I’ll be splitting my days between running Mighty and serving as Creative Director for Typekit. As any regulars here will know, I have a deep love for typefaces and typography, and Typekit couldn’t be more tailored to that love. It’s a fantastic opportunity to work alongside some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and continue to grow something I believe will help shape our industry for the future.

Portfolio Updates

I’ve also updated my portfolio with a bunch of projects that have launched in the last few months. A few from my time at Happy Cog: W. W. Norton, our oldest independent publisher, and The Amanda Project, a website and community counterpart to a book series for teens and tweens.

Earlier this year I worked on two Chicago-related sites: Chicago Now, a hyper local blogging network (working alongside Byrne Reese), and a one-day design sprint reworking the Chicago Tribune homepage. The Tribune team asked me to take a pass at a rough design they had already mocked up, basically saying “do as much as you can in a day”. This was a really fun experiment that I’d definitely like to try again. The design was later adapted by internal teams at other Tribune sites like the LA Times and Baltimore Sun.

A few months ago I was asked to do quick blog and store redesign for one of my favorite bands, They Might Be Giants (working alongside, Brian Warren), a lovely new site for my always insightful friend, Liz Danzico, and lastly, my two type-related loves, Typedia and Typekit.

I’ve been very busy lately and have lots of stuff coming down the pike. Stay tuned.

Well, it only took nearly a hundred issues since working on the A List Apart redesign for me to get around to writing an article.

I’ve had a blast working behind the scenes working with authors on fleshing out the visuals for their articles, but after repeated kindly nudges from the rest of the ALA staffers, I wrote one of my own: On Web Typography.

This has been a year packed with talk of type on the web. We’ve been making great strides in bringing real fonts to the web, a good progression that will help us rely less on replacement techniques. There are many great articles that boil down the technical hurdles involved in doing so, but I wanted to tackle what happens to our designs once we have lots of typefaces to choose from. How do you choose typefaces that suit your site’s message? What technical and aesthetic attributes should you look for in a typeface? How do you harmoniously combine typefaces? These are just some of the questions I tackle in my article, and I hope this helps start the discussion of how web fonts will affect a visual design process.

And, this installment of ALA is a whiz-bang all web fonts issue with an article on how to spec typefaces by the talented Tim Brown: Real Web Type in Real Web Context.

If you love type, head on over and check out this week’s A List Apart.

by Jim Coudal

A rumor borne of children talking, what befell All Hallows’ walking
Whispers of “this boy I knew” who on a cold damp sidewalk laid.
Which house on which dark moonlit street, gifted him his final “Treat?”
A Taffy Apple sealed his fate, a “Trick” malevolently played,
 by deftly hidden razor blade.

What evil felled him lurks anew. Perhaps hid deep in Charleston Chew?
Does M&M stand for good? Or rather Murder & Maliciousness?
What vileness skulks in Tootsie Pop? Or sprinkled o’er a Lemon Drop?
Might Snickers creamy nougat hide a whipped suspiciousness?
 Is blight twixt Twix deliciousness?

So Child attend what you’re receiving, less tainted it by foul deceiving
make Chuckles cry or Pixies sick or unleash a beastly Gummi Bear.
Red Hots that leave the tongue inflamed or Jawbreakers that do as named.
Lest you deny and lack despair and Trick–or–Treat without a care,
 I have for you but just a prayer.

The orange moon is for the dying, deny their songs of baleful crying.
Don’t swap Hallow’s hay ride for one on a crepe-draped hearse.
And while in darkness and costume go, note what’s cheerful isn’t so.
As if an early death was not enough I pray you heed this verse,
 for fear of finding something worse.

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Jim Coudal runs Coudal Partners, The Deck, Layer Tennis and Field Notes. And he seems to have a particular fascination with All Hallow’s Eve.

by Khoi Vinh

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Khoi Vinh is the design director for NYTimes.com, and the author of Subtraction.com. He was born in Viet Nam and came to the United States when he was three.

written and designed by Rob Weychert

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Rob Weychert is a graphic designer, artist, and lachanophobe in Boston, MA. He almost never writes at robweychert.com.

by Liz Danzico

Footnotes

1. The original “how many licks” video aired in 1970. After the commercial aired, Mr. Owl became the mascot.
2. Students from Purdue University reported that a licking machine took an average of 364 licks to get to the center.

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Liz Danzico is part designer, part educator, part editor, and full-time dog owner who writes part of her time at Bobulate.

Though it will come as no surprise to those that know me, those of you that do not know me should know that I consider myself to be something of a nerd.

by Rob Giampietro

And so here I am, writing a piece about Halloween candy, and the obvious conclusion to draw is that I’ll be dedicating this space to the tart, two-flavored Wonka treat that goes by that description. Would you be wrong? Yes. While Nerds are delicious (and, I have it on good authority, nutritious), they are also, unfortunately, reminiscent of kitty litter, and, when dropped, as I did accidentally one Halloween in 4th grade, they form an motley constellation of unappetizing neon nuggets all across the kitchen floor.

No, there will be no crying over spilt Nerds here. My choice, instead, is the thinking man’s candy, the brain food packed in an orderly tube of tablets known in the U.S. as Smarties. Manufactured by Ce De Candy, Smarties were dozen or more pastel discs—their color was oddly reminiscent of both an Easter Bunny and a fancy sheet of flecked résumé paper—stacked into a striped log, and wrapped with a sheet of red-tipped cellophane. To finish, the wrapper was stamped with a circusy slab serif bearing the product’s name.

The Smarties package of my youth was an exercise in minimalism. Its graphic interest, the stripes of color, came directly from the different flavors inside. Its structural integrity came from stacking the tablets atop one another and twisting them tight. It’s as if Ce De Candy channeled Hideyuki Oka’s classic “How to Wrap Five Eggs” when they concocted the package. Today’s Smarties differ in one unfortunate respect: they depict the package on the package itself. Maybe it’s a symptom of our meta-obsessed times, or maybe it’s a fear of pure abstraction, but this minor graphic revision leaves the prospective Smarties consumer feeling a bit of the Dröste Effect with a dash of Cluckin’ Chicken thrown in for good measure.

Like its chocolate cousin M&Ms and unlike a Snickers bar, Smarties are meant to be munched in multiple bites. Though I knew kids who would gleefully consume the entire strip in a single mouthful, I always considered this approach “unsmart.” Better still was to savor each tablet or pop them like pills, or Tic Tacs. And, like Tic Tacs’ minty blast, the sour sizzle of Smarties was part of the treat. The candy’s British trade name, Fizzers, reflects this tasty fact. There was always a delicious frisson of excitement that came with leaving one on your tongue for awhile. The flavor of a Flintstones vitamin, but with none of the redeeming nutrients. Smarties were an unregulated drug, one no adult could take from us. Digging through my plastic pumpkin basket after a long night of Trick-or-Treating, I would set the chocolate aside, pluck out the Smarties, and gleefully eat them first.

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Rob Giampietro is a designer, writer and teacher who has a filing cabinet on the internet called Lined & Unlined.

by Mandy Brown

I remember the candy cigarettes most fondly, not because they tasted better, but because they were grown-up. Sticks of white sugar rested neatly in packaging that could have passed for the real thing. I could hold a candy cigarette between my fingers and perch on the curb—my too-long legs in front of me—and the driver in the passing car would open his eyes wide; I was seven going on seventeen.

It wasn’t long before candy cigarettes vanished from the aisles, sent off to the same warehouse where the toy-guns-that-looked-too-real went. They were too obvious a sign of our parents’ addictions, too easy a target for their guilt. And yet I’ve barely smoked a day in my life. Maybe practicing with candy eliminated the novelty; maybe all I ever really wanted was the sugar. I never held a candy cigarette long before eating it, and then it tasted like anything else: like candy hearts, or fun dip, or pixy stix. The packaging couldn’t change that—only my attention could.

And soon enough, that wavered; soon enough, I was seventeen, and it wasn’t as glamorous as I thought. I never long for real cigarettes, but I do sometimes pine for the candy ones—for the long days with nothing to do, and no one to be. For the illusion of vice without the consequences of it. I suppose that’s what it really means to be grown up. If only I had known.

Candygrams are odes to candy by guest authors during the month of October.

Mandy Brown is a Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company. She writes about books and the reading experience at A Working Library.

My first time speaking professionally in public was back in 2005 at the first An Event Apart in Philadelphia. While not my first time speaking in front of a big audience, it was the first time I had to prepare a slide deck and use Keynote.

Before and after view of a slide deck. On the left, you can see the bright red used to slides that need work, as well as black and grey for title slides, and blue for quotations.

Two basic rules: simple and big

When I use images, I almost always use them full screen and free of distraction.

Keep your title slides to a few words, then speak through the rest of the story.

A sample quotation slide.

Today, I’m very pleased to announce the launch of a new site I put together with the generous help of friends called Typedia. At its simplest, Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. Think of it as All Music or IMDb for type, but created and curated by everyone.

I can’t count how many times I’ve labored over looking for just the right typeface—from the right era, in the right style, or with just the right aesthetic qualities. This is often a frustrating process of hopping between sites and books with different criteria for organization, and most times, only involves the typefaces that a company sells. Typedia can be agnostic and unburdened to catalog typefaces from any library.

Because typefaces aren’t just pretty letters alone, but pieces of art that have distinct criteria, a more specialized tool is needed. The site is a wiki with structure, a “swiki” if you will. We’re dealing with similar subjects and shared parameters, so we can organize the form of that content, as opposed to a freeform essay-style site like Wikipedia. This allows us to basically make all the meta data into clickable tags.

Every time you attribute a designer or foundry to a typeface, a separate page is made for them as well. Typedia hopes to not only inspire people to learn more about the art of type design, but also to discover the underpinnings of it as well, like the type designers and the rich history itself.

The Long Road

The making of the site has been very much a labor of love, and I hope others see the same potential in it that I do. If nothing else, it fulfills my desire to work on stuff that matters and to learn more about type—something I have a very deep love for.

Though it has been in development for a couple years, many times we would have to put it aside for weeks and months while individuals pecked away at client work or start from scratch when we realized our system wasn’t as good as it could be. Sometimes people dropped out completely, and we had to find others to take over their roles. This has been a effort like I’ve never taken part in before and owes everything to the passionate people involved. Those very kind and talented folks are:

• Design: Me, Khoi Vinh, John Langdon (logo), Dan Cederholm (icons)
• Front-end code: Dan Mall, Dan Rubin
• Back-end code: Mark Huot, Brian Warren, Ryan Masuga, Ethan Marcotte, Aaron Gustafson, and Shaun Inman
• Information architecture: Liz Danzico
• Classification and Logic: Mark Simonson, Stephen Coles, Kristin Dooley

Getting Started

A site like Typedia is only as good as its members. So we made it dead simple to contribute. Creating an account is quick, and adding a listing for a typeface only has one required field, the name. Fill in any other information you know, and others will (we hope) help by filling in what you don’t. The site also has a neat feature called “Good Deeds” that highlights only what’s missing from listings so people can go in and fill in the missing pieces.

The “Learn” section has specific details on some of the more cryptic typeface terminology, like Typeface Anatomy or what those Typeface Classifications mean.

Behind the Curtain

Type classification has long been a contentious topic. No classification scheme works for all typefaces, so Typedia doesn’t aim to have it right from the start. But the most important thing is that this is a start, a work in progress. It’s not perfect, and there will likely be some discussion about how it can evolve. Organization is just one piece of this very big typographic pie, and we’re always open to discussing how to continue improving it.

After trying to build a custom backend couple of times, we realized we were wasting time rebuilding common site functionality and ended up using ExpressionEngine instead, albeit a seriously customized installation of it.

For now, we’re using Flash for type specimen display. It’s not unlike sIFR, though much more custom-tailored for our needs. We realize Flash isn’t the ideal way to display type, but after trying and evaluating all the solutions we could think of, Flash won out due to copyright concerns, consistent rendering, and flexibility. We hope to grow into a better solution someday.

The site is, and will always be, a work in progress. Some areas are still a bit rough, but we didn’t want to wait any longer to launch. We’ll continue tightening and improving things in the coming weeks, if anything seems wildly amiss, drop us a note.

Lastly, I just want to thank everyone who offered advice, helped test, or offered support over the years. I hope Typedia grows to be something great, but I consider it a success already to have come this far.

Please take a few minutes to poke around, read the story behind the Typedia logo (designed by the ridiculously talented John Langdon, who you may know best for his ambigram work in Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons), follow Typedia on Twitter, and take a shot at adding some typefaces.

I like to think of many of the things I collect as artifacts of creation; drawers that once housed metal type, cameras that require both patience and dexterity, and through their past use these items tell stories of their own operation and creation. They tell us how ideas take their first breath.

This typewriter is one such acquisition. I was lured in by its blood orange shell, but after cleaning it up and pecking out a few lines of text, something else happened. Using this obsolete machine gave me a new appreciation for its place and time. It has dozens of moving parts, each assigned to levers or keys by way of springs and hinges deep in its tangled metal innards.

This typewriter is a product of the technology and needs of its time. It was a stepping stone to the digital contraption I use everyday from a time when the input from finger to keys gave a direct physical output. How far removed from that am I now?

I had to spend time practicing typing again. The ideal page has even weight to each character, press too softly and you end up with grey letters, too hard and you deliver too much ink. I take the ease of use I enjoy today for granted. Take a moment to consider the things around you. Sit down and reconnect with an object. What can you learn from it? Does it inspire you?

Excuses, Excuses

Despite the temptations of ever-warming weather, I had to throw most of my free time towards a new presentation for An Event Apart and @media last week, and on a gameplan for teaching in the fall. Well, that and sometimes I just don’t have much of anything to say. Rather than drop posts on here that I don’t care about, I decided to take a few weeks away from this site to recharge.

The New Stuff

Last week, along with six other lucky souls, I was elected to the AIGA/NY Board of Directors. I’m seriously humbled to be asked, and also very excited to work with the local community of designers. I’m already brainstorming some interesting activities and events I can help organize, but if you’re a designer in NY and there’s something you want to see, drop me a line.

In case you’ve missed it, I’ve been working alongside the talented group at Small Batch on a new service called Typekit. We’ve been working with type designers and foundries to bring real fonts to the web, in a legal way that benefits everyone. This promises to be big fun. Follow along with the blog and Twitter for updates, or sign up and we’ll let you know when it’s live.

Lastly, somewhat thematically related, look for a long-teased type-related side project of mine to be launched in the coming weeks. Until then, I’m going to get back in the saddle and on to some more regular updates.

“

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.

”

—Douglas Adams, March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001

It was my pleasure to be interviewed last night by Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney, two self-proclaimed extremely passionate design students from the Savannah College of Art & Design, for their Read Between the Leading podcast. We had a nice chat about where I got my start, from school to my first job, and a good bit about the state of web design and where we’re headed.

Thanks very much to Aaron and Matt for having me on! Be sure to check out a few of the past episodes with some of my favorite designers: Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of UnderConsideration, Stephen Coles of Typographica, John Boardley from ILoveTypography, Mark Simonson, and Antonio Carusone of AisleOne.

You can listen (or download) my interview from the site. Enjoy!