Coming Together is a font consisting entirely of different ampersands designed created by 400 artists and designers to help the Haiti earthquake victims. It’s available for $20 from leading font distributors and all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.
The “Coming Together” font contains over 400 glyphs and is supplied as a single, cross-platform OpenType font. All glyphs are accessible using OpenType-savvy applications, Unicode-savvy utilities, the Character Map utility on Windows, and FontBook on Mac OS X.
This is the fourth Font Aid initiative by the Society of Typographic Aficionados, the first one in 1999.
While it’s a bit late to write about this, it’s never too late to help Haiti out. What is unfortunate, however, is that another major earthquake has struck, this time in Chile. Tsunami warnings have been hoisted across the Pacific as well. I hope the Type Society and other groups extend their help for this particular disaster too.
I’ll get straight to my answer: very.
More specifically, I’m quite excited about what this league is doing for a branch of typography which seems almost mythical. We know about paid fonts and free fonts, but what’s buzzing big right now is the use of fonts on the web with the emergence of @font-face embedding, webfonts, and services like TypeKit. But what about usage and modification of fonts in general?
The open source debate is always tricky when creative works are in question, but the case shouldn’t be different for typefaces. The League is going beyond that debate, but still has some tough questions to be answered:
Is open source typography important enough to fight for? Are we all brave enough to do something to change the status quo? Is the status quo okay, do we really need to change anything at all?
What is the status quo? If this 3-year old post is any indication, it looks like a sleepy town that needs some jazzing up. The Open Font Library is more closely linked to the open source software community than with the open source design community, but they mentioned Lettercase being a Github-like tool, so it looks like they’re taking steps towards that already.
Should we fight for open source typography and change the status quo? It could potentially compete alongside the hosted font embedding services and create a fine alternative for web designers using custom web fonts. Options are good.
Sound off with your thoughts there!
Meet Laika, a dynamic font that throws out typographical conventions out the window. Serif, sans serif, bold, italic, old style, or new—Laika can be anything you want it to be. Check out the video below or play with it yourself!
There is such a rigid and finite nature to typography that it is staggering to imagine what the implications of a “dynamic font” would be. Is this how future fonts will be made and how they will behave?
You can never run out of things to talk about when it comes to cascading style sheets or CSS, but lately there have been developments that are more than worth your while. CSS3 is slowly but surely becoming mainstream thanks to several browser updates, while the gurus continue to think up smart ways to code those stylesheets.
Update: Ajaxian blogs that WebKit will support CSS variables. Amazing news that has come out just in time with this blog post. I’ve listed it below as well.
Tools and Frameworks
I’m not going to mention every imaginable CSS framework and piece of software out there, but these are worth looking at.
Stylizer: Skybound Software comes out with perhaps one of the most interesting (read: intuitive) CSS editors to date. It helps that it has a free version with a 14-day trial for its Ultimate counterpart.
YAML: Smashing Magazine shows how it is possible to create a flexible layout using Dirk Jesse’s HTML/CSS framework called YAML. The YAML Builder is an excellent plus.
CSS Cacheer: Shaun Inman releases a mini-application for CSS caching.
Best Practices
Here are some great nuggets of advice that will help guide you when writing your own CSS.
Font Stacks: The Unit Interactive blog lists various scenarios in which you should order your CSS font stacks. A PDF file is available for download, too.
Fun With Floating in the Grid: Devlounge recommends several practical CSS classes and layout techniques to achieve hassle-free floats and grids.
Performance Testing: jpsykes reports how the different browsers fare using different CSS selectors and attributes.
Faux Absolute Positioning: A List Apart comes up with a new layout technique that does away with hacks.
Nesting Specifics: DZone goes into the nuances of CSS selector specificity.
CSS3 and Beyond
If you’re still hesitant to use CSS3, you might change your mind now that some of the most popular browsers are slowly incorporating support for it.
Firefox 3: Killian Valkhof and David Baron write about support for several CSS3 features in the latest version of Mozilla Firefox. These include ligatures, kerning, font-size-adjust, inline-block/inline-table, and even text-shadow—coming in Firefox 3.1. The complete list is on Mozilla’s official page.
Opera 9.5: The Opera Developer Community discusses the CSS3 features its own browser supports, namely, @media, text-shadow, opacity, HSL values, overflow-x/overflow-y, :firstof-type, :nthchild, -o-background-size. Not to mention HTML 5 elements and SVG. Don’t forget to check out Opera’s debugging tool, Dragonfly.
Safari 3 has been out for a while now, but it’s Internet Explorer that we’re really waiting for. Unfortunately, IE8 will continue to lag behind.
Qualified Selectors: Shaun Inman proposes a different breed of CSS selectors.
CSS Variables: David Hyatt announces that WebKit now supports CSS variables as documented here.
A great product sells itself. In the case of FontStruct, which is a Flash-based tool for font design, its creators took no chances and went all out to promote it in the latest issue of their email newsletter: one full page showing what you can do with FontStruct.
Beautiful fonts created with FontStruct are put on display using powerful praises.
(The image above emphasizes only one testimonial. It would be too long if I put everything on the right side in full size.)
This is how you sell your product. You show it in action. And because we’re talking about typography here, nothing goes with beautiful type better than beautiful words. It also happens to be the smartest way to spice up testimonials, or similarly short pieces of text.
As long as you build a good product, you won’t have to worry about either the by-products or marketing copy. I mentioned “by-products” because aside from being a web-based tool, FontStruct is also a user-generated website. I know user-generated sites suffer from high noise-to-signal ratios and people are starting to doubt the “wisdom of the crowds”. But in creative environments like FontStruct, you tend to attract talented producers and enthusiastic consumers. Especially when coupled with a tool that works well.
If you’re looking for cool new fonts to play with, try FontStruct. You’re in for a pleasant surprise.
