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.
Haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit quite yet? Perhaps these design and development focused advent calendars will do the trick. Come to think of it, it should do even more than that; you get a treat every single day for 24 days straight. Sounds even better than Christmas day? Almost.
This site may not have started the “geeky” advent calendar trend, but it has certainly built an excellent reputation and tradition for web designers everywhere. The design continues to be cutting edge and inspiring as well.
All PHP, all holiday season long. See also the Perl Advent Calendar. (There’s a Rails one too, but the original post seems to be missing now.)
Few things are better than a holiday sale, and this advent calendar themed bazaar by SitePoint looks great. The format is pretty clever too: each offer lasts for only 24 hours, and you won’t know what products come on next.
Here’s one for the WordPress lovers, made by no less than WP Engineer. I hope that next year this becomes a community-wide effort as with the PHP Advent Calendar. Archive here.
A great crash course, if you will, into everything about social media. Not quite for designers or developers, but a great resource nonetheless.
Lists done better?
Writing this article made me realize this could actually be a way to create better list articles. Instead of cramming everything in and bombarding your readers with one long, heavy post, create a series. Exercise patience and restraint on your part and theirs. Keep them coming back for more.
Once you’ve reached your quota, do a round-up, and store the past articles in a safe place. They can even be realigned or revisited (hopefully not like recycled fruitcake, mind you) when the holidays come around again. Of course you can write all year long, but the idea is also avoiding predictability and knowing when to make things special.
And speaking of which, may you all have a special holiday season this year!
Here’s a great deal you don’t see everyday: SitePoint is letting you purchase 5 e-books for the price of 1 (that’s $29.95) and one hundred percent of the proceeds will be donated to the victims of the bushfires in Australia.
So we’re taking one day, working around the clock to plan, package, and execute our best book deal ever in order to raise funds for the Red Cross as soon as possible. Our ambitious plan is to raise over US$50,000. Every single cent generated from this promotion will go directly to the bushfire relief effort—so if you spend $29.95 purchasing 5 books from SitePoint, the whole $29.95 will go directly to supporting this cause. We feel that’s the least we can do.
The bushfires have already taken hundreds of lives just these past few days. But admirably enough, the SitePoint folks have come up with this selfless deed and at the same time managed to reward others who contribute to it. All in record time—this promo launched only a few hours ago.
It helps that digital products like e-books (and other downloadbles like songs and movies) cost practically nothing to distrbute. Of course one would rather leaf through real paper in a book, but getting hold of the information contained in the book matters more.
More importantly you’re donating to charity and getting rewarded for it. And unlike other products, all of the proceeds go straight to the victims. Not just a fraction. Which means you don’t even have to be interested in the books they’re selling; you can always find someone else who is.
So the customers get books, the victims get help, and SitePoint gets what, exactly? The satisfaction that it’s helping people in deep trouble. And, eventually, the reputation that it’s that kind of company. And knowing that, wouldn’t you want to do business with them again?
The offer ends on February 13. Buy now!
(Disclaimer: I’m not being paid by SitePoint to write this.)
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