Type is a guide through the history of our letters and a study of their power. From fashion through propaganda and the development of mass literacy, author Simon Loxley shows how typography has changed our world.
A better-late-than-never post on a game played by Tim Van Damme, Elliot Jay Stocks and Sam Brown (i’m sure there are plenty more people playing the game!).
Simply go to your browser, type in the letters A-Z and blog the results. So here are mine:
But rather than just knock them up in a UL like some, and being that kind of person I had to make an ordered list and use capitalised letters. The CSS to do that is:
.alphabet-list{list-style:upper-alpha}
So play along and leave your results as a comment!
Merry Christmas everybody! After a short delay due to a holiday, the December wallpaper is now live. The wallpaper is based on a present, complete with wrapping paper, ribbon and tag.
The tiling pattern is actually based on the Koch Snowflake. It’s mathematical basis allows it to be tiled in a number of ways, which can be seen on this Wolfram Alpha page.
I’m really excited with the possibilities 2010 brings, so expect more wallpapers, blogs and other goodies still in the pipeline.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate all the comments and tweets and wish you all a Merry Christmas.
I hope you like the wallpaper. If you have any feedback or messages, please do leave a comment below.
After becoming increasingly interested in typography, I felt I needed a book that set out the fundamentals. After doing some research, I found Thinking with Type: A critical guide for designers, writers, editors and students.
This book is divided into three main sections, Letter, Text and Grid. Starting off with a little history lesson on letterforms, leading into the anatomy of type with great examples along the way. It then goes into more detail, covering spacing and alignment, followed by layouts and grids.
After a brief, one month absence the monthly wallpaper is back!
The November 2009 wallpaper is very minimalist, based on a simplistic pixel grid, inspired by the recently launched cleartypemedia.com. The font is the fantastic Vegur (Extra Light) Don’t worry if this isn’t your cup of tea—expect a festive theme for December!.
I hope you like the wallpaper. If you have any feedback or messages, please do leave a comment below.
Whenever I start a new project, I seem to be repeating myself when it comes to adding, and styling basic content: Headers, Lists and Tables etc.
So I decided to create a ‘Kitchen Sink’ of markup and basic styling, using some content from the great HTML-Ipsum.com plus a few extra bits.
This is a topic I recently tweeted about, and one I think we forget about sometimes:
As designers, our job is to make our work invisible. Good design just looks ‘right’ without being obvious to the user. Without fuss.
For a while now, my Twitter description has read like this:
A web designer and developer from the UK. I occasionally blog, frequently tweet and often procrastinate.
The last part couldn’t be more true. With RSS feeds, Twitter and other social media, lots of time can be spent keeping up-to-date and researching – but it really boils down to procrastinating (postpone doing what one should be doing).
With the immediacy of these social media, links can come in at any time, easily distracting you away from the current task in hand. Staying ‘in the zone’ can be hard with tweets popping up and other distractions such as IM, text messages and phone calls; chances are you are reading this when something more important needs to be done.
Taking a dedicated hour out of your day to deal with these can help alleviate this. You’d be surprised how non-urgent reading your tweets are when you don’t do it for a few hours.
So turn off your Twitter client, IM and sign out of anything which could ‘pop-up’ during your day and give it a go, perhaps taking time out in the morning and afternoon to check-up and see what’s gone on in the real world and see if your productivity increases.
I have now (soft) launched the site in time for ScrunchUp.com‘s first edition, but I won’t lie, finding the time to work on my personal site has been tricky, and the version you see today will no doubt change in the coming weeks (just after I’ve had some sleep!).
In doing the redesign, the style changed at many stages, although most never made it past a quick Photoshop mockup. I knew I wanted a change, as I felt my style evolved, and the previous incarnation was no longer suited.
I had been working on this current style on-and-off for the past month or so, and I thought I had nailed the look and I eagerly began converting it to XHTML/CSS.
Now at this point, if your client asks for changes this late in the stage, you ask yourself why the designs were signed off in the first place. But I was one of those clients!
The change of look came about after watching graphic designs videos on YouTube late one night. Afterwards, I was sketching s few logos, playing around with my initials and left it at that. the following day, I has only planned to make some PhotoShop versions of thr sketches for Flickr, but that soon turned into a major brand redesign. I had some positive feedback decided to bite the bullet and change my ‘brand’.
My old logo was Georgia based, and the site redesign focused on serif headings with additional touches of Adobe Caslon Pro. The new logo wasn’t going to match with the site. I had a dilemma.
Cue a week of frantic typographic redesigning and colour scheme changes; gone is the light brown, red and green in comes red, white and black.
I hope you like the redesign, but please bear in mind that the site is not 100% finished, and there are plans to add more in the coming weeks and months.
For September, I was inspired by the work of Andy Gilmore and created this months wallpaper around the geometric styling of his work.
