VOCAL
Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.
Link tags: faces
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Programming Fonts - Test Drive
Monospaced fonts you can use in your text editor. Most of them are …not good. But then there are gems like Mark Simonson’s Anonymous Pro, David Jonathan Ross’s Input, and Erik Spiekerman’s Fira Mono. And there’s always good ol’ Droid Sans.
What would a world without pushbuttons look like? | Aeon Essays
A history of buttons …and the moral panic and outrage that accompanies them.
By looking at the subtexts behind complaints about buttons, whether historically or in the present moment, it becomes clear that manufacturers, designers and users alike must pay attention to why buttons persistently engender critiques. Such negativity tends to involve one of three primary themes: fears over deskilling; frustration about lack of user agency/control; or anger due to perceptions of unequal power relations.
Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article
I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.
HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.
Font Playground — Play with variable fonts!
A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.
Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS — Smashing Magazine
Rachel goes into detail on how she uses pattern libraries—built with Fractal to build interfaces. I know it sounds like we paid her to say all the nice things about Fractal, but honestly, we didn’t even know she was writing this article!
After discovering Fractal two years ago, we have moved every new project — large and small — into Fractal.
Fonty: the new way for testing web fonts
This is very neat! Test out how Google Fonts will look on your website: type in your URL and away you go. Works well on mobile too.
Untold AI: The Untold | Sci-fi interfaces
Prompted by his time at Clearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet, Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence …and what stories are missing.
And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?
Fontjoy - Generate font pairings in one click
This looks like fun: it’s like a clever slot machine for pairing typefaces.
I thought the “machine learning” angle sounded like marketing bullshit, but it’s genuinely fascinating.
The Next Big Thing in Type
Over the course of a semester, students at UMPRUM Academy in Prague made variable fonts. I think Krabat might be my favourite.
Wakamai Fondue
A drag-and-drop tool for examining variable fonts (kind of like FontDrop but with more sliders to play with).
I didn’t get the name until I said it out loud.
Variable Fonts | DSType Foundry
Here’s an interesting twist on variable fonts: one of variable axes is serificity …serificousness …serifness. The serifs. The serifs, is what I’m trying to say.
One small point: it seems a bit of a shame that there are separate files for regular and italic—it would’ve been nice to have a variable axis for italicity …italicousness …ah, screw it.
Variable Fonts
A simple resource for finding and trying variable fonts.
The first visual identity for UK Parliament
Some lovely branding work for the UK Parliament, presented very nicely.
FontDrop!
A handy browser-based tool for examining font files to see which features they support.
It’s Dangerous to Go Stallone. Take Glyphhanger | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA
You’ll need to be comfortable with using the command line, but this is a very useful font subsetting tool from those clever folks at Filament Group.
V6: Typography and Proportions | Rob Weychert
Rob walks us through the typographic choices for his recent redesign:
Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.
Berlin Typography – Text and the City // Buchstaben und die Stadt
A blog dedicated to documenting the letterforms on display in Berlin.
Typography for User Interfaces | Viljami Salminen
The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.
Better Google Web Fonts
A single page showing all the weights available from Google fonts at a glance.