Mona Sans & Hubot Sans
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
Link tags: faces
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Jack Rusher ☞ Classic HCI demos
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
Our web design tools are holding us back ⚒ Nerd
A good ol’ rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.
Programming Portals
A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes
Fontshare: Quality Fonts. Free.
A whole lotta nice fonts—most of them variable fonts—from Indian Type Foundry.
Bunny Fonts | Explore Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
Folk Interfaces
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.
Now apply that to software:
Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.
Seb Lester’s Favorite Fonts
Seb picks his top ten typefaces inspired by calligraphy.
Why are hyperlinks blue?
A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.
Collecting my thoughts about notation and user interfaces (Interconnected)
HTML sits on a boundary between the machine, the creator, and the reader.
Our Favourite Uses of Typography in Watches
The typography of horology.
System fonts don’t have to be ugly /// Iain Bean
You don’t have to use web fonts—there are some pretty nice options if you stick to system fonts (like Georgia, Charter, and Palatino).
A tale of three skeuomorphs
A trashcan, a tyepface, and a tactile keyboard. Marcin gets obsessive (as usual).
The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf
I’d watch this game show:
Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.
Times New Arial
Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!
FEMME TYPE – Celebrating Women in the Type Industry
A treasure trove of case studies and interviews.
FontGoggles — Interactive Previewing and Comparing
A really nice open-source font-previewing tool for the Mac.
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.
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.