Adactio: Links

Visions - A Literary Science Fiction Magazine

This forthcoming sci-fi quarterly publication looks intriguing:

Each issue contains a part of a previously untranslated novel as well as essays looking at the world through the lens of different writers.

I’m loving their typeface. It’s called Marvin. It was specially made for the magazine, and available to download and use for personal use for free.

Marvin gets its distinctive voice not only from its Art Nouveau vibe but also from its almost geometrically perfect construction. Its roundness and familiarity with Bauhaus typefaces shows its roots in geometric sans serifs at the same time.

The story of its (re)construction is fascinating. (Thanks for the heads-up, Jason.)

User Interfaces for Variable Fonts · An A List Apart Article

A good introduction to variable fonts, and an exploration of the possible interface elements we might use to choose our settings: toggles? knobs? sliders? control pads?

If you really dislike FOUT, `font-display: optional` might be your jam | CSS-Tricks

Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional and font-display: fallback as well.

The Equilateral Triangle of a Perfect Paragraph | Better Web Type

This is a fun game (I scored a measly 73/100). The idea is to develop a feeling for the balance between font-size, line-height, and line length …just like the three sides of an equilateral triangle.

Too many of them still set line-height, font size and line width as independent features when in fact they should all be considered together. The equilateral triangle is a perfect representation of how the three features work in harmony.

Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO

Fontlandia is yours to explore.

By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.

Color fonts! WTF? 🌈

I only just wrapped my head around the idea of variable fonts and now here’s colour fonts to really mess with my mind.

Get started with variable fonts – Medium

Rich has posted a sneak peek of one part of his book on Ev’s blog.

A wonderfully thoughtful piece from Robin, ranging from the printing technologies of the 15th century right up to the latest web technologies. It’s got all my favourite things in there: typography, digital preservation, and service workers. Marvellous!

Google Noto Fonts

Google’s Noto (short for no-tofu; tofu being the rectangle of unicode sadness) is certainly ambitious. It has glyphs from pretty much every known alphabet …including Ogham and Linear B!

Accessibility Whack-A-Mole · An A List Apart Article

A fascinating piece by Eleanor on the typographic tweaking that the Wellcome team did to balance the competing needs of different users.

Tentacular: Douglas Coupland on Helvetica, clip art and the gangly beast that is the internet

Douglas Coupland on web typography.

When I discuss the internet’s feel and its random rodeo of fonts, I think of the freedom, naivety, laziness, greed, cluelessness and skill I see there — it’s a cyberplace as wondrous as the bubbling cradle of pea-soup goo from which life emerged. The internet has a rawness, a Darwinian evolutionary texture. It’s a place where metrics totally unrelated to print typography dictate the look and feel.

Web fonts, boy, I don’t know – Monica Dinculescu

Monica takes a look at the options out there for loading web fonts and settles on a smart asynchronous lazy-loading approach.

The scorpion express | Butterick’s Practical Typography

This is easily the most wrong-headed piece of writing I’ve read in a long time.

“But customers benefit from smaller file sizes too, because that makes web pages faster.” Certainly, that was true in 1996. And some web developers persist with political objections. But with today’s faster connections—even on mobile—optimizing for file size is less useful than ever.

I’ll leave it to you to see the logical flaws in every one of the arguments presented here by Matthew Buterick. Meanwhile I’m going to get off his lawn.

The Typekit Blog | Variable fonts, a new kind of font for flexible design

This is what Nick Sherman has been banging on about for years, and now the time has come for variable fonts …as long as typographers, browser makers, and standards bodies get behind it.

More details on Ev’s blog.

Webfonts on the Prairie · An A List Apart Article

A good ol’ polemic in favour of using web fonts. It’s a good read although I strongly disagree with this line of reasoning:

The average internet speed in the United States today is three times as fast as it was in 2011.

But that americentric view is redeemed later on:

The World Wide Web may be a creation of the West, but now, at long last, it needs to get ready for the rest.

I may not agree with all the points in this article, but I think we can all agree that if we’re going to use web fonts, we must use them responsibly …otherwise users are going to treat them as damage and route around them.

`font-display` for the Masses | CSS-Tricks

The font-display property is landing in browsers, and this is a great introduction to using it:

If you don’t know which option to use, then go with swap. Not only does it provide an optimal balance between custom fonts and accessibility of content, it provides the same font loading behavior that we’ve relied on JavaScript for. If you have fonts on the page that you’d like to have load, but could ultimately do without, consider going with fallback or optional when using font-display.

Until it’s more widely supported, you can continue to use a JavaScript solution, but even then you can feature detect first:

if ("fontDisplay" in document.body.style === false) {
  /* JavaScript font loading logic goes here. */
}

Tags: fonts

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