Tags: faces

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.

briangonzalez/fontprep

The missing font generator for Mac OS X.

Very handy for subsetting fonts for the web. It doesn’t (yet) export WOFF2 unfortunately.

Beautiful web type — the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory

Many of the free fonts available from Google are pretty bad, but this site showcases how some of them can be used to great effect.