Tim Brown: Typography & Web Design

Notes & Bookmarks

• Get notified about new notes & bookmarks: RSS feed. More→

• WestCiv CSS Wiki

  Mon, Jul 21

• Pixar's tightknit culture is its edge

  On a smaller scale, this is how I feel about working at Vassar - our culture of learning to be better web designers.

  Sat, Jul 19

• 280 Slides

  "Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world [...] there's no software to download and nothing to pay for."

  Mon, Jul 14

• Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3

  Ralf Hermann's screenshots of browser-typeset text with kerning and automatic ligatures.

  Fri, Jun 20

• @font-face survey results from Ralf Hermann

  "The new font embedding feature introduced with Safari 3.1 has already caused heated debates in the type industry. But what do web designers think about it? Do they want to use it? Will they be willing to pay for webfonts?"

  Sat, May 10

• Hypsometry. On tradition, harmony, pitch, the atonal, typography, Fibonacci, and coincidence.

  In the aforemarked OmniTI post, Tan mentions that he, "used a traditional scale," as explained here.

  Sat, May 10

• A Site for Sore Eyes: OmniTI

  Wonderful work from Jon Tan. Pay special attention to the short section on "Typography & Palette."

  Sat, May 10

• Vassar College is looking for another Web Designer

  Mini portfolio and job description. Vassar Web Development isn't a typical in-house shop - we have four web designers on staff already. You can be our fifth. Makes for awesome collaboration, and your specialties and interests help shape your projects. Apply!

  Tue, May 6

• Daring Fireball Linked List: April 2008

  John Gruber offers a great introduction to a Typophile thread in which folks react to Apple's claim that, "Web Designers Can Post ‘Any Font’ for Use With Safari."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Free fonts for @font-face embedding

  "Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. FDI fonts.info believes in the future of web fonts, so we decided to provide webdesigners with a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Beware the New New Thing

  Damian Kulash Jr. argues, "It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online."

  Sun, Apr 27

• Font Creators Need To Make Up Their Minds

  Bill Hill, head of Microsoft's Typography group, urges the font industry to address for-web licensing, and makes a case for Microsoft's EOT embedding technology.

  Wed, Apr 23

• Figuring It Out: OSF, LF, and TF Explained

  The FontFeed's Ivo Gabrowitsch differentiates between oldstyle, lining, proportional, and tabular figures.

  Sat, Apr 19

• Speak Up - Ethan Bodnar, Underage Designer?

  Some very nice posters.

  Wed, Apr 16

• Textism: Renderance

  "Safari evidently has no trouble rendering [...] but it ignores the font’s metrics and kerns letter pairs. Firefox [...] won’t render [...], however the kerning seems to be respected."

  Mon, Apr 7

• Pattern Tap

  Subscribable sets & collections of website design patterns. "Find thousands of design solutions to inspire your work."

  Sun, Mar 16

• hCardMapper

  From a form page, allow folks to point to their online hCard to auto-fill the form. John Allsopp points out that it could be especially useful, "with mobiles, and other devices (like the Wii) where input is more of an effort."

  Sat, Mar 8

• Yahoo! Microsearch

  John Allsopp describes it as, "an experimental search engine that in addition to traditional search techniques, extracts microformats and other metadata (RDF and RDFa) from pages to help improve search quality." Try searching, "John Allsopp" to see microformatted results.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Preparing for HTML5 with Semantic Class Names

  Start using HTML 5 today (kinda) by using classes that will eventually be replaced by new elements: header, nav, section, article, figure, dialog, aside, and footer.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Universal Web Type

  Jon Tan argues that, "we don’t just need standards for layout and object rendering, but also a standard type library that is universally available to all." He also explains how it's a different issue than @font-face.

  Sat, Mar 8

• Leveraging our collective knowledge

  The decision that we each make, to share our gifts and our energies, is one that I personally revere, appreciate, and hope to encourage. That’s where Nice Web Type comes in. Wed, Dec 19

• Moment of clarity

  One day, and that day may not be soon, the thoughtful, imperfect projects I shoulder from dawn until dreary rest are going to fall to earth with a satisfying thump. Tue, Nov 27

• One place for web typography

  Nice Web Type will aggregate collections of links, step-by-step technical advice, blog posts, articles, exemplary work, and more – those isolated, bountiful resources we have all known and loved. Wed, Oct 3

• Web Patterns + Sandbox + Wordpress

  Quick thought: it would be really cool if someone cross-bred a lite-CMS engine and a library of markup frameworks based on Web Patterns ... Wordpress + Sandbox + Web Patterns anybody? Sat, Jun 16

• Blogging with Ma.gnolia

  Bookmarking things in Ma.gnolia is nearly effortless and is a huge efficiency for me because it helps me remember, sort and share things both inside and outside of the Ma.gnolia website. Treating bookmarking like blogging works for my style of information sharing. Thu, Jun 7

Search provided by Rollyo.

Notes and bookmarks are somewhat ephemeral, but Ma.gnolia’s “saved copies” provide an extra layer of potential permanence. More→

About tbrown.org

This website is a product of Tim’s desire to organize and share ideas, resources and creative inspiration.

Notes & bookmarks are a Yahoo Pipes mashup of RSS feeds from Tim’s Ma.gnolia bookmarks and tbrown.org’s WordPress blog. In addition to visiting tbrown.org, you can subscribe to any of several XML feeds.

You might have noticed that tbrown.org uses microformats (which is a fancy name for common kinds of information marked up in common ways). Adhering to these small conventions allows specific details in a text to be drawn out and used by web services, search robots and visitors like you. Check the notes & bookmarks for more.

This site’s CSS suggests typefaces in the Lucida and Verdana families. Colors were inspired by Hermann Zapf’s Ein Arbeitsbericht. Content can be multi- or single-column to fit your browser. Dimensions are em-based to preserve text measure, try resizing the text.

Last, please note this site’s Creative Commons License.