Feb
26
2007
at 3:05am
Eric Meyer had a post last week about gender diversity in the Event Apart conference series. What he’s saying, basically, is that he doesn’t believe in recruiting female speakers just for the sake of gender diversity. They want to get the best people, and I totally agree with that. I certainly would not want to be part of any project or conference just because I’m a minority.
Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”
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Posted in Design, General, Web Culture | 3 Comments »
Feb
22
2007
at 7:56pm
Kathy Seirra has an interesting post about whether automated tools make us dumber. In the article she raises a number of examples, including web design:
But should a web designer need to be an HTML coder? Or can he just use a WYSIWYG tool? The debates still rage in the web development world, although the issue should be resolved soon enough. In desktop publishing, for example, you will never hear, “Oh, you can’t just use Quark or Adobe InDesign… you really need to tweak the Postscript by hand to do it right.”
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Posted in Design, Web Standards | 6 Comments »
Feb
19
2007
at 10:48pm
I came across Joe Clark’s site today, rather randomly through a series of links leading to his Letter to Tim Berners-Lee about WCAG 2. Check out the typography on there. Gorgeous, isn’t it? I’m not sure exactly what you’ll see, since he is using the new MS fonts for his body text and headers which not everyone has installed. I must say, they look nice (does anyone know what’s up with the smoothing on those? That’s new – is it a MS thing or are all fonts able to handle that now? I actually think they’re a little too smooth).
Here’s a screenshot for those of you who don’t have Cambria and Calibri installed (I can’t get the names of those two straight!). Check out his typography stylesheet too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an interesting set of font specifications in a stylesheet before. So many elements are very specifically defined, with many more options than what designers normally include. He’s also got a very different set of fonts listed for various elements. His main body font list is Cambria, “Hoefler Text”, Baskerville, “Palatino Linotype”, Garamond, “Lucida Fax”, Georgia, “Book Antiqua”, serif. Hmmmm…. interesting.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look quite as good on my Linux computer where the first available font is Georgia. It still looks nice though – classic typographic principles at work.
His header also works perfectly with the rest of the design even though it is using different typefaces. Brilliant! (although I do think the home page has a few problems…)
Anyway, I don’t necessarily think that typography is the most important thing, but it can really make (or break) a design, as we see here. Do you know of any other examples of outstanding web typography?
Posted in Accessibility, Design | 8 Comments »
Feb
19
2007
at 8:30pm
We just ordered it last night from The Linux Store. We were very happy to find a place that does Linux laptops in Canada. Otherwise I would have had to order from the US and pay customs fees which is a pain.
I’m getting a 15″ Lenovo 3000 N100 with a 1.6Ghz processor and 1gig ram. Ubuntu pre-installed. Liam has the email with the rest of the specs. It should be here in a few days!! Yay!
The computer I was using at home is 5 years old and I was really starting to get annoyed with it.
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
Feb
18
2007
at 3:19pm
Posted in General | Comments Off
Feb
16
2007
at 2:55pm
I’ve come across a few interesting posts on code validation & standards today. Roger Johansson says that Validation alone is not enough while Stuart Brown believes that Web Standards Don’t Matter (As much as you think). While I think Brown goes a bit too far in his post, I believe that his post has a point.
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Posted in Web Standards | 5 Comments »
