Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Dec
17
2007
at 2:15pm
Todays’s 24 Ways article, Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix is another take on listing the fonts available in different operating systems and encouraging designers to use a wider range of fonts. This is something I covered with my Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows (not sure what to think about the similarities there!). Obviously Richard Rutter knows a whole lot more about typography than I do so it’s good to have his take on this topic.
I was inspired to come up with my list after looking at the font stacks on Joe Clark’s site. Check out his typography stylesheet for some interesting ideas.
I find myself using the list I from my A Padded Cell article all the time now. Just today I added a few more options as a back-up for a heading that’s already replaced by sIFR. From the way I have it’s easy to pick one font from each column, although I find Rutter’s chart to be a lot cleaner and better as a quick reference (and he’s got Adobe fonts included). I thought a lot about the best way to display that information, especially since I wanted to include information about which fonts are near equivalents of each other, as originated here.
In an upcoming update to A Padded Cell I’m using this font stack:
"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode","Eras Medium ITC","Mg Open Moderna",Helvetica,Verdana,sans-serif
It’s working well so far but we need to do some more thorough testing before final release. I’ve also used that list to add some Linux alternatives to the font stack in various stylesheets I’ve come across at work.
If you’re finding my list to be useful I’d love to hear about it!
Posted in Design, Software, Web Standards | No Comments »
Nov
11
2007
at 11:11am
It’s finally finished! I’ve been working on this article off and on for months. It took a lot of research (especially when I didn’t have access to a Mac, and now when I don’t really have access to Windows), and a lot of messing around with sample graphics to get the sizing right. This is a complete (to my knowledge) list of fonts installed with OSX, Ubuntu (as a sample Linux distro), and Windows as well as MS Office.
I hope this list will make it easier for web designers to use a wider variety of fonts in their designs. There are really quite a lot of fonts available as long as you’re okay with things looking a little different on diffrent operating systems.
Enjoy!
Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows
Posted in Design | 1 Comment »
Nov
05
2007
at 3:58pm
Simplebits is on a 404 hunt. Others have already done some searching. But what have they come up with? Lots of “cool” examples of clever but completely useless things to do with 404 pages.
I really don’t get why it’s considered to be a good idea to do something silly/”cool” with a 404 page. At this point the user has encountered an error, and you’re not going to tell them what to do about it? This example (and others) actually tell the user to turn around and leave. Is that really what you want? They’re trying to find something on your site and you tell them to go away?
Read more…
Posted in Design | 1 Comment »
Oct
31
2007
at 1:10pm
When I checked the site stats last month on my (old) work site I found a big surprise. That’s right, 1280×800 had overtaken 1024×768 as the most common resolution. And not just overtaken it, but surpassed it by over 6%.
Note: All screenshots were taken on October 23, 2007.
Read more…
Posted in Design | No Comments »
Aug
24
2007
at 11:17am
Laura wrote me and asked why the three sites I have discussed so far in my Great Websites series use tables for layout. Good question! I did notice this about them when I first wrote up my crtiques, but it didn’t affect my decision to include them in the series (although I hadn’t put 2+2 together and figured out that all three were table based). Why? Because I was already drawn in to the site. That’s what really matters – the user experience. Who cares if the site is using tables for layout when the experience is that good? Read more…
Posted in Great Websites, Web Standards | 3 Comments »
Apr
19
2007
at 10:40pm
The wordpress theme I developed for tomorrow’s “Orange and Maroon Effect” webmaster challenge is now available for download. Here is a screenshot:
Here is the zip file and the tar.gz file.
I hope some of you have the chance to actually use it! And let me know if you have any problems. This is the first theme I have attempted to distribute. Also, I am really not sure about the copyright on the photo. Please let me know if you decide to use the theme so I can contact you if there are any problems regarding the photo.
With the exception of the photo, this theme is released under a Creative Commons Lisence
Posted in Design, General, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
