Posts Tagged: fonts

The billionaire’s typewritter

Practical Typography’s Matthew Butterick on Medium and other similar writing platforms:

We can’t say that Medium et al. are offering minimalist design. Only the veneer is minimalist. What they’re re ally offering is a shift from design as a choice to de sign as a constant. Instead of minimalist design, a better term might be homogeneous design.

Matthew is clearly anti-Medium with his stance here, and he goes onto attack many fronts; lack of typographic customization is just the beginning. Pro or con Medium as a publishing platform for the future, it’s nevertheless an excellent read.

The best UI typeface goes unnoticed

Designer Thomas Byttebier covers typographic basics for UI design. Spoiler alert: Helvetica gets some (well deserved) dings.

Typography cheatsheet

Excellent single source from Typewolf on how and where to add various special typographic characters. There’s grammar tips, examples to copy and paste, keyboard shortcuts, and HTML entities for the web.

Our favorite typefaces of 2014

For the record, I’ve dabbled with Skolar Sans on a side project and use Nitti Grotesk all the time within Writer Pro. Both are outstanding choices.

The ten most popular web fonts of 2014

Avenir and Proxima Nova still rank incredibly well.

Typographer’s typefaces

Type Worship’s Jamie Clarke:

Over four years and across eight issues we interviewed 64 world-renowned designers1, including; Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Michael Bierut, Nina Stössinger, Mark Simonson & Seb Lester, plus owners of respected type foundries such as, Font Smith, Type Together and Process Type.

We’ve counted the number of times each typeface was selected and found consensus with the top 25.

FontShop glossary

The next time you’re in a discussion about typography, for a design or other context, have this handy resource by FontShop handy. It’s a nice refresher on a lot of basic terminology, from ascenders to x-height.

Typeset In the Future: Alien

Another meticulously detailed Typeset In the Future post, this time about the use of Futura, Helvetica, and many other fonts in Ridley Scott’s Alien. The movie is a masterpiece of horror, sci-fi, and suspense, one of my favorite movies of all time. So it’s wonderful to see author Dave Addey geek out in such depth on small typographic cues contained all over the picture. It’s complemented with lots of freeze frames and behind the scenes knowledge.

Butterick’s practical typography: presentations

There’s many other aspects to recommend about Matthew Butterick’s wonderful book, but one of my favorites is this section, where Butterrick breaks down how to apply typographic principles to presentations. Given I teach courses part time, it really helped improve the quality of my work.

Input: fonts for code

I’ve traditionally been a big fan of the Meslo web fonts for coding, a variant of Apple’s ultra-popular Menlo. But that all changed when I discovered Input, a new set of fonts optimized for programming by Font Bureau. The glyphs and overall layout is gorgeous.

They offer a sans, serif, and monospaced version (I run with the default Input Mono set) and best of all, it’s free for private use.