Chris’ Corner: Type Stuff!

Let’s do typography stuff!

• Video: “A live demo by me of early font editors on a real Macintosh Plus” by Mark Simonson
• Font: “Is this font easy for you to read? Good—that’s the idea.” Hyperlegible is the name of the font, designed for people with low vision.
• Technique: “Fluid typography means thinking in terms of type scales and flexible spacing across your defined design space.” Richard Rutter goes retrofitting a new type sizing technique into an old layout. Miriam is also thinking about all this. Richard also has a good one on avoiding faux bold, which has afflicted me many times. My hot take is that browsers shouldn’t do faux nuthin.
• Font: “To help young readers of all skill levels, we’re introducing Kermit, a child-friendly typeface created by the type design studio Underware.” It’s fairly pricey but I can imagine it being perfect for some projects. Like Comic Sans but cooler. P.S. you should really try Comic Code on CodePen, it’s awesome.
• Fonts: “UNCUT.wtf is a free typeface catalogue, focusing on somewhat contemporary type.” A lot of them are super similar which makes me wonder if many of them come from students taking a design class or something.
• Journey: “One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.” Marcin Wichary on Manhattan’s hardest working typeface.
• Performance: “… file sizes of web fonts? I personally don’t have a gut feeling how much is too much and how much is to be expected.” Stoyan Stefanov reckons 20k is fair.
• Behind the Scenes: “This meant that on web we could simply start our font stacks with Verdana, pick a couple of reasonable fallbacks, and get IKEA branding effectively for free.” IKEA didn’t end up using Verdana, but I wish they did, I kinda love it at small sizes. This is a great look at a major typographic choice at a major brand from Robin Whittleton.
• Technique: “…we added text-wrap: balance on WordPress.org, and quickly got community feedback that it led to awkward, unexpected breaks in Japanese and Korean.” Kelly Choyce-Dwan whips out stuff like word-break: auto-phrase; for the win.