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Leading type designers love webfonts

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:10:08 PST

This year’s ATypI conference in Mexico was big on webfonts. FontShop celebrated this by putting together Webfonts Week, a series of interviews with leading type designers. There seems to be universal support for webfonts now, even from those who were dead set against it a year ago. This is obviously great news for web designers and font services such as Fontdeck (coming to a browser near you very soon).

Erik Spiekermann

It’s the difference between using software and owning it. What webfonts are doing is providing an engine to send fonts to a website, which is like sending ink to a printer. For any designer out there, it’s a tremendous service to be able to have any font in the universe without committing to the cost of buying a font. Services that hold the fonts on a server somewhere, on call for me as a designer, will send them to the website that I’m designing. To me as an old guy, that is like how we used to use a typesetter. The difference is that I used to have to sketch out the design for the typesetter. For a designer now, it’s a godsend to see how it will appear in real life.

David Berlow

Print is a wonderful stable medium, and turns out the web is a wonderful unstable medium. Type on the web is continuously needing to be improved; over the next 2 or 3 years at least we’re going to see a lot of fonts revving and re-revving to keep up with the process.
I’m much more enthusiastic about web fonts. A year ago I was the king of denial but now technology people and type people have moved much closer together. We’re going to support whatever is required by our users. If our users want to address every single browser then we’ll address every single format those browsers require. This will not be done by them, it will be done by us because we license designs, we don’t license formats.

Christian Schwartz

The WOFF format is such a huge step forward. It offers that small bit of protection without being DRM that will make type designers comfortable with letting their work out into the world on the Web.
What I’m really excited about is the opportunity to embrace the new technology and finally have a framework for designing screen fonts that will actually get used […] I’m very optimistic about that. Because when was the last time you had a new medium to play with? It’s an exciting time.

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18 months of beagle ownership

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:14:41 PST

Poppy is 1½ today. She’s my first dog, and it’s been a wonderful, if occasionally trying experience for both Her Indoors and me. The Wikipedia article on beagles gives some agreeable insight into the ups and downs of beagle ownership. This sums up Poppy perfectly:

The Beagle has an even temper and gentle disposition. Described as “merry”, they are amiable and generally neither aggressive nor timid. They enjoy company, and although they may initially be standoffish with strangers, they are easily won over. They make poor guard dogs for this reason, although their tendency to bark or howl when confronted with the unfamiliar makes them good watch dogs. In a 1985 study, the Beagle was given the highest excitability rating.

Merry, easily won over and highly excitable all sound about right to me. But she’s not exactly the most obedient dog in the world. I blame my lack of ability to train her, but this uncanny description provides some crumbs of comfort:

Beagles are intelligent, but as a result of being bred for the long chase are single-minded and determined, which can make them hard to train. They are generally obedient but can be difficult to recall once they have picked up a scent and are easily distracted by smells around them. They do not generally feature in obedience trials; while they are alert, respond well to food-reward training, and are eager to please, they are easily bored or distracted.

Single-minded and determined, difficult to recall, easily distracted by smells. Sounds like my Poppy!

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The postcode lookup pattern

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:36:13 PST

The UK has a particularly precise postcode system, where a postcode such as BN2 1NA represents just 20 individual properties. The postcode database was created by the Royal Mail and it is sold for use by anyone whose willing to stump up the cash (why we should pay for something our taxes have created is a whole other argument). The upshot is that many websites which require an address from users will provide an ajax postcode look-up as part of the process.

However the postcode look-up is fraught with danger and is rarely implemented well. As is often the case in UX design, everything is fine until an exception is reached. I’ve created an interactive wireframe to demonstrate a successful way to integrate a postcode look-up as part of an address input scenario. This is the user flow diagram:

User flow of ajax postcode look-up for address entry

The important bits are the arrows on the edges dealing with the deviations away from the successful look-up through the middle. Commonly implementations miss out at least one of these:

allowing users to skip the lookup altogether (maybe the user doesn’t know their postcode)
helpfully dealing with a failed lookup (edit the postcode or skip the lookup – often databases are not kept up to date and so valid postcodes are not recognised)
allow users to type a different postcode (their work address instead of their home address)
deal with addresses not present in the list returned
allow users to edit the address returned from the database

All this does raise the question: who does the postcode look-up help? Probably not the person filling out their address. Regular web users will be able to input their addresses more quickly by typing directly than through use of a postcode lookup. This is particularly true if they are using the form filling functionality available in all modern browsers and many plug-ins. Postcode lookups may well get the website cleaner data, but probably not by much. Either way, more attention needs to be given to the postcode lookup experience and flow.

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Immediate impressions on the new iTunes 9

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:54:47 PST

I’m live blogging my experience of the new iTunes version 9 – as I explore a new feature I’ve written in here. I didn’t think I’d care much, but there’s a few things I need to get off my chest.

iTunes LP

iTunes LP is apparently the ‘best thing to happen to fandom’ and will make you ‘become an even bigger fan’ whatever that means. What they’re trying to do with these is give you back some of the things you’re missing when you buy digital music instead of physical media: sleeve notes, lyrics, artwork, etc. You might also get a few more extras like video clips, so it’s basically a DVD album. This is a good thing; I’ve written before about the shortcomings of digital media.

Call me a snob (and I’d be hard pressed to disagree), but I do object to the name iTunes LP. I still buy LPs. Vinyl pressing quality is at an all time high, particularly with the increase of double and triple disk albums (as a rule, less music pressed onto one disk increases quality). Nowadays LPs tend to be marketed as luxury items and often come in fabulous gatefold packaging, giving you a wonderfully tangible 4 square feet of artwork. A DVD it isn’t.

And let’s say I wanted to specifically buy an iTunes LP from the iTMS – how the hell do I do that? There’s no category for such things, at least not one that I can find. Maybe it’s down to Apple’s usual neglect for its European customers.

iTunes Home Sharing

Initially I didn’t quite get Home Sharing. The only real benefit seems to be that you can import from a library on one Mac to another, and automatically add new purchases made on any of the (up to five) computers in your home. Thinking about it more, it will be handy to easily see items not in one library but in another and just click ‘Import’.

What I really want to do is synchronise my iTunes libraries – in particular ratings and playlists – and Home Sharing doesn’t do that.

Redesigned iTunes Store

I’m not sure if the redesign has improved the usability much (I’ve never had any major complaints, but I’m not exactly an iTMS power user). It does look a bit prettier.

But who the hell came up with ‘iTunes U’? Yuk. On closer inspection it seems to contain a lot of educational material, so perhaps the ‘U’ refers to the rating or is some hideous abbreviation of University. Either way at first glance it sounds like a bastardised ‘My iTunes’ whatever that would be.

iTunes Extras

Extras seems to be fixing for films what iTunes LPs are trying to fix for music, ie. give you access to content you would normally get on a DVD. About time too.

Genius Mixes

At first Genius Mixes weren’t there. According to the help ‘to play a Genius Mix: on the left side of the iTunes window (below Genius), click Genius Mixes’. I had to force a Genius Update to get this option to appear. Once the Genius Mixes had arrived, I was quite impressed. I love using Genius Playlists, and Mixes are very similar except they are not based on an individual song, but are more like a genre-based Last.fm station, in as much as they still play related tunes (from your library), but you can’t see or edit what’s coming up.

For example I’m currently listening to “Alternative & Punk Mix 5, based on: Fleet Foxes, Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, & others”. Judging from that title, iTunes Mixes may be based on the genres specified in your library, although I hope not because my genres are all over the place, as I suspect are many people’s.

Improved syncing

I forgot my phone this morning so I can’t really comment on whether the syncing is better or not. Although I do like the idea of organising and arranging my iPhone apps within iTunes rather than struggling to do it with my finger on the phone.

New column view

I’m not convinced about the new default layout, with artists down the left side. It doesn’t leave enough room for the info I like to see and I like to be able to easily select individual albums. Admittedly the new layout does feel I little more like navigating folders in the column view of Finder. No problem though as there’s the option in the View menu to put it all back how you had it before.

Fixing the store arrow

This isn’t a new feature but a reminder of an old hack from the days of version 4.5. The little arrows which show up upon selecting something in column view by default go to iTMS. You can option-click these arrows to go the album or artist in your library instead. If, like me, you think the option-click method should be the standard, quit iTunes, open a Terminal window, and type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

That hint courtesy of Mac OS X Hints.

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Talking Type and Design at South by Southwest

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:22:14 PST

Talk of South by Southwest seems to come around quicker each year. I’m already looking forward to heading back to Austin, not least of all because I may get the chance to be on a couple of great panels (please cast a thumbs up if you like the sound of the panels).

First up is Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck? with Alan Colville, Jon Tan and Giles Colborne. We’ll be looking at three cool websites that turned into car wrecks and discuss what went wrong and how disaster could have been avoided. We’ll have some fun ripping apart the good-ideas-gone-bad, disastrous user experience and shoddy implementation, but more importantly we’ll try to get across where and how all of these things could be avoided and how you can stop your website heading the same way.

I also hope to be joining Jon on Get Your Glyph On 2, a reprise of our typography panel from last year, in which Elliot Jay Stocks, Ian Coyle, Jon and I were admirably moderated by Samantha Warren. There’s been an awful lot of movement on web typography this year, particularly with the impending arrival of font services such as Fontdeck, so we’ll have a load to talk and argue about.

The SxSW panel picker also reveals a few other very promising web typography panels:

Jason Cranford Teague, formerly editor of the CSS 3 Fonts Module, is proposing a talk on Fluid Web Typography: Many Types, Many Faces
Bram Pitoyo has put together a must-see panel Web Developers, Type Designers & Browser Supporters: Ally! featuring representatives from Kernest, Typekit, type designer Mark Simonson and potentially John Dagget from Mozilla and Thomas Phinney formerly of Adobe.
The inimitable Roger Black is also getting in on the act as moderator of Web Fonts: The Time Has Come with some excellent panelists including Font Bureau’s David Berlow, Stephen Coles of Typographica, W3C’s Bert Bos and Jeffrey Zeldman.

More panel worthy of your thumbs up are:

Fellow Clearleftie Andy Budd has two excellent proposals, Seductive Design: Making Sites Your Users Fall In Love With and Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!
Another fellow Clearleftie, Cennydd Bowles has a really top notch presentation on Beauty in Web Design in which he discusses making websites beyond just cool, fun and useful, but things of beauty too.
Fellow Brightonian and superb speaker, Aral Balkan is proposing User Experience: Remember the Magic in which he will present a A Tarantinoesque journey to remind you of the joy, fun, and passion – the magic – behind why we do what we do.
HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches will be Opera’s Bruce Lawson and feature Accessibility ninja Steve Faulkner and jQuery warrior Remy Sharp
Erin Malone is proposing SocialMania: Designing Social Interfaces – The Game covering designing social interfaces through interactive, collaborative gameplay.
Jeffrey Zeldman is proposing New Publishing and Web Content, a fascinating sounding panel exploring the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of traditional and internet hybrid book publishing.
Christopher Fahey also has an excellent list of UX-related panels, including his own on The Human Interface, in which he will urge UX designers to stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.

Panel or not, I’m sure I’ll end up at South by Southwest again next year, so hopefully I’ll see you there too.

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