陳 Jon Tan

SxSW Pick ’n’ Mix for 2010

Jon 陳 — Fri, 4 Sep 2009 14:32:06 GMT

I know I’m woefully late. Voting ends today! I don’t really mind, though. It embodies this restful period I’m having. However, I did want to write a bit about SxSWi 2010. I loved Austin when I went for the first time earlier this year. Perhaps it was the grumpy dude at Bobalu on 6th street making cigars by hand who Matthew Smith and I visited on a leisurely stroll. Perhaps it was sharing a room with Chris and Elliot. Maybe it was the Brit invasion. It could even have been the polar bear nochalantly strolling down 6th Street.

I’m hoping for a return visit to Austin from March 12th to the 16th, next year. If you have the chance to go, go! You honestly won’t regret it. This post is part plea for your endorsement and part top picks from some friends who were panelists last year, with some juicy bits thrown in at the end. Panel voting ends today!

Homemade sweets:

View and endorse

Web Typography: Get Your Glyph On 2

I was so surprised at how packed the room was last time out. In the last few months, we’ve seen Kernest, TypeKit, and Fontdeck emerge (I should mention I’m invloved with the latter). Proposals have been flying around like chilli in a Singaporean kitchen. Foundries and designers are optimising for the Web. It’s all about to explode, beautifully. Who knows what the next six months will bring. We’ll try and explore it all. Richard, Elliot, Samantha, and I will be pontificating and hosting the discussion again. Join us!
View and endorse

Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck?

Behind the ominous title are a few simple questions that have plagued many a good idea for a web project: How can ideas be successfully brought to life by design? Why do so many good ideas fail, and how can designers help make a good idea become a good product? Join Giles Colbourne, Rich Rutter (penciled in), Alan Colville and I for a few insights into successful collaboration. We are (in order) user experience designers, a UX designer who used to be a product manager, and a web designer. We don’t necessarily share the same viewpoint; should be fun!

Friends’ favourites:

View and endorse

Where the Sidewalk Ends

‘I’m really intrigued by Where the Sidewalk Ends because I’m fascinated by the difference between good design and great design — a concept I personally find very difficult to put into words — so it’ll be interesting to see what sort of definitions the panel come up with.’

—Elliot Jay Stocks
‘My #1 panel for SXSW 2010 is Where the Sidewalk Ends. I am really in favor of seeing more design thinking content at SXSW, not just web design content and feel confident that anything these guys would talk about would leave me feeling reinvigorated.’

—Samantha Warren
View and endorse

Secrets of Open Source Communities

‘For me, it’s Secrets of Open Source Communities mainly because I’m trying to build a FOSS community around Spaz and SpazCore. As the project lead, I find it challenging to know how to encourage involvement, manage devs, and work with commercial interests.’

—Ed Finkler
View and endorse

Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real?

‘Accessibility is so often portrayed as a boring subject, so I’m excited to see some interesting accessibility panels proposed. My #1 pick would be Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real?, which touches on the Mobile Web and geolocation, which should be very interesting, even for beginners.’

—Jon Gibbins
View and endorse

Delight

‘Delight, inspiration, pleasure are all words that we as designers strive to deliver. However, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of needs, delight is often hard to achieve. So, I’m very interested in hearing how to replicate delight first time and every time.’

—Alan Colville
View and endorse

Design Thinking: Create Lasting Ideas and Better Brands

‘I’m a huge advocate of the idea that design is about problem solving more than about exercising one’s visual skills. Design Thinking is a topic that parallels some of the work of Edward DeBono who promotes thinking as an exercise you should practice to perfect. I don’t plan on just designing pretty things the rest of my life, I want to effect change, I want to solve real problems, and I think Design Thinking is addressing that. Plus I’m hoping Ian Coyle will sign my chest.’

—Matthew Smith

Other sugary treats:

View and endorse

Social Web Security: From Psychology to Programming

Put Ed Finkler, Simon Willison, Alex Payne, and Chris Shiflett in a room together. It’s like a talent and experience super collider. Have them talk about where user experience and security overlap. It can’t be anything but interesting.
View and endorse

Travelog With Maps: When 1000 Photos Aren’t Enough

Maps, pictures, and GPS. I’ve seen the little app that luminary developers, Andrei Zmievski, Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, and Chris built for their trip to Iceland. It’s a wonder. Definitely worth a vote if you’ve ever wanted a better way to record your travels.
View and endorse

New Publishing and Web Content

The future of publishing is a subject I find fascinating. I wrote a piece for OmniTI around it, and with Jeff Zeldman hosting a panel on the topic, there’s bound to be some erudite opinion.
View and endorse

Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

When it comes to designers who know about publishing, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable than Roger Black. I’m curious who else might appear, but I’ll be there, regardless. Definitely worth your vote!

For more hand-picked goodness, there’s Joe Leech’s south west picks, and to give the Brit contingent in general some love, see the 60 Brit panels in a handy list from Chinwag. For the designers reading this also see Ian Coyle’s panels for designers, or Samantha Warren’s top ten panels.

Thanks to everyone who made ‘South-by’ such a blast last time, and here’s to seeing you there in 2010!

Review: HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions

Jon 陳 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:27:52 GMT

I’m so glad that this book exists. I’ve been hoping someone would write a book almost exactly like this for a long time. I have to be honest, when I first heard about it I sighed a little. Part of it was the word ‘standardistas’ in the title which made me wince a bit. The other part was wondering if this wasn’t just another book to add to the pantheon of web standards texts that have been published in the last few years. Yes, cynical, I know. However, I was wrong. After being approached by one of the authors, the publishers, Friends of Ed, kindly sent me a review copy. It took me a long while to get around to reading it after the carnage of the last few months, but I can honestly say that HTML and CSS Web Standards Solution: A Web Standardistas’ Approach is excellent.

The authors are Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson — both lecturers in interactive design at the University of Ulster. As they make clear in the introduction, they wanted to:

…cover everything our students needed to embark on a well-grounded, web standards-based approach in one package: namely, a solid foundation in XHTML coupled with a comprehensive introduction to CSS.

That’s exactly what they’ve done. Here’s two reasons from my own experience why I think it’s so important:

A long time ago, a film editor friend of mine who moved to Bristol found scant local opportunities. (It’s a very nepotistic world.) I knew a web editor job was coming open in a few weeks time. It would only require entry-level HTML and CSS skill. Almost on a whim I suggested he do a crash course in the basics then work next to me in my office. So, for a week, he read everything I directed him to on the Web, did some basic tutorials, and soon after got the job. Using me as a kind of organic bookshelf to solve problems, he quickly became self-sufficient. Today he earns his bread coding HTML and CSS daily into beautiful, accessible, commercial web sites.
Sometime later, I was interviewing students for an entry-level job. By far the most disappointing aspect of their portfolios was the web design elements. They could write HTML, apply CSS, but were missing what I consider core principles that underpin everything we do. Things like a knowledge of plain old semantic HTML, some understanding of accessibility, and the basics of web typography.

Both examples made me realise that there was something missing amongst the excellent, but often niche or advanced books we know and love. We needed a starter kit, a crash course in basics. That’s the book that Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson have written. HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions is the missing primer of web design.

In an industry where much of the critical knowledge has been researched and published by self-taught designers, and design schools have traditionally lagged behind (inevitably doing a disservice to their students) this book does what all good teachers do: teaches people the core skills and gives them the knowledge to continue learning.

It would be easy to dismiss the detail in the book as entry-level, or incomplete. I could debate resetting body font size to 10px using ems, or grids, or XHTML versus HTML. However, to do so would be missing the point completely. The authors have successfully navigated a huge range of passionately held opinions to present good, solid, core knowledge in an entirely practical format. The common denominators they impart will enable students to be discerning later on when they stumble across niche techniques that can range from brilliant, to totally useless. Those who start with this text may well find it useful later when trying to understand how a technique can be appropriate and superb to use in one context, and awful in another.

Every design school on the planet should make HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions a required textbook. As well as a perfect primer for students, there’s many a formally-trained graphic designer, or self-taught web designer, who might find it useful. I recommend it to you. Careful, though, some people may find themselves arguing the finer points of web typography or debating DOCTYPEs faster than they think.

All Change, Please

Jon 陳 — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:49:21 GMT

‘One door closes, another opens’ is an idiom that has always resonated with me. It reminds me that serendipity† is the salve of change, and returns to mind when I have news like this: I’ll be leaving OmniTI at the end of August.

†Coined by Horace Walpole in a letter of Janurary 28th, 1754, and based on The Three Princes of Serendip.

I have a natural reluctance to go into details. Suffice to say we have very different views on how design should be done; each are valid, but I have to be true to my own. Those who know me will probably have a good idea what my opinions are, and some may have gleaned them from talks or articles. If friends wish to know more, drop me a line via the usual means.

The dynamics of how OmniTI wanted to implement design changed in a way that made me reassess everything. After a lot of reflection, discussion, and valiant attempts on both sides to satisfy everyone, it became clear to me that my future would be elsewhere. An amicable disagreement followed, and here we are.

It’s been a roller-coaster time at the company, keeping me very busy going back and forth across the pond. That was always supposed to be temporary. My intention was to move my family across to the States as soon as it was reasonably possible. Running a design team across time zones and an ocean was never going to be sustainable in the long-run — you lose too much of the natural osmosis that physical proximity converts into inspiration, energy, and ultimately, good work. Reading back over the post when I joined the company sharpens my disappointment that what we set out to do wasn’t possible at OmniTI, but I’m looking forward to pursuing the same goals in the future.

I still hold the people there in high regard; they are without doubt some of the best in the business at what they do. If you need a company to optimize infrastructure, databases, or scale a site to serve millions of people, they should be your first choice. I’ve also been lucky enough to get to know Brooklyn, and Dumbo, pretty well. I still love the city, and I’m certain I’ll be back, devouring sushi from the Rastafari chefs at Gen, or a croissant from Almondine, with hot chocolate from Jaques Torres very soon.

So, to the future. For the moment, I’m going to be taking some time to refresh. There are some interesting discussions going on in the background. I’ll have a little more time to get involved with all of the discussions around web design and typography. I will write more, perhaps give a few more talks if folks are kind enough to invite me. One thing’s for sure, my sorely neglected blog will probably be groaning under the keystrokes again shortly, and I’ll be assaulting your eye with my version of design soon after.

OSCON 2009: incoming!

Jon 陳 — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:51:11 GMT

Just a quick note. More of a test really. Can I crank out a quick post in the lounge at Bristol airport? Will the wifi not fail? Faced with the prospect of spending the next 17 hours in planes and airports, and a manic schedule that always seems to halt any attempt at the usual essays, can I post something this in a brief hiatus? We shall see!

I’m on my way to OSCON for the second time only. Last year was a blast, and I’m hoping for more of the same. This year I’m lucky enough to have had a talk accepted called, Grokkin’ Design — an introduction for developers to the principles of design. I have to be honest and say this is very much a talk for developers, focussing on the 80% science that makes up much of what designers do, rather than 20% art that we love so much. It’s hopefully going to be a mix of practice and theory, with a bit of my own opining thrown in about ways designers and developers can collaborate to go from good to great. It’s in meeting room J3 on Wednesday 22^nd at 10:45am. Love to see you there if you can make it. Feel free to bring questions in abundance I’m hoping it can have a good chunk of debate in it, as well as my monologuing.

There are other bits of goodness in the design and usability sessions as well as many friends and colleagues giving tutorials and speaking at sessions. Here’s a few:

Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates: PHP: The Good Parts
Chris again on Security-Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behavior
Theo Schlossnagle: Scalable Internet Architecture
Theo (again): Reconnoiter: Monitoring and Trend Analysis
Luke Welling and Laura Thomson: 2009 PHP Best Practices
Robert Treat on Conventional Thinking, a guide to database naming standards
Andrei Zmievski: All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP
Ed Finkler: Put Down the Superglobals! Secure PHP Development with Inspekt
Wez Furlong: Getting it Done

There’s a lot of technical stuff in that list for a lowly designer like me, but I often think that the more diverse the interests of your circle of friends, the more you get exposed to the intellectual food for interesting ideas. All of the people in my list are super smart and definitely worth listening to no matter what your primary discipline may be.

If you’re heading to San Jose next week, stop by and say ‘hi’!

PS. They’re boarding so I have to dash. No proofing time! Please forgive any typos but feel free to email me and let me know!

SkillSwap Goes Typographic

Jon 陳 — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 17:45:36 GMT

Right. I’m blitzing this. Two posts in one day. It’s unheard of! I’ve finally managed to put up my slides together from SkillSwap Goes Typographic:

Web Type: 80% Science, 20% Art on SlideShare

Also available as a PDF (8.9MB)

The night was fun and informal — heaps of people thinking, talking, and asking about web typography; a treat! The Clearlefties were great hosts in the day, and a special thank you goes to James Box for looking after and inviting me, and to Natalie Downe for helping James organise a fun, relaxed night. The pub inevitably followed with more type talk, and Señor Richard Rutter generously gave me a bed for the night in his fantastic house. The walk to the office in the next morning along the seafront was also a treat. Almost as good in fact as riding the travellators at Gatwick when changing trains on the way there and back.

Rich’s Facing up to Fonts talk had a lot of very well-researched detail about the technical aspects of web typography. I recommend downloading the slides. Mine had some food for thought and a bit on technical legibility. Between us we seemed to cover quite a lot of ground. Thanks for all the kind feedback both on and offline. Hopefully, I’ll make it back sometime and share a few drinks with the fantastic Brightonians again.

Coming up on Saturday at SxSW, there’ll be more typographic musings from Richard Rutter and nefarious others including myself at Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On. I tagged them good in the previous post. If you’re going to be in Austin, say hi!

Seven Things

Jon 陳 — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:55:57 GMT

Meme is a funny word. I remember interrogating the hive mind of Google to understand what it meant not that long ago. Participating in one (or rather, perpetuating one) is something that always escaped me, but it seems I’ve been stitched up by my mate, Chris Shiflett, and new colleague, Rob Treat. When infected with this meme, you post seven things people might not already know about you. There’s no penalty for not doing it, but apparently you get props for passing it on to seven other people after you’ve done your bit. I’m going to pick on designers!

Meme: ‘A cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes’ — a term created by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

An Internet meme is an evolved term. Cough — neologism — cough.

Before I get to picking on anyone, I’d better get to the meat of this memetical sandwich:

I once had a farm in Af-ree-ka. No, well, sort-of. I once helped to run a guest house and restaurant in The Seychelles. We did grow things. We used the radical method of throwing papaya seeds out of the kitchen door and being swamped by saplings a few weeks later. There were no lions. The guest house was in a place called Anse Volbert or the Cote D’Or (gold coast) — a seven kilometre strip of white coral sand on the island of Praslin.
I once MCd with drum and bass DJs at a full moon party in Haad Rin, on Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. It was an accident. The DJ box was open, Sang Som (sugarcane whiskey) was flowing freely, and Bob’s your uncle (or Jon’s your MC). The DJs were happy to oblige after cresting the anxiety curve and realising the dude who looks at least partly farang wasn’t completely awful. It was fun. I think.
Wellington harbour in New Zealand has a shipping lane. You can hire Kayaks, too. When hiring a kayak they warn you explicitly not wander into the shipping lane because the ships will not stop (and probably can’t). The problem is that Wellington harbour is so stunning that it’s easy to spend your time rubber-necking rather than looking out for ferries. The shipping lane is not marked. The slightly-less-than-ambient signifiers that one might be doing it all wrong is a fog horn and the sight of a large ship’s bow heading towards you. I once did a cartoon-style, arm-flailing kayak-sprint in Wellington harbour.
I love the water. I dream of living on a boat one day. For a while, I hunted octopus for food and trade. I’d go out with fins, mask, and the masters of Indian Ocean small boat fishing. While they practiced their craft with mercenary grace, I would flounder, spike in hand, barely making the bottom to chase the octopods before bursting to the surface gulping air. The best bit was hunting in the dive areas. While we hunted, the tourists observed, often slightly wild-eyed and with a disapproving air. Tenderise octopi by boiling them for three hours. The skin falls off and all rubberiness evaporates. Chop, mix with salad and a classic dressing and it’s heavenly grub.
Once upon a time I wrote a book. It was never published, but had fans who used to sit at my mother’s kitchen table and read the lastest chapter. It was a tale of dashing up and down motorways in the dark from weekend to weekend, and occassionally from gig to gig, DJing. An autobiographical coming-of-age story, wrapped in a raw dose of youthful mischief and carnage. Sometimes I revisit it, smile indulgently at the sparse, brutal journalistic prose, and really wish it was indeed an improvement on the style of Ernest Hemingway, or Dale A Dye in Citadel, rather than a bad facsimile.
My father is Singaporean Chinese. My mother is a bit of a mixture. You may have guessed this already. I love all sides of my heritage equally which may also be an obvious thing to say, but it’s not: When I grew up in what felt like a deeply racist place during the 70s and 80s my tendency was to fight the bigots with an exaggerated pride in my Chinese heritage. Things have changed since then. Now I’m just quietly proud of both. I like being from Blighty just as much as I like eating eating Singaporean food. I could sum it up in a sentence: Keep calm and carry on eating prawn sambal on toast.
Eating a Granny Smith apple makes unmentioned parts of my anatomy itch. True story. I have no idea why. Some things are beyond explanation. If that reads like too much information, you have a dirty mind. :)

I’m done! Ah, now who to tag? Well, as promised, some erudites from the design community. I’m late to the party as usual (the meme is dying if not dead) but what the hell. These guys are appearing on the SxSW panel, Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On with me this coming Saturday, so finding out more about them if they have time would be great:

Ian Coyle because I heard he’s a super hero
Rich Rutter because still waters run deep
Elliot Jay Stocks for the secret to his mighty barnet
Samantha Warren because she has badass ideas

Do your best, guys! Also being tagged are a few folks from around my way (type and geography):

John D. Boardley because he loves typography and lives in Japan
Rick Hurst who skates and rides, but what does he do when he arrives?
Joe Leech for his UX super brain and tales of adventure

Oh yeah, and last but not least I’m supposed to post the rules:

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter. (JT note: Referrer stings do this for you mister rule-writer.)

So, that’s the lot. A random post, I realise, but I hope it gave a little insight into yours truly. In mitigation I should say I have been threatening to write it for something like two months. If anyone has a spare day a week to lend me I’d be very grateful!

Growing OmniTI

Jon 陳 — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:55:48 GMT

’Twas the week before Christmas, and all was hectic in the house.  Or, at least, that’s how it seems! The last few weeks have been a little wild, culminating in one big event: I’m excited to announce that I’m the new Creative Director at OmniTI.

One reason it’s such big news for me is because this is the first time I’ve been employed for many years. I’ve spent a long time in the fertile fields of freedom, or so it seems looking back. Before the turn of the new millennium, I spent most of my time skipping around the country and the world trying life on for size — finding amazing moments to punctuate the scrapes and mischief. Since then I’ve spent most of my time working with like-minded people from within Grow Collective. So, this event was a long time coming — over a year in fact — and all the better for it!

The truth be told, I doubted if I would ever take a ‘proper job’ again. It may sound dramatic, but it was true! The ability to measure my actions by my own standards, decide what jobs I took, and report only to myself was too precious to me; I thought I’d be unemployable. It had to be something extraordinary to turn my head, and OmniTI is. In my view, it is the most important web company you’ve never heard of (especially if you’re a designer). If you’re a sysadmin, developer, or involved with the open source community, you’ll probably know that there’s hardly a single significant technology deployed on the Web today that someone at OmniTI hasn’t contributed to. If you use Apache, PHP, Perl, PostgreSQL (to name but a few), or frameworks like Cake and Solar, you’re probably reading books, using code or documentation that people at OmniTI have written, or helped create. They also have an awesome client list, featuring the likes of National Geographic, Digg, Facebook, Friendster and Ning. All that is exceptional, but not enough to pry me away from Grow Collective. The thing that tipped the balance was the culture.

How I work is equally as important to me as what I work on, as anyone familiar with Grow will know. OmniTI started life as a family-run Internet and web operations company. It was founded by Theo, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Internet architectures, scalability and performance. Also there from the start were Theo’s equally talented brother, George, and mother Sherry. Since 1997, a lot of people I admire — like Chris — have found a home at OmniTI. They’ve grown in almost the exact opposite direction to most other companies: from operations, to data management, to web application development, and now to interface design and user experience. It means OmniTI can create and build complex web applications, but also deploy the infrastructure to support the hundreds of millions of people who might use them. They have a special approach to their work with an engineering rigor to what they create and manage. They’re a family-orientated and collaborative culture, with one of the lowest staff turnaround rates in the industry. I think it’s exceptional.

So, when my equally exceptional friend, Chris, asked me if I’d consider joining them, I had to give it serious thought. A year or so later, and here we are. I’m stoked! Chris has also shared his generous thoughts on behalf of the company in the official article.

A few people have asked about Grow. Up ’til now I’ve been unable to talk about it, but now I’m happy to also announce that Jon Gibbins is joining me at OmniTI! He’ll be a core component of the interface design team. Officially, he’ll be an accessibility engineer. A posh-sounding title that basically means he’ll be doing what he does best: accessibility consulting and training, interface development and quality assurance. So, that effectively means that we’ve ported ourselves to OmniTI; the core of our small interface design team at Grow has been acquired!

Our ambition, for a long time, was to expand the co-op to take on larger, more meaty projects, and work with more amazing people. However, being so busy with client work always made managing that problematic. We had some notable successes like Alan, who’s going to continue to practice his outstanding user experience design skills from Ezyas. However, there were a couple of disappointing experiences. It became obvious that some people were not suited to working within a co-op. Especially one with such a rigorous ethical and qualitative bias. The ambitions remained, though. As the deal with OmniTI was being fleshed out, it also became obvious that we could skip the pain of growing organically, and jump straight into an organisation that already had exactly the kind of people we wanted to work with, and the kind of projects we love to work on. Not only that, but the culture had strong similarities to the one we wished to create. So, effective from now, Grow is no more. The domain and the organisation is in stasis from this point. My emotions are mixed. Looking back, I’m proud of what was accomplished over the last six or seven years, and a little sad to see Grow Collective retire. Looking forward, I’m already engaged with fantastic projects, and thrilled to be working with such great people. I have a feeling that we’ll be working with Alan again soon, as well. The best is definitely yet to come, and I’m excited to be part of OmniTI — 2009 is going to be a great year!

PHP Advent Seasoning

Jon 陳 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:39:43 GMT

Ladies and gentlefolk, I give you the two-thousand and eight PHP Advent Calendar!

As an aside in a season that gets rudely interrupted every year with a huge, great party, the PHP Advent Calendar is adding to the fray. Some of the denizens of PHP are sharing their wisdom from a beat-up old soap box in our quiet, geeky corner of the Web.

The entire project was launched in a mad, two-day rush, which featured the guys with real talent setting up the server, propagating the DNS, and gathering the initial content. A couple of days after the first article, for my sins, I applied some style to the interface. Twenty-four hours of key-smacking later — and with a good dose of help from the indomitable Jon Gibbins — it was done.

The project is edited by Chris and Sean with nuts and bolts help from Jon. It is kindly sponsored by OmniTI. I have to tell you, with almost no time to get it done, deadlines looming, colleagues sweating, and the world in general turning far too fast, I’m pretty pleased with the result.

A single typeface is used throughout. It changes depending on availability, but this seemed like a good opportunity to stretch a face or two. (Writing that made me smile.)

Although we would have loved to license and use various typefaces not currently available in operating systems, there just wasn’t the time. Without knowing the full range of glyphs the content might need, the faces currently licensed for @font-face linking (many with slightly abridged character sets) might not have had the range we need. So, I chose Baskerville as the primary face with various fall-backs from there. Hopefully the epidemic of the Baskerville italic ampersand will ebb soon, but there are many worse things in life to see on an almost daily basis.

You might notice the use of the golden ratio, and an attempt to coerce our awkwardly independent browsers into rendering a baseline grid.

As always, the content was king, queen, barkeep and god: I veered away from images as decoration, considering them unnecessary. I hope nothing overshadows the reading experience. With that in mind the interface is fluid, with a minimum width to stop it all collapsing into a narrow abyss. Most significantly though, the content is genuinely interesting. There are some choice pieces over there, and if you’re interested in PHP at all, swing by, grab the feed, or follow ‘phpadvent’ Twitter for fast updates.

Display Type & the Raster Wars

Jon 陳 — Thu, 6 Nov 2008 15:26:05 GMT

ClearType is 10 years old this Autumn. For most of that time it lay hidden until Vista brought it to the fore by default. Font rendering in Internet Explorer using ClearType is good for body copy at smaller sizes; it’s a huge improvement on the Standard rendering that preceded it. However, larger display text is badly rendered. I don’t say it lightly, but every time I load a page for testing in IE7, I wince at the jaggies. What makes this worse is that Standard rendering is better at display size anti-aliasing. I used to compose scales and size headers to take advantage of smoother Standard rendering at larger sizes.

The context in which I view the text has the most influence over my reaction: Apple. I use a Mac. My browser of choice is Safari which uses OS X’s native ATSUI font rasterisation engine. Text is as beautiful as it can be on the Web right now. If text rendering in Firefox is disappointing in comparison because of the added weight, rendering in IE on Windows is positively distressing.

The quality of the rendering is dependent on various factors like the display type (LCD or CRT), the display resolution that has limited pixel density, the rendering engine itself, and the quality of the font file — specifically the hinting of the typeface.

ClearType was launched in 1998 at COMDEX by a celebratory Bill Gates. In a press release, the director responsible for the ClearType project, Dick Brass, was quoted as saying:

ClearType makes inexpensive screens look as good as the finest displays, and it makes the finest displays look almost as good as paper.

If only that were true. OK, it’s a press release, so we assume a degree of hyperbole from exaggerateers, AKA marketeers, writing the copy. But still. Let’s look at the evidence. I built a quick test suite using Georgia, Verdana and Arial because they’re some of the more commonly used Core Web Fonts. Here are screenshots of a heading set in Arial at 36px in different browsers:

IE7 with ClearType on XP Pro:
IE7 with ClearType on Vista:

Sample thanks to Ryan Brill (he was the first of many kind replies via Twitter). Thanks, all!
IE6 with Standard on XP Pro:
Firefox 3 OS X:
Opera 9 OS X:
Safari 3 OS X:

Compare the jaggies and dire anti-aliasing in IE7 using ClearType with the Standard Windows rendering of IE6. Also compare the heavier weight of Firefox using its own platform-independent engine with that of Safari using ATSUI.

Factual insights about the differences from professional font, browser, or raster engine developers would be welcome in the .

One of the reasons for the glaring difference between IE and Safari is a fundamentally different approach to web typography from Apple and Microsoft. Apple tries to render type as true to the original typeface design as possible, Microsoft uses grid-fitting when rasterising a font. There’s more in a previous article for those interested. Studies have shown ClearType to be more legible than Standard rendering, but they only compared the two. Expanding the study to test Macs and Linux-based PCs, as well as ensuring the test group was populated equally by people who use machines other than Windows PCs, would have all helped the results be more interesting.

Type rendering anomalies are a serious issue for web design. Designers and clients with an eye for detail want typefaces to render accurately and smoothly. Shaun Inman is right:

Until anti-aliasing discrepancies between platforms can be resolved I don’t see even a standardized approach being accepted by discerning designers.

ClearType fails to deliver good anti-aliasing. In my view it is a backward step from the old Windows Standard rendering. I am at a complete loss to explain why it is allowed to persist. Especially because Microsoft Typography seems packed full of experts in the field. Surely they’ve noticed?

Typography on the Web should at least equal the sophistication of print typography, if not enrich it. To do so, type needs to be rasterised correctly, and web designers need the ability to set it with much of the same subtlety and detail available in print. Until that time, technologies like Flash, PDF, and hacks like embedding type in images, will continue to thrive. Designers will use them not just because they ‘do type better’, but because they won’t have to deal with painful inconsistencies between user agents; the bane of the browser wars, and in this instance, the bane of web typography in what seems like the age of the raster wars.

Happy Birthday, Son!

Jon 陳 — Wed, 5 Nov 2008 11:08:11 GMT

Dear Xen, you’re five today. Five years old! You left for school this morning and I was reminded, without the prompting of sentiment, but by the eloquence of your words, and the agility of your thoughts, and the serenity of your actions at such a young age, of why I am so proud of you and the young person that you are becoming.

Every time a birthday passes I think back to how much has changed since you were born, and I look forward to how much will change in your lifetime, and hope I will be around long enough to give you the tools you need to navigate the world and grow into yourself. So, it seems apt that on the day that Guy Fawkes tried to spark a revolution in 1605, and on the day that Barack Obama won an election in 2008 to become the first black president of the United States, I share some of his words with you in the hope that when you’re ready to read them they might be useful:

Re-affirm that fundamental truth: Out of many we are one, that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.

Happy birthday, son. I love you.