Fresh

While much of the country is still reeling from the effects of massive winter-ness, PDX has had an untimely run-in with Spring for the last week or so. Our cabin fever has been relieved for the moment, and so our thoughts turn towards happy hour on the patio and unplanned use of vacation days.

Now, some of us have a not-so-healthy idea of fun (spring cleaning, anyone?). Of course, often it’s necessary to purge clutter and bad habits, and spring is as good a time to do that as any. In this spirit we wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the best practices we’ve found when working with your design files. Good habits can make the difference between a seamless development process and a complete nightmare, one that will try everyone’s patience and waste valuable time. We’ve even included a little treat at the end to help get you started. Ready to clean house?

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In honor of WordPress week, I’ve collected an assortment of sites that are tickling my fancy in some way or another and oh yeah, they all use WordPress. Hopefully you will find a couple that you haven’t had the pleasure of checking out before.

I Love Typography

This is a blog about all of the intricacies of typography ranging from the basics to super technical jargon-filled goodness. The design is a beautifully simple execution of what they preach.

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Leading up to the holidays last year I was keeping an eye on what West Elm was doing with their email designs. They were aggressively marketing to me and I was impressed with all of the emails I received! The clean design and photography is really first class and they used a number of devices to keep them interesting day-to-day.

West elm has a slew of what look to be templates that are super clean in their design. They rely on the great product photography for the most part and always have a grid as the foundation. There is care taken with the typography and this helps the designs sing. The photography is very high quality with beautiful staging.

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he latest from Jessica Hische, Daily Drop Cap is a service to bloggers everywhere. Every day she is creating a new decorative drop cap for the public to use. She has created some beauties thus far, and I’m sure many more to come. She includes html to copy into your blog with each letter she posts. Thank you Jessica!

(images: Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische. Found Via Apartment Therapy)

Every Friday the design team here gets together and we have a “lunch n’ learn.”  We use the time for watching tutorial videos, inspirational TED talks, interviews with artists, and other such things that get us excited to be creative. We also eat delicious food cart grub. Today we all brought in a site or project that we thought was stellar to show the rest of the group. Here is the result:

The Selby.  Artist Todd Selby interviews and photographs interesting people in their homes. Great site to browse through for beautiful interiors and color inspiration. Each interview at the end is really unique and often includes little drawing tid-bits.

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I’ve heard through the grapevine that a couple lovely fonts have been released recently, and I wanted to highlight them here since I am a closet type geek who wants to share the beauty of nice typography with others.

Buttermilk

First up is Buttermilk, a delightfully bold script font by Jessica Hische:

The example on the purchase page highlights its use for holiday cards, but Jessica also mentions its extensive ligature options as well as its potential for fancy numerals or drop-caps.

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Like most cool technologies, this WordPress plugin was developed out of necessity for a client project. In a nutshell it works very similar to the way sifr works only without involving flash in the process. Instead, the plugin relies on php and the GD graphics library to dynamically replace html tags with images of true type typography.  As it is heavily inspired by the Signwriter drupal module, it is clearly not a novel method, however, in the spirit of open source it seemed natural to port the functionality to WordPress.

In brief, once installed, the plugin will act automatically, relying on CSS classes to target content. Typography styles are defined using a simple rule syntax not at all unlike CSS allowing for versatility and flexability all from within the wordpress dashboard. Since it is a server-side technology, the method is truly cross-platform and allows license-burdened fonts to be secured to prevent download.

Download the plugin here.

Have you seen Brent Barson’s short film “F is for Fail: An Alphabetical Odyssey Through The Creative Process”? It’s featured over at Veer in the Ideas section. It has some lovely typography (Proxima Nova and Arno Pro), movement and color. It definitely features some words we can all relate to :)

Check out the film here.

via Design Crush

What are we even talking about?

Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On was a popular panel that discussed limitations of web typography, myths about web typography and how to dispel them, and talked about overcoming constraints on the web to create typographically beautiful websites.

What is all the fuss about fonts on the web?

The first question the panelists were asked was, “Why are designers still bitching about typography?” After the giggles subsided, the top reasons they gave were:

• frustration stemming from having such a limited palette of available fonts
• the complexity and consistency involved in getting your type to render as intended

Basically, type on the web can be a pain in the ass. There are a decent amount of web fonts, but not all are attractive (Papyrus, anyone?), sometimes you have to use the corporate font specified in a client’s brand guidelines, and regardless what you do, everything can still shift around. A user could increase their font size or have a different default font specified for their system and throw off your whole groove.

Are there solutions?

There are several. Many people make their fancy titles into images, which does work, but then you’re faced with how to keep that text on the page for SEO; others use an image-replacement method like SIFR, but that involves Flash and can get pretty tricky in terms of line-height and making sure it doesn’t do something funky with punctuation or line wrapping. The “new” thing on the scene is to try out @font-face.
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Valentine’s Day is looming on the horizon.  If you’re feeling especially amorous over typography (who isn’t??) head over to Font Feed and participate in Valentype 2009.

The contest is as follows: Create a “declaration of love” for an OurType or FontFont typeface (you can use whatever typefaces you want to design with, though.) Types of submissions can include images, poetry, or “whatever you feel like creating.” The winner will take home a license to four weights of an OurType or FontFont typeface of their choice. It’s is open to everyone and runs until Saturday February 14th at midnight GMT.

Learn more about the contest here, and check out the submissions at The Gallery.