Fresh

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.

The day is finally here! The new website for The White House has launched, and may I say I’m impressed. It is just amazing to have an administration that understands how people are using digital media these days. yay.

The site’s aesthetic is so appropriate; clean, with modern lines and colors (lots of white and gray!) supported by elegant, historical touches.

We’re not seeing any Gotham (Obama’s signature typeface during his campaign), but they’ve stuck with faces from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry with an elegant use of Hoefler Text and Whitney for image-based typography. Georgia and Lucida Sans are used for web text. I’ll miss seeing Gotham around, but still give a big thumbs-up!

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Welcome to our second post dedicated to delving into the nitty gritty information about a typeface. Previously, we explored the infamous Papyrus by Chris Costello. Today we’re going to learn all about Trebuchet MS. It’s a web safe font, so that makes it especially exciting!

Trebuchet (pronouced tray-byou-shay) is a humanist sans-serif typeface. Some other examples of humanist sans serif are: Lucida Grande, Gill Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Tahoma, Verdana and Optima.

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I’m a subscriber to Ancestry.com. It’s a paid subscription site that focuses on genealogy, family trees, history etc. They have a really well designed website, with amazing functionality and resources; but that isn’t what I want to show you. They do a killer job on the design of their email. Every time I get one of their messages, I am delighted by the level of attention to detail, design consistency and engaging content.

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To be able to use custom fonts on the web without making it an image or using tricks to manipulate it would be a dream come true for most designers and developers. That dream has slightly come true but not quite all the way.

The Contenders:
In the left corner you have Typeface.js, which offers a solution for custom fonts to be displayed on the users system with a few lines of javascript, CSS for styling and doesn’t require Flash.

In the right corner you have sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which also offers the same role with displaying custom fonts, but is created in Flash and embedded into HTML with the help of Javascript and CSS for styling.
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I started to write this post all about how overused the typeface Papyrus is, how much I dislike it, and ask “why do people still use it?”. But then, I realized that topic has been done to death. Ironic, no?

Instead, I’m going to primarily focus on the history and context of this typeface. Because, a good way to make sure you use a typeface well is to know about it’s history: it’s original purpose, who designed it, it’s cultural implications etc. Ready to get started? Good.

Papyrus was designed in 1982 by Chris Costello and acquired in 1983 by the foundry Letraset. Costello had shopped the typeface to 9 other foundries as well. (more…)