welcome

Hello.

Here is a collection of resources that I find either helpful or interesting.

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just smart

Here is a list of anything that is very clever, innovative or just way cool. Have any suggestions to add to this section? Send me an email and let me know.

wallpapers

on-demand (custom) products & printing

shopping resources

web development books

Here is a list of books for someone who is new to Website Development or for anyone that wants to hone their skills. All of these links will bring you to the product's page on Amazon.com.

typography books

Here is a list of books for someone who is new to the field and wants to start learning the basics about Typography. All of these links will bring you to the product's page on Amazon.com. If you know of any other great Typography resources, please send me an email and let me know about them.

typography videos

email management

fonts

Once you take the plunge into typography you will never see a billboard, sign, pamphlet, restaurant menu, book or website the same again. Remember that Fonts are the computer's instructions for producing a certain typographic style. So just imagine typography as being the cookie dough and a computer font as being the cookie cutter.

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font resources

Here are some fonts that I either use and adore or just adore. Except for the Microsoft fonts, all of the premium fonts listed below are expensive and are not practical purchases for individuals. My purpose in listing these premium fonts is so you can see the ideas and style that have been incorporated into the design for these fonts.

  1. exljbris Font Foundry — (Mostly) Free, Delicious, Fontin, Fontin Sans, Fertigo Pro, Tallys, Diavlo, Anivers, MUSEO — wow, I don't know how he finds the time to produce all of these!

  2. Klim Type Foundry — Premium, Feijoa, FF Meta Serif, National, Newzald, — Kris Sowersby's contemporary typefaces.

  3. Underware graphic design studio — (Mostly) Premium, Auto, Bello, Dolly, Fakir, Sauna, Unibody 8 — they always try to balance being functional & fun.

  4. Soho - Premium, By: Seb Lester. To get a quick preview of this slab serif typeface, follow the link and you will see a short flash video and an available PDF type specimen book.

  5. Gentium — Free, a typeface for the nations.

  6. Divide By Zero: Free TrueType Fonts - Free, a large number of fun & playful display fonts.

  7. Bitstream Vera - Free, great set of Open Source serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts.

  8. The Microsoft Cleartype Font Collection: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel - Premium, Bundled with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. For more information, check out poynter.org, neosmart.net, typographica.org and jeffmilner.com. All of the fonts start with the letter 'C' because they have been crafted with ClearType in mind. In fact if you have the fonts installed on a Windows XP computer and they look horrible, just enable ClearType and then they will become clear.

    breakdown of the new fonts:

    • serif

      1. Cambria: Replacing the role of "Arial", the new default heading text font in Office 2007. From the Cambria Poster XPS document:
        "Cambria has been designed for on-screen reading and to look good when printed at small sizes. It has very even spacing and proportions. Diagonal and vertical hairlines and serifs are relatively strong, while horizontal serifs are small and intended to emphasize stroke endings rather than stand out themselves. This principle is most noticeable in the italics, where the lowercase characters are subdued in style, to be at their best as elements of word-images. This font is suitable for business documents, email, web design."
      2. Constantia: This font was designed from the ground up so that it can be used in a publication that will available in both an on screen medium and a print version, without having to have a different font for each medium. This one works well in both worlds - electronic and print. From the Constantia Poster XPS document:
        "Constantia is a modulated wedge-serif typeface designed primarily for continuous text in both electronic and paper publishing. The design responds to the recent narrowing of the gap between screen readability and traditional print media, exploiting specific aspects of the most recent advances in ClearType rendering, such as subpixel positioning. The classic proportions of relatively small x-height and long extenders make Constantia ideal for book and journal publishing, while the slight squareness and open counters ensure that it remains legible even at small sizes. This font is suitable for book typesetting, email, web design, and magazines."

    • sans serif

      1. Calibri: Replacing the role of "Times New Roman", the new default body text font in Office 2007. From the Calibri Poster XPS document:
        "Calibri is a modern sans serif family with subtle roundings on stems and corners. It features real italics, smallcaps, and multiple numeral sets. Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small text alike. This font is suitable for documents, email, web design, and magazines."
      2. Candara: From the Candara Poster XPS document:
        "A humanist sans with verticals showing a graceful entasis on stems, high-branching arcades in the lowercase, large apertures in all open forms, and unique ogee curves on diagonals. The resulting texture is lively but not intrusive, and makes for a friendly and readable text. This font is suitable for email, web design, magazines, and informal typographic setting."
      3. Corbel: From the Corbel Poster XPS document:
        "Corbel is designed to give an uncluttered and clean appearance on screen. The letter forms are open with soft, flowing curves. It is legible, clear, and functional at small sizes. At larger sizes, the detailing and style of the shapes is more apparent, resulting in a modern sans serif type with a wide range of possible uses. This font is suitable for business documents, email, web design."

    • monospace

      1. Consolas: Replacing the role of "Courier New", "Courier", "Lucida Console", for use in text editors and programming environments. From the Consolas Poster XPS document:
        "Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. The improved Windows font display allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen."

ideal programming font

A font that makes clear the following characters:

  • "l" [Lowercase, 12th Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "i" [Lowercase, 9th Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "1" [Number One]
  • "o" [Lowercase, 15th Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "O" [Uppercase, 15th Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "0" [Number Zero]
  • "Z" [Uppercase, 26th Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "2" [Number Two]
  • "B" [Uppercase, 2nd Letter in the Alphabet]
  • "8" [Number Eight]

Having these characters extra clear may seem like a trivial detail at first, but if you invest any amount of time into programming, or even lengthy reading on the computer, the improved comprehension, especially when skimming or reading over sections of text or code quickly makes picking out a good font well worth the time.

My favorites are:

  1. Consolas - Premium, Bundled with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007
  2. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono - Free
  3. Pragmata - Premium
Visit this Programming Fonts page if you want to explore all of the various options out there.

design by fire - Andrei Michael Herasimchuk's "an open letter to John Warnock"

This is a very interesting letter, well worth the read. Also searching with Google for "an open letter to adobe fonts" will get you some interesting blog posts with people's reactions and further ideas on this topic. Now he has also posted a follow up to his open letter, "The Unfortunate Death of Helvetica."

the problems with web typography

There was a great lecture given at "South by Southwest 2007" about all of the current problems with Web Typography. Information Architects Japan also posted a great article about why Web Typography is so important, since in his opinion, Web Design is 95% Typography.

a request to authors & publishers

Please, in whatever you produce and publish, include a little section, whether it is a "Colophon" or an "About The Type" and let us know what Typefaces you choose for a certain project and why. A nod of thanks to all of you who have already picked up on this increasingly popular trend, and to all of you decide to join in.

contact

email

The email address listed below is my secondary email address. I check this secondary email account regularly. If you are someone that I know, send me an email and I will reply with my primary email address.

(In order to email me you will have to transcribe the address shown in the image into your email client.)

about

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about the type

There is no way for me to know what particular computer system that you happen to be on, whether it is a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux/Unix machine. On top of that I do not know what particular fonts you have installed on your system. So the list of fonts CSS goes through in order from left to right and if you have the font it displays it, if not then it goes through the list. If all else fails it will display the default sans-serif or monospace font installed on your system. I have included the new Windows Vista fonts as the first choice and for the follow up choices I tried to pick fonts that come installed by default on Mac OS X and Windows XP.

about me

You want to know something about me?!?! Oh, alright... I am fascinated by Information Technology on many different levels. I enjoy learning about smart and unique thinking in any field. I am always most amazed by the ability to create something out of nothing (or virtually nothing) to create environments, solve problems, inspire, inform, or for just plain fun!