Browsing Design

wp-Hyphenate A clever Wordpress plugin that embeds soft-hyphens and zero-space entities in your text providing browsers with the cues necessary to successfully hyphenate words. hyph-n.com has a dingus to try it out if you don’t use Wordpress. 

Making Web Fonts Work Jon Tan on the current state of embedding typefaces. It never occurred to me that @font-face might incur a delay before rendering text (a common complaint against sIFR). And I had completely forgotten how rubbish ClearType is. Until anti-aliasing discrepancies between platforms can be resolved I don’t see even a standardized approach being accepted by discerning designers. Looks like we’re in for another four years of flash replacement. 

Giving geometry a bad name The new Pepsi logo just doesn’t add up. There’s no point flaunting your geometry if the finished piece comes across arbitrary and unbalanced. 

typeface.js Text replacement using the Canvas element instead of Flash. Dear type vendors, please save us from these convoluted stopgaps. Legally, The Internet (via email) 

10tees Sweet tees from around the web grouped into themed collections of ten. 

Designer as Ghostwriter Metropolis coverage of this past weekend’s Social Studies uses Leslie’s Take Root presentation to drive its point home. 

Oscar Wilde Retrospective Lovely typography. A few more shots on Design has No Name (click on “portfolio,” then “print” and finally “Oscar Wilde”—damn Flash). 

CSS Filters for Firefox, Safari and Opera Of particular interest are the Firefox and Opera filters, both of which seem to seat the text baseline oddly high at smaller font-sizes relative to line- and x-height. 

Replica “…designed on a very reduced and religiously strict grid which defined each and every design decision. In place of the 700 units for standard caps height in Fontlab, the grid was reduced to just 70 units. This arbitrary simplifaction and self-induced restriction strongly influences the shape of each individual glyph.” Gorgeous. 

Idioteque College bud Mike Creighton finally gives his Radiohead blip a proper home. Actually got to see this “live” when Radiohead played the Field Day Fest.