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When The World Shifts Beneath Your Feet

Richard Fink — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:19:03 +0000

Garrick Van Buren, my taskmaster at Kernest/Konstellations, sent me over a link to an article about how different publishers are dealing with DRM and, just as importantly, the Walmart of online publishing – Amazon.
Cutting Their Own Throats on Charlie Stross’s blog.

Uh, there seems to be a notion floating around that somehow there’s something people in the publishing biz can do to “avert the evil decree”.
(To grab an apt phrase from Jewish liturgy.)
But, like drowning in a tsunami, or any other deluge of “Biblical” proportion, there is no averting – or avoiding – the devaluation of anything that can be converted to bits and bytes.

Back in mid January, I wrote that this year already “felt” different. And it’s been. And today I’ve been musing about the people in publishing who are going to lose their jobs. Yes. They – maybe you – are going to lose your job. And no purchasing of an act of Congress like SOPA or an outfoxing of Amazon is going to prevent this.

“Teach Me To Dance, Will You, Zorba?”

“There are people who fall hard and do not find their feet for a long time, if ever — a condition some psychiatrists call complicated grief. And the depth of the economic collapse has unceremoniously stripped thousands of far more than money: reputations have reversed; friendships have turned sour; families have fractured.”

In reality we are all like beggars selling apples or pencils on a street corner. But that reality gets masked over time and people feel safe and secure. The beggars huddle for warmth within things called “industries”. After awhile, the idea that people will continue to prefer buying from “us” over the other beggars begins to look and feel like a law of nature. Life can be good, even for a beggar.

I used to work in apparel manufacturing in the United States – an industry that crumpled to nothing in the face of lower-priced foreign imports. We knew that no matter how loudly we begged, no one was going to buy from us any more.
The auto workers who used to populate Detroit know all about this, too.

When the market says to you: “We can’t pay you anymore for what you do”, you move on.

But when the world shifts beneath your feet like that, don’t just stand around flat-footed, dammit. Instead, with a fresh start, focus on the possibilities and ask Zorba to teach you how to dance. If you’re lucky, he’ll oblige.

Practical Font Design, Third Edition

Richard Fink — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:29:12 +0000

Practical Font Design
3rd Edition

In Digital Publishing you need to co-ordinate your efforts with many people. Web designers, developers, server techs – the list goes on and on – and the more you know about how those people go about their work, the better off you will be.

With fonts, the “collaboration” might take the form of a purchase, or a free download, or just a link to the font in your HTML. But there is a font-maker somewhere on the other end of that transaction. And the more you know about how that font came to be, the better off you’ll be. And unlike a lot of things in today’s fast-paced environment – where it’s hard to separate the side-shows from the main attractions – a knowledge of fonts and how they’re made won’t be obsolete in just a few years. Changes in font technology come at a snail’s pace, and what changes do come, are incremental. So what you learn about fonts will pay dividends for as long as you live. Really.

Have A “Practical” Christmas

David Bergsland’s Practical Font Design is now in its Third Edition. It’s greatly improved in many, many ways from the Second Edition. (Bergsland not only listens to reader feedback, but he acts on it, too.) It’s still the only book of its kind, and it does a simple thing: it tells you, in a friendly and to-the-point manner, how one experienced font designer and teacher – David Bergsland – goes about his work. It’s a must-buy for font designers. It’s a should-buy for any web designer, graphic designer, or anybody involved with digital publishing.
Not much interested in the technical details? – It’s worth the price just for the “history of type” section and as a flip-through reference. If you’ve ever used Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, you already know more than you necessarily need. And a demo download of FontLab Studio – the professional level font editor referenced in the book – is available for Mac and Windows free.

Here’s a little piece to give you an idea of the tone:

“My plan is to go through my decision making process so you can do the same as you develop your fonts. There is no right or wrong here. All you have to guide you in the process is your personal sense of style – what’s right and wrong.”

Practical Font Design, The Links:

Amazon Print and Kindle

Lulu PDF

Lulu Paperback

David Bergsland sells his fonts at:

Hackberry-Fonts

And blogs here, dispensing technical tips and helpful font-making tools:

Hackberry-Fonts Blog

Extensis Brings Google Web Fonts Straight Into Photoshop

Richard Fink — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:42:10 +0000

Extensis, the company behind the WebINK web font service, today announced a plug-in that brings Google Web Fonts straight into Photoshop.

Free And Open-Source Fonts Served Alongside The Proprietary, In A Surprising Twist

Since launching the WebINK web font service, Extensis has concentrated on building a library of fonts drawn from the proprietary type community, building on long-standing relationships developed through Extensis’ other font and design products: Suitcase Fusion (a desktop font manager) and Universal Type Server (a server-based font library and font license manager for workgroups).
But they haven’t left it at just being another service operating in the shadow of (now Adobe) Typekit – as services like Fontdeck, WebType, and others have done. From day one, I’ve personally seen them strive to find new ways to meet the needs of web designers with innovative software tools that, in combination with their hosting service, make the use of a font service – as opposed to shopping the web for suitable fonts and then self-hosting – a much easier and useful proposition. They’ve continuously shown up at the major web conferences to promote, of course, but also to watch and learn and listen. What’s sets them apart is that they turn around and act on that knowledge in creative ways.

Riding Piggy Back On Google’s Web Font Initiative

[A developing story... more analysis, riding in on piggy-back, is on the way...]

Amazon Moves To HTML5/CSS3 For New Kindle, Leaves Mobi Format Behind

Richard Fink — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:50:10 +0000

Some folks I know are waiting for E-Pub to magically arrive and provide a comfy transition from print to screen. But anybody who’s looked into that closely knows it’s a fairy tale.

Ain’t gonna happen, and here’s the latest nail in the E-pub coffin:

Kindle Format 8

The List of Features Includes @Font-Face

Here’s a list of supported features on the way:
List of supported HTML tags and CSS elements

(Note to Amazon: It’s HTML Elements (but I’ll accept “tags”) but definitely not “CSS elements” CSS Properties, it is.)

Steve Jobs Role In Typography By Computer

Richard Fink — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:21:37 +0000

A few weeks ago, my eye doctor said to me, “I only know of two people who know anything about fonts, you and Steve Jobs.” Seemed Dr. Patel was re-doing his web site and had questions about the qualities of Trebuchet MS. But the line about Jobs raised an eyebrow, naturally, and it was as I suspected – Dr. Patel had read Jobs’ commencement address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005, the relevant portion of which follows:

“Reed College [where Steve Jobs enrolled for awhile] at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

Setting The Record Straight

A lot of people know that Benjamin Franklin did research on electricity. The silhouette of Franklin in a lightning storm with his kite flying and key dangling is emblazoned on the average American’s brain: the rugged individualist in pursuit of a dream, no matter the danger. But what almost nobody knows is that Franklin’s work on electricity was as a part of a team of co-equals. And that his signature was only one of several others’ that appeared upon publication of that work. But Franklin had the fame and got the credit. Sound familiar? History is a single-sentence thing.

A lone eagle, as an icon, works great. A flock of geese, not so much.

FinksLinks: Pre-Approved For Your Reading Pleasure

Here’s a couple of articles to help put it all in perspective:

The Impact of Steve Jobs on Typography

Steve Jobs and Type: Connecting the Dots

And here, on Typophile.com, a bit of additional insight, debate, and perhaps a few ruffled feathers: Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Adobe Announces Acquisition Of Typekit

Richard Fink — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:43:00 +0000

It’s fair to say that those close to the development of Web Fonts expected Typekit to be acquired by somebody. Well, today somebody did.

Adobe Buys Phonegap And Typekit for Better Web Tools

The Typekit Blog Announcement

And Adobe’s press release: Adobe Acquires Web Typography Innovator Typekit

A good thing? A bad thing? An inconsequential thing? Who knows?

A Nice Use Of Web Fonts In Mainstream Media

Richard Fink — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:16:10 +0000

There’s a nice use of web fonts at the New York Times. (Just remember to clear your cookies to keep on reading past their twenty page a month limit.)

Titled The Reckoning , it’s a link and teaser page for a group of stories about 9/11.

Very tasteful and dutifully solemn.

Definitely not cheesy.

We don’t want cheese.

Worth a look. Really. Except for the upper case “G” with a pimple on its chin. Is this some kind of slick reference to Lincoln? Or Lincoln’s well-documented love of pizza? We’ll probably never know for sure.

Turning My Back On The New New York Times

Richard Fink — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:26:48 +0000

Ever since the New York Times announced that it’s moving from free online web access to a paid subscription I’ve been torn. And sad. I spent most of my life in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn, and the Times has been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember.

Growing up, there was the Sunday morning ritual of freshly bought bagels and, of course, the Sunday Times. What a bargain ! The Week In Review, the Arts section, and on and on. (And let us not forget the lingerie ads – a secret soft-core bonus for the boys of every borough and beyond.)

Also – and nobody but a New Yorker could possibly know about this – there’s even a special way to fold the Times origami-style, so you can read and yet not disturb the people pinched up to the left and right of you on the subway. I remember my Dad showing me how it was done when I started commuting to high school every morning from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan.
Rites of passage. Only in New York. Great memories.

The Last Time They Asked, I Paid

Back in 2005, the Times began charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists in a program called TimesSelect. It was about $60 a year. I enjoyed the Op-Ed section a lot and, to some extent, I was grateful that the entire paper was online for free, and so I paid for the subscription partly as a show of support. $5 bucks a month, what the heck. However, TimesSelect didn’t work out for them – I’m assuming they lost too many readers and too much advertising revenue – and they did away with it after two years. They sent me and the other subscribers a pro-rated refund.
But now we’re not talking about $60 a year anymore.
Here’s the New York Times’ new take-it-or-leave-it proposition:

Once readers click on their 21st article [the first twenty for the month are free] they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year), $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year) or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year). All subscribers who take home delivery of the paper will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

The New York Times Can Kiss My Ass

That’s my answer. I don’t have the patience for convoluted overpriced schemes like this. I’ve had it with ultimatums. This is just one more lopsided End User License Agreement. And it’s one that I can walk away from, so I’m walkin’. Besides, if this is where their heads are at, perhaps the “newspaper” as an organizational model for delivering news is not long for this world.
How the Times monetizes their site – which gets about 40 million hits a month, BTW – is not my problem, it’s their problem. I wonder if they’ve tried delivering any ultimatums to their advertisers lately?

My life just got simpler and probably a whole lot better. I stopped reading the Times three days ago. Cold turkey. And if the Times is out of the free stream, I won’t be linking to any of their articles unless I absolutely have no choice. I’m not going to be a salesman for the New York Times, for free.

Why Are They Doing This Anyway?

If you read their financial report for 2010, it’s hard to understand why the Times is doing this at all. There’s no tone of desperation. If anything, the report paints a fairly rosy picture.

“Operating profit increased to $234 million in 2010, more than triple the $74 million we reported in 2009, and operating profit excluding depreciation, amortization, severance and special items grew 20% to $384 million in 2010 from $320 million in 2009.

And why now? When so many people are jobless and the economy is struggling? It seems the Times has a new motto:
“All The News For Those With The Means To Pay Whatever We Ask“

There’s something about this that just feels wrong. The pricing, the timing, the tone of it. Not even a student discount? It turns out that the NYTimes site was shareware set to expire after fifteen years, and time’s up.

Here are the relevant links so you can read all about it straight from them:
The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan
A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions

And that’s the end of it. I move on.

Best Practice For @Font-Face CSS Takes A Turn

Richard Fink — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:32:50 +0000

“Bulletproof ” is out, and “Mo’ Bulletproofer” is in.

In the last few days, major players on the web fonts scene – Kernest and Font Squirrel – have moved from Paul Irish’s Bulletproof @Font-Face syntax to Richard Fink’s Mo’ Bulletproofer syntax as the default.

Ethan Dunham, the developer behind Font Squirrel and Fontspring says:

Mo’ Bulletproofer is the only syntax that works across browsers including Android.
IE and Android both have buggy implementations and this format works around both of them.

Since I’m Richard Fink and this could just be my ego talking, here’s why Mo’ Bulletproofer is best practice going forward…

The Android local() Bug

Android has a bug that’s triggered by using the local() descriptor inside the @font-face declaration.

To clarify, the following non-standard code does not work on Android as it does in IE 6-8:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'somefont';
  src: url(somefont.eot);
  /* IE takes this font, Android doesn't. */
  src: local('3ix90a'), url(somefont.ttf) format('truetype');
  /* Android chokes on the local() descriptor and
    discards the entire @font-face declaration.
    No web fonts show up. */
   }

Unlike IE, Android doesn’t “look back” and take the font specified in the initial url reference.
This makes the “Bulletproof ” syntax unusable on Android.
The problem is described in a bug report filed by Google’s Paul Irish, originator of “Bulletproof ”.
It also includes this FYI:

This bug has also caused a workaround from the Google Font API team: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/
As a result they sniff and change the CSS they serve to Android 2.2 devices.

Android Is Too Big For This Problem To Go Ignored

There isn’t much choice here. Mo’ really is more bulletproof. Even if the Android problem didn’t exist, there are other solid reasons for using Mo’ , but Android is the kicker.
How big is the Android market? Well, in 2010 Android emerged as the single best selling mobile platform in the United States.
Andy Rubin, former Android CEO and current VP of Engineering at Google, reports that 300,000 Android devices are being activated every day.

Bulletproof Reported As Problematical On Linux, Too

Last week there was a pingback here at RW from WordPress developer Aaron James Young saying:

I use the Mo’ Bulletproof @font-face syntax, which I’ve found to have the best cross-browser compatibility.

Young spent considerable time hands-on, testing Linux based browsers, before coming to this conclusion.
(It seems GTK-Webkit and Konqueror also have problems with local()).

Don’t Use local() At All

The bottom line is that using local() at all is a bad practice. In Google Fonts Failing for Internet Explorer Users I wrote:

See Jonathan Snook’s post here, and this Typophile thread here for an in-depth explanation of why the local() descriptor should not be used to specify a locally installed font except in very special circumstances.

I now take part of that back: in the absence of being able to specify and query for a unique font version ID – as a matter of defensive coding – I can’t imagine a plausible scenario where using local() isn’t, in some way, asking for trouble.

Here’s the original post on Mo’ Bulletproofer. To be updated soon, after the next Beta of IE9 arrives for testing.

Update – Feb 3, 2011

Paul Irish has chimed in on this issue in the comments. See his roundup on full view, with web fonts, on this test page. Paul is reporting that IE9 downloads both the EOT file and the WOFF file using Mo’ Bulletproofer. His tests were performed in Platform Preview 7. Is it a bug or a flaw in Mo’ Bulletproofer that calls for the addition of Conditional Comments? (That would fix the problem and it’s likely that the page would already contain the necessary “less than” IE9 Conditional Comment tags, anyway.) Also, in yet a new turn, Ethan Dunham of Font Squirrel has chimed in with yet another syntax that looks quite promising. And clever, damn him. Stay tuned. Rumor has it that IE9 RC1 (or will it be an RTM?) is due out in just a few days. Will go hands-on with testing then.

Financial Power Shifting Through The Mobile Screen

Richard Fink — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:27:20 +0000

Peter-Paul Koch reports that mobile phones are poised to become the new medium for financial transactions, bringing the ease of electronic funds transfer to nearly everybody on earth. It’s been headed our way for awhile, and the impact it’s going to have can’t be overstated. It creates a window for new players in the world financial markets and it’s a democratizing force of tectonic proportions.

In case you’re not aware of it – the growth and popularity of mobile phones worldwide is staggering. Personal computers look lame in comparison. For many people in poorer countries, a mobile phone is way more than just a phone, it’s participation in the modern world; it’s ambition; it’s hope.

Follow The Money

What’s coming is a modern-day replay of the revolution in banking that started at a time when banking was only for the rich. In 1904, a fellow named Amadeo Giannini, angry because the existing banks refused to service working class immigrants like himself, founded the Bank Of Italy in San Francisco. Giannini did rather well with the “rabble” that his competitors turned away. So well in fact, that some years later Bank of Italy merged with another and changed its name.
You might have heard of it: Bank Of America.
By assets, it’s the largest bank holding company in the United States. And the second largest bank by market capitalization.

It seems a little indignation can go a long, long way.

At that time, the driver of change was demographic. To Giannini, a hundred customers, each with ten cents to deposit, was just as big an opportunity as ten dollars from a well-heeled one. He simply saw the world differently than his rivals. Today, the change is driven by technology. The SIM cards in mobile phones have built into them, for other technical reasons, the solution to the central problem in funds transfer: authentication. You see, every device on the network must have a unique identifying number. Just like, ummmm…, like a credit card!

I can hear it now: “Hello? Hey, could you phone me fifty dollars until Tuesday? I swear I’ll phone it back to you then. Promise!”

Note: Peter-Paul Koch – aka PPK – is well known for his writings on web development, especially JavaScript. His recent article, Smartphone Browser Landscape is a must-read for anyone wading into the morass of mobile web development. Kudos to him for stretching out and writing about the social and economic side of mobile. Inspired, I’ve done the same.

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