Last year sometime, Typedia showed up on the radar here at Readable Web. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, frankly. No tag line. What’s the focus? What’s the angle? But the people behind it had gravitas in the world of web so I figured maybe I was missing something. I kept an eye out.

Lately, that’s been paying off. The posts on the Typedia Blog by Erik Vorhes have been top notch, by my lights. Enlightening reading with enriching links. This son-of-a-gun is puttin’ me to shame, really. And so……. may we have a drumroll pleeeeeeese……. I have added Typedia to the Linkworthy blogroll here at Readable Web.

What’s Typedia? Well the font loving folks who created it say this:

In a nutshell, Typedia is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. Think of it like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type.
We love type, and we have a burning desire to learn as much as possible about typefaces: where they come from, who made them, and why they look the way they do. We want everyone to be able to share in that rich knowledge and enjoy the art and artists of type design. Over time, we think Typedia could grow into a great educational resource for people to learn about their favorite typefaces and discover new ones.

Got A Yen For A Yin, Yang?

If you’re into fonts, web fonts, type, typography, web design and stuff like that there, check it out and get involved. Typophile is a great and unique resource, too, let’s not forget. But for every Yin there’s gotta be a Yang.

Dang!

Related posts:

1. TypeCon 2010: A New Birth Of Type
2. Google Starts Hosting @Font-Face Web Fonts
3. Destination Web At ATYPI

John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks and Christopher Slye of Adobe arranged a briefing – a guide to the perplexed – by Firefox developer and editor of the W3C CSS3 Fonts Module, John Daggett.

John Daggett has kindly posted his slides.
Dave Crossland has kindly posted his notes.
Photos of the event are posted in an album on Readable Web’s Facebook photo gallery.

California Dreamin’

As Simon Daniels of Microsoft put it on the TypeCon feed, these links are the closest thing to having been there “minus the element of spending a sunny afternoon in an underground bunker with a bunch of geeky web font geeks”.
This is true. But we emerged from the bunker with good tidings: the CSS3 Fonts Module has come a long way and Daggett says there’s a possibility it will move to Candidate Recommendation status by the end of this year. Truly impressive and unusually speedy work by the WG and its panel of Invited Experts. Many parts of the draft will be implemented in IE9 and Firefox 4. With other browser makers expected to follow. As John Hudson said during the Web Fonts panel discussion a few days later, “The standards process works.”
Considering the pessimism last year, quite amazing.

Web typography and a standards process that works. Wow++.

Related posts:

1. Playing Up WOFF At TypeCon, LA
2. TypeCon 2010: A New Birth Of Type
3. TypeCon 2010

As good as digital gets there is still no replacement for face-to-face. Never will be. The only thing that a human really understands is other humans. Facial expression, tone of voice, body language – the real people deal – there’s just no way to get that from afar. Technology allows us to adopt a persona in our communications, and the only way past that is to be there.
Ya gotta get out of the office.

The Past Has Passed

It’s amazing how much has changed since last year. Here at TypeCon, there is a new mood: a growing acceptance that the future of fonts is onscreen. A feeling of relief is in the air. Decisions have been made. Last night, in a keynote kick-off, Roger Black of the Font Bureau focused on screen fonts and, with optimism, stated the obvious – that the font industry has to rethink the business of type because there is no going back. Roger was understandably a little light on details but the last slide in his accompanying Powerpoint demo was a price: “99 Cents”

News And Links

Webtype

Webtype, a partnership between Font Bureau and Ascender Corp, has finally launched. Without even looking, I know the fonts look good. Webtype has a blog, too. See: New Web Font Service Launched by Partnership of Experts
FinkTip: Stop with the “we are the experts” stuff. Nobody cares. Self-congratulatory mumbo doesn’t convince anybody of anything. (Unless you’re trying to convince yourself, which is really what sales copy like that is about.) Pronouncements from on high about your own expertise doesn’t work onscreen. It only undermines the effort.
And if I see from anybody, “use fonts legally” as marketing pitch, I’m going to scream. I’m screaming right now. You might as well hang a sign that says, “Hack me, please!” And how many potential customers, pray tell, are even going to understand what you’re talking about? This is just the reality. Why not be explicit and tell customers that if they don’t do business with you, they could potentially get sued? That would be charming, eh? Either get into it, in detail, or cut the FUD. It just detracts.

Fontfonter

Some guys from Fontshop have put together a web font preview site called FontFonter which lets you see their fonts as applied to external sites. Conspicuously missing is support for Internet Explorer. I don’t think it’s a technical issue but I could be wrong. I have noticed an ideological bias – unstated, but certainly there – against Internet Explorer at Fontshop. I don’t know if it’s a beef with Microsoft in general, or what.
I’ll be trying to get to the bottom of it and will report. [Update: see report that follows]

FinkRetract: (Concerning the deleted above) I met up with Stephen Coles and Ivo Gabrowitsch of Fontshop today and was assured that there is no bias against IE and that Fontfonter’s lack of support for IE is purely technical. They just can’t make the font swap-out work in IE. And they are quite glad that Microsoft held the line and helped bring about WOFF so no biases there, either. Love is in the air. My bad for reading into things.

Typecon Pics On Facebook

I’ve been trying to get a handle on my new Canon Rebel X4 camera – and dammit I’m going to do it no matter how long it takes – and have been posting pics on Readable Web’s Facebook Page. Check it out. You might be tagged!

Good Web Fonts

Educator Laura Franz – who I met last night – has put together a side-by-side comparison site for body fonts called Good Web Fonts. Great idea. Check it out.

The Web Font Awards – A Contest

Monotype Imaging will be sponsoring a web fonts contest. The site is called Web Font Awards. Brand new. No details as yet. Kudos to Monotype for this idea. The world holds one surprise after another. Now how do we get more web designers to attend a conference like this? Two hour Web Font “panels” are fine but in the world Roger Black is describing, fonts on the web are the main event with two hour panels on print fonts.

Related posts:

1. John Daggett On CSS3 At TypeCon, 2010
2. TypeCon 2010
3. Playing Up WOFF At TypeCon, LA

Harvey Pekar, Not Long
After We Met

Comic Book innovator Harvey Pekar died last month at the age of 70. I met Harvey a long time ago when I was a young musician and on-and-off student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. This was well before his comic book series American Splendor, or his appearances on David Letterman, or the HBO movie with actor Paul Giamatti as Harvey. I didn’t hear about his death until about a week after it happened. But eerily, I had been thinking about him on the day he died: my blog post that day – On Facebook, Nobody Knows You’re A Dick – reminded me of a very funny riff Harvey did in the movie about other people named Harvey Pekar listed in the Cleveland phonebook.
(It’s PEE-kar, BTW – and American Splendor is a cute movie, watch it.)

But still I couldn’t figure out what I could possibly add to the existing obituaries that would make any sense here on Readable Web. Then I got to remembering…

A Jazz Maven First

A Frame From His 2003 NY Times Op-Ed Piece

I only met him once and briefly. But well before that, I heard about him from mutual friends and fellow musicians. Harvey said this, Harvey said that – voiced with a combination of reverence and awe. Harvey was a legend in the Cleveland jazz scene. A local whose articles and reviews had been published in Downbeat and Jazz Review! His knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic. An entire room was set aside for his record collection. Harvey was The Jazz Maven, The Expert. And in the days before the web, before mobile phones, before damned near everything or so it feels like when I think back to that time – the maven was invaluable: a human search engine. If you wanted info on the best recordings by a particular jazz artist, or you wanted to know the names of the sidemen on a particular record because the record jacket didn’t say – you could get answers or at least clues from Harvey Pekar.

By the time I met him, he was in his mid thirties and had stopped writing about jazz. He was writing about politics – or so I heard. He was still acquiring jazz recordings, though – out of habit. Years later, I read an article about American Splendor and, at first, wondered if it was the same Harvey Pekar I met in Cleveland. Frankly, I thought the idea of an autobiographical comic book was weird. And after all, I had an unremarkable existence of my own to keep me entertained, thanks, and that was enough. But American Splendor slowly gathered a cult following. It caught on. It led to appearances on Letterman and Harvey became a minor celebrity. It’s a pretty unique individual who can turn being a nobody into a basis for fame. In retrospect, American Splendor foreshadowed the personal blog and reality TV.

But being a jazz maven/search engine was Harvey’s start. Cartoonist Robert Crumb was a jazz fan, too, and that was the connection that initially brought them together. Today, the local maven doesn’t count for anything. No, you can’t get insight from a search engine but it will lead you to all the relevant data you could possibly process in a lifetime. Plus a list of mavens all over the world who’ve already processed parts of it and are happy to share their insights. In ten years, if you try to explain to someone who was my age at the time I met Harvey, that asking a human was once your first and sometimes only path to information, they might not believe you. And they certainly won’t be able to comprehend it.

Oh yeah… I met Harvey when he stopped by the house I was living in to connect with my friend, teacher, and house-mate Willis Lyman – one of the best double bass players in town at the time. I think they were heading to a party or a gig, or something. We sat around shooting the breeze for five or ten minutes while Willis finished getting ready. We talked a little about jazz, and made some wisecracks. Just two guys killing time, shooting the breeze. I remember him unusually clearly – that’s what’s odd. True to the spirit of American Splendor and Harvey’s legacy, it was completely mundane yet worthy of note.

No related posts.

It’s Tomorrow, And Free. Please come.

If you’re in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and you’re into design, web design, web fonts, fonts, typography, or anything at all like the forementioned, please come to FontCONF tomorrow, Saturday, June 19th at:
CoCo – Coworking and Collaborative Space
213 4th St E., St Paul, MN

FontCONF

Organized by Garrick Van Buren of the font service and download site Kernest, a great time is guaranteed for all.

In the morning, font designer Chank Deisel will be leading a session where an entire font will be constructed as a collaborative effort. As part of a team, I’ll also be facilitating a session in the afternoon. There will be surprises. Fun. Laughter and learning.

Greatly looking forward to it. Hope you can come.

Addendum To Conference:

As some readers of this blog know, an article I wrote about fonts on the web was published on AlistApart Magazine about ten days ago. Unfortunately, Bill Davis of font producer Ascender Corp, took issue with some of the things I wrote about Ascender’s new web font services.

As it turned out, Bill flew in from Chicago to a attend FontCONF, and I’m sorry to report that all the bad blood boiled over, things got completely out of hand, and there was a brawl. Luckily, someone had a camera and captured the incident:

Davis and Fink square off with scornful laughter, each confident of victory.

Witneses to this unfortunate confrontation included font designers Mark Simonson, Stu Sandler, and Chank Deisel. However, after a delicious dinner at a nearby steak house in St. Paul, both men declined to press charges.

Related posts:

1. Google Starts Hosting @Font-Face Web Fonts
2. Early Reports Of Web-Safe Font “Sickness”
3. An Interview With Kernest’s Garrick Van Buren

Rochester, New York

Over the past two days here at the Future Of Reading Conference at RIT there’s been two talks by publishing industry insiders – Molly Barton of Penguin Books and Jane Friedman, former longtime President and CEO of Harper Collins Publishers Worldwide.

There’s a big difference in age between them. One of them is young and one of them is, well, probably a grandmother. (Didn’t ask, but she mentioned she had four sons.) One of them under­stands where the publishing of books is headed and the other one seemed a little stodgy, frankly.

Here’s what they look like. Guess who’s clued in, who’s not:

Jane Friedman, Clued In

In the days of print, competition between the major publishers could afford to be a “gentlemanly” affair. But in these days of digital and print-on-demand, it’s guerrilla warfare. Jane Friedman brought up the fact that there’s 80,000 independent publishers in the USA. Twice. She gets it. And she gets the change in mood, too. It’s not just digital distribution, there’s a change in expectations. Many readers want to feel a relationship, a connection to the author. A name on a book cover isn’t enough. And readers want to get the book they want, whenever they want it, on whatever device they’re using, wherever they are. She gets that, too.

Jane Friedman is co-founder of start-up publisher Open Road Integrated Media. And for the first time, they are publishing digitally, with no accompanying print edition, Negotiating With Evil, by Mitchell Reiss.
Let me say that again: no simultaneous print edition.

Hey Jane, How ‘Bout DRM?

After her presentation, I asked Friedman if all of Open Road’s titles were DRM’d (Kindle, Nook, etc) and she said that at the moment, all of them were. I asked if they were considering releasing anything under trusting, open licenses and she said it wasn’t out of the question but that Open Road is a very new company, give it time, and certainly anything and everything that gets books into the hands of the most readers and generates revenue for the authors is on the table.

OK. Maybe someday I’ll be able to quote a paragraph or two without jumping through hoops. (Or, alternatively, downloading the cracked edition which we all know will exist. Not condoning, just saying.) But in the meantime, it’s refreshing to see somebody with long experience thinking anew and acting anew.

Next, more from the conference: Chris Anderson of Wired, Jon Orwant of Google Books, and my new hero, old fart Richard Lanham, Professor Emeritus at UCLA.

Related posts:

1. E-Book Publishers Go Delusional
2. To Kindle Or Not To Kindle
3. Two Joes On The State Of E-Books

Rochester, NY
On the two planes I had to take to get from Florida to Rochester, I was reading the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig I downloaded (for free, natch) and then transferred to my iRex 1000 e-reader using a custom formatted PDF from Feedbooks.

The illustrations in the PDF edition are missing. Sometimes the iRex skips pages inexplicably. The iRex has no network connectivity. But still, what Lessig has to say is making its way into my brain. Maybe I’ll compare the Mobi or EPUB editions from Feedbooks on the iPad with what I’ve got on the iRex in a future post.

The iRex 1000 is the largest e-paper device around and looks like this:

Thus have I prepared myself through hands-on encounters of the frustrating kind to discuss the future of reading here at the Future Of Reading Conference. It’s being held at the Rochester Institute Of Technology and starts tonight with a kick-off talk and book signing from author Margaret Atwood whose work I am not familiar with but will be by tonight – maybe even convincingly so – through the magic of search engines and Wikipedia.

What, Nothing About the Readable Web Redesign?

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve upped my blogging game a bit with a redesign. Still not quite tweaked to absolute web perfection but soon, soon. (Done with the aid of Joshua Wold of Sabramedia – to give credit where credit is due.)

Related posts:

1. A Future Without Flash: Microsoft and Apple Nail The Coffin
2. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition

Boston, Massachusetts  Readable Web is getting out of the office this year. I’ll be attending and reporting on a wide variety of events.

Starting with:

AnEventApart, Boston

I’ve never attended one of Zeldman & Meyer’s traveling road shows before and I can’t wait. The event kicks off tonight with a meet and greet at the Westin Copley Hotel sponsored by Extensis who is here to preview their new web font service WebInk.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting pics, twittering, muttering, commenting about just how tall Jeff Veen really looks in person, and reporting on everything and anything that happens to spark an idea in my brain.

Details on this conference and upcoming Event Apart conferences here.

Update: After-Conference Thoughts

Call it what you want: web design, digital publishing, whatever – the problems exist on two levels.

Problem 1: Cutting The Bullshit

This problem is not unique to digital publishing but to all publishing: staying on message, staying focused, writing clearly, keeping it brief – all the trite truisms are just as true today as they were when David Ogilvy wrote Ogilvy On Advertising in 1983 and Rudolph Flesch wrote The Art Of Readable Writing in 1949. Nobody is going to give you or your product more than a passing glance. At least at first. Waste people’s time and they’re gone. Click.

This is why I perked up when Luke Wroblewski argued that you should design your small-screen mobile experience first and build your desktop experience from that kernel. I agree. Working from the inside out like that imposes a discipline that would probably not exist if you started with the desktop experience. And if you can’t seem to cut it all down to it’s essence for an iPhone or Android, it’s time to ask yourself why the site exists in the first place.

Problem 2: Re-Tasking Content For Different Devices And Screen Sizes

It used to be that the difference between user agents (browsers) was the thing that drove web authors crazy. Yes, there are still issues, but it’s easy to envision a time in the near future when that won’t be anything more than an occasional and minor annoyance. The monster facing us now is different devices and screen sizes. This is a tough one – and the mental tools publishers need are just beginning to coalesce.

Recently, on Typophile.com, designer John Hudson made the observation that, to him, websites in general resembled scrapbooks. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot and finally realized why: minus the negative connotations of the word “scrap”, they are scrapbooks. Chunks of information being fed in and out from disparate sources on the network and placed together on the same “page”. The equivalent of taking chunks of five or six pages of a book or magazine and pasting them together. Even in an era of relatively high resolution screens this will still be the case. Content must be chunked so it can reflow into its container. And connectedness is a requirement – the idea of an “e-book” on an “e-reader” disconnected from the net is already preposterous – even though we’ll be living with that situation for some time to come.

I got a new TV delivered today. It’s connected to the network, too. A TV with web apps. A giant iPad. Who’d a thunk?

And, oh, yeah. Just to cap off AnEventApart, Boston:

How Tall Is Jeffrey Veen?

Meeting Jeff Veen in person was a bit of a shock, really. For a guy who writes and speaks about all this web stuff, turns out the guy’s tall enough to be my father!

Oops, Capped Off Too Soon

[A Bit More On An EventApart, Boston] Here’s a nice roundup of the event called Themes From AnEventApart Boston with a link also, to Luke Wroblewski’s extensive notes from the conference. Also, Luke and the concept of “Mobile First” gets a treatment on the Big Web Show.

Related posts:

1. FontCONF In Minneapolis/St. Paul
2. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition
3. Google Starts Hosting @Font-Face Web Fonts

Wow. Big Changes. Bad news and more bad news for Adobe Flash and Flash developers over the past few days.

Apple Says No Flash On Apple Mobile

First, there was the announcement by Steve Jobs on the Apple blog.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

Steve hath spoken. Adobe Flash lies broken.

Microsoft Says Yes To H.264 Video, Says No To Flash

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE team drove in another nail with an announcement on the IE Blog.

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

The name of this blog isn’t “Watchable Web” so I don’t know anything about what hidden or not so hidden agendas Apple or Microsoft might have for supporting H.264. But Flash’s funeral will have a big impact on the way text looks on the web, and soon.

Web Fonts Become More Important, Cufón, Too.

@Font-Face just became a whole lot more important. If Flash isn’t going to be available on Apple Mobile devices and IE9 won’t support it for video, Flash no longer has a future. For text replacement, it is no longer a viable option, period. As in: stop using as of now, today. As in: if using, phase out, soon.

Related posts:

1. Apple And Microsoft In Talks On Fonts, Part II
2. Microsoft WOFFles On SVG Web Fonts In IE9
3. Apple and Microsoft In Talks On Web Font Protections

Required Reading

In his book, the Blind Watchmaker, evolut­ionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes:

— Explaining is a difficult art. You can ex­plain something so that your reader under­stands the words; and you can explain some­thing so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn’t enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate’s trade.

John Allsopp knows the tricks. And luckily, for those of us who work with things web, his field is web development. If you want to know what’s going on today and in the near term, Developing With Web Standards will take you through it all, step by step.

Snapshots And More

Like its “sister” volume, Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte, Developing With Web Standards is like flipping through a book of “snapshots”. Each chapter gives you a picture of one aspect of web technology along with the occasional zoom-in on things of particular import­ance. Seasoned web developers will find in it a valuable review. And no mat­ter how much you know, or how familiar you think you are with something, I guarantee that at some point you’ll find yourself thinking:

  “Hey, I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that?” Hah!

For myself, I found the chapter on Canvas and SVG especially useful because, frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to Canvas and SVG. (Is there such a thing as keeping up with it all?) And since the book is liberally sprinkled with links and sources for further study, I not only get John’s expert analysis, but a leg-up on how to learn more.

I would also recommend it highly for people who are only vaguely familiar with web development and would like to learn. It’s not a basic primer by any stretch, but it’s written in a friendly and clear style that helps a lot when you’re trying to make sense of a thing for the first time. Yes, you will learn some things, but more importantly, you’ll come away with a clear idea of what it is you don’t know. And when you’re new to field of knowledge, finding out what it is you don’t know can be the hardest part.

The Soul Of An Educator

In addition to authoring, publishing, and software development, John Allsopp is co-founder of Web Directions – which puts together incredible conferences on web development all around the world.

When I grow up, my ambition is to speak at a Web Directions conference and get to rub shoulders with people like John Resig, Steve Souder, and Mark Boulton.

John Allsopp, good luck with the book.

Related posts:

1. Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition
2. John Daggett On CSS3 At TypeCon, 2010
3. Readable Web At AnEventApart, Boston