After over a year and a half in development and a good 6 months writing it, I sent off the introduction to Speaking In Styles yesterday afternoon. I am now done with the writing. There are still a few more tasks to perform—especially since I decided to lay the damn thing out myself—but the long nights are over, and I got more than 5 hours of sleep last night for the first time in weeks.

Nancy P. is now asking for the final page count, and it’s looking to come in at about 360 pages of pure CSS knowledge.

The publication is set for later this month.

Tags: Uncategorized by jason
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Last week at the Voices that Matter Web Design conference in San Francisco, I unveiled the latest incarnation of the Web Safe Fonts list during my presentation “Many Types, Many Faces: Web Typography Beyond Arial and Times and Georgia.” I created the first beta version of the list over a year ago to show all of the fonts that are likely to be pre-installed on Mac and Windows computers, with a rough rating of the likely hood a given font is installed based on the source of the install.

The Web Safe Fonts list has gotten some attention, but I’ve held off really promoting it until I got some basic functionality in place. With that done, I’m ready to launch Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2 which now includes:

• Column Sort: Organize fonts by name, available weights and styles, OS, and install likely hood.
• Graphic Samples: A screen capture of the full alpha-numeric glyph set for the given font. There are still a couple of samples missing, but I should have those in place soon. Thanks to Mauro Scappa at MediaBarn for help with the Windows screenshot.
• Other refinements: The list is now in an array to allow sorting and I separated the OS and rank into separated columns.

At the conference, I was not able to only talk about the list, but got some great feedback and ideas for some new features I need to include, as well as some great news about a new project. I can’t say much about it right now, but I hope to make an announcement soon.

I’m by no means finished with the list, and hope to make more improvements as time allows including:

• List Unix fonts.
• Add Generic font-family names. This can be problematic since there are no hard and fast rules, but I’m working on it.
• Add Lorem Ipsum and font-family list features. This will allow visitors to create a custom list of fonts they want to use and preview all of them in Greek text.
• Add notes on font legibility and size constraints.
• Continue to vet list for accuracy.

If you are using the list and/or have any feedback, please let me know.

Tags: Conferences, Typography, Web Design by jason
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