South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) is looking for a few good speakers, and I’m hoping to be amongst the chosen again this year. I have two sessions up for consideration, and although I can only present one of them, I’m asking very, very, VERY nicely to consider voting for both of them so that I have the best chance of going to Austin.

Thanks for your help!

Fluid Web Typography: Many Types, Many Faces

Are you tired of using the same old fonts in your Web designs? The type you use can say as much to your audience as the actual words on the page, but until now, Web designers have had an extremely limited palette of fonts from which to choose—essentially, Arial (yawn), Times (yawn), and Georgia (yawwwwwn). Design is about overcoming the limitations of a medium, and Web design is no different. In this session, Jason will show you how to use fluid typography, browser-safe fonts, and type over images to create robust scalable designs to achieve great typography without resorting to typing in images or Adobe Flash. You’ll also learn how to use CSS to download any font you want to use in your Web designs, and to use downloadable fonts, despite the limitations of some browsers.

Vote for It!

The Trusted Filter: Finding Your Cronkites Online

There is just too much information in the universe—too much to know—for one person to experience even a small fraction of it it all first hand. We have always turned to the people around us to help sift through and synthesize data (turning information into knowledge) and to help us learn what’s going on (turn knowledge into understanding). We have always relied on our trusted filters.

However, at every major shift in the way technology is used to transmit information, we see a parallel shift, not only who our trusted filters are, but also the very nature of what it means to be a trusted filter. With the rise of the Internet, and the shift away from the one-to-many paradigm of trusted filters to a many-to-many paradigm, some alarmists are sounding the fall of civilization as we know it. However, we must view the period we are in now as one of transition—a transition that may last several decades—and consider it against the background of other significant historical shifts in culture and technology. Doing so, you’ll realize that the future of communication, knowledge, and understanding our children will know will be nothing like what we know now.

The Trusted Filter examines where the shifts in culture and technology we are currently experiencing have developed from, the implications they have on how we gather and process information, and where these changes may be leading us. Neither reactionary nor Pollyanna, The Trusted Filter will acknowledge the downsides of the “New” media, but will equally acknowledge that the devaluation of “Traditional” media is not a bad thing.

Vote For It!

Tags: Conferences, Future, Typography by jason
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This week I had two different articles go out on different blogs.

The first was over on Peachpit.com where I’m writing a weekly blog now called “Ask the Web Designer“. This week I answered the very basic question “What is a Web designer?” Answer: Everybody. Here’s a bit more of my answer:

The long answer is that a good Web designer is a good design, and this can come “naturally” or from training, but is not medium dependent. However, a professional Web designer has to understand the medium well enough to know it’s strengths and limitations. Any designer can pump out something that looks brilliant when displayed in a Web browser window, but is slow to load, static when loaded, and completely unusable.

Read the article »

I also finally had an article I wrote weeks ago published in Webdesigner Depot with 5 (really 6) new CSS3 techniques that work in several browsers. However, since none of the browsers that supported the techniques included any version of IE and even though I went to great pains to explain that up front and talk about using these to enhance designs, the post caused quite a lot of heated discussion around using anything that doesn’t work in the browser that “everyone” is using. Here’s a typical comment in that vein:

While not developing for IE may work for you, most clients I’ve had still use IE. I do think if people start using these new techniques in sites it may help push IE to support the new techniques, yet I won’t be able to use them until they work for my clients.

Overall, the comments were positive, though, and I hope that the article will get some good discussions started around Web designers supporting a Web browser that seems hell bent on not supporting Web design.

Read the article »

Tags: CSS, Web Design by jason
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