Entries Tagged as 'Conferences'

Web Typography 2009: What Was…

Last night On Slideshare.com, I posted an edited version of the slides I used in my Web Typography lectures last year, and they seem to have gotten some notice. Slide share featured the slides on their main page, resulting in several hundred views.

I’m currently working on a new revised lecture for 2010 to present at SXSW and Voices That Matter, as well some other possible venues TBD. In the meantime, here’s a look back at what was happening in 2009 with Web Typography.

View more documents from Jason CranfordTeague.

For more details on Web typography, pick up my new book Fluid Web Typography


Vote Jason for SXSWi!

sxswi2010.gifSouth 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!

See You at the CSS Summit!

Sign up for the online CSS Summit.

Sign up for the online CSS Summit.

My friends Chris Schmitt and Ari Stiles have been working hard to set up what looks to be a really cool online learning event on July 18th—the CSS Summit. Besides myself, the CSS Summit will have some amazing speakers like Molly Holzschlag, Stephanie Sullivan, Kimberly BlessingDave McFarlandZoe Gillenwater and Christopher Schmitt.

The topics being talked about include:

  • Future CSS and Markup
  • Troubleshooting IE6
  • CSS3
  • Coding Layouts
  • Web Typography (that one’s mine)
  • Web Form Elements
  • Flexible Layouts

The CSS Summit will take place online Saturday, July 18 from 9 a.m. to 5p.m ET. Tickets are $139 for a single user or $439 for a meeting rum, but you can get $25 off is you use my discount code (CSSJASONCT).

Register now!

Web Safe Fonts Beta 2 is Live!

Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2

Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2

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.

Jason Reads from SiS at SXSW 09

At my SXSW Book Signing

At my SXSW Book Signing. I don't usually look this menacing.

At SXSW last week, I read Chapter 3, “The Myths of CSS”, from my forthcoming book Speaking In Styles, and then did a book signing for CSS, DHTML, & Ajax  at the Barnes & Noble booth. It was an interesting session, where I talked to several nice people, and even signed copy of my book for someone from Microsoft (hopefully he won’t be returning it).

SXSW posted an audio recording of my reading on their site and I am happy to re-present it here.

Speaking in Styles: A CSS Primer for Web Designers