George Francis on Voronoi tessellations in generative art. Enjoyed this. Seems like a decent alternative to circle packing at least some of the time.
Elise Hein on her experience with stackless dev. The minimalist in me is pretty much always interested in this angle on web development.
WebComponents.dev on all the ways to make a web component. Lots of charts. Prism and Svelte look intriguing.
Josh Comeau on designing beautiful shadows in CSS. The techniques definitely make a difference.
Fleta Selmani’s Escheresque impossible type (via
Kottke). Love this.
Dave Rupert on how the web is something different. Celebrating the democratic nature of the web as a space for everyone, not just professionals. I like that.
Adrian Roselli on responsive type and zooming. Over the last few years I’ve become one of those people who scale text up. Not massively — not yet — and not always, but it very much makes a difference for these aging eyes.
Donny Trương’s free online book on Vietnamese type design. Mmm.
Noah Smith on developing countries in the Global South, which tied in nicely with my recent reading of How Asia Works (and mentions the book as well). Nice to see that Malaysia’s doing better than it was when the book was written.
Radio Garden lets you browse worldwide radio stations via a map. Fun.
Trying out a new format with these link bundles, in the hope that dropping the bulleted list format is a) more flexible and b) more conducive to writing a bit more about the links, rather than limiting myself to a single line with an awkward semicolon shoved in if I need more room.
Andy Bell on recent/upcoming CSS changes. Good stuff here. I’m probably most looking forward to using :is and clamp() and ch (all of which I’d read about before but had mostly forgotten). Oh, and scroll-margin-top.
Design Engineering Handbook by Natalya Shelburne et al., a free ebook which looks interesting. (I’ve read part of the first chapter so far.) Design Better (which appears to be an InVision thing) has other free books available as well, on various design-related topics.
Max Koehler on continuous typography. Also see his post about the tool and the tool itself. This is great, and I hope these ideas get broader traction. (Also, I’m excited to start using Source Serif 4 and its optical sizing axis.)
Aleksey Kladov on including an ARCHITECTURE.md file. Great idea. Having a high-level overview is so helpful.
Graydon Hoare on always betting on text. I’ve probably linked to this before, but it’s good and worth rereading occasionally.
Andrew Johnson’s article on his typographic experiments in augmented reality is good.
Realtime 3D is another medium that affects our typography and design. What implications are there for typography? Does this change how we need to design?
Recommended: Standard Ebooks. They’re doing the same kind of thing I’ve done — making nice EPUB/Kindle editions of Project Gutenberg (though my efforts have of course been at a much smaller scale, and far more sporadic). Even better, Standard Ebooks has good typography standards and they’re proofing the books against original scans. This is a good project.
I enjoyed Simon Cozens’ talk The Journey of a Word: How Text Ends up on a Page. It’s a good explanation of the overall process of how text works: the input text stream, fonts, shaping, language support, line breaking, and PDF generation. Lots of good stuff.
Dodecaglotta is a lovely polyglot Bible in progress — Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Georgian, German, English, Dutch, and French. The custom typeface looks very nice as well.
For a while now I’ve used option-0 on OS X to type a degree symbol, primarily for tweets about how blasted cold this winter has been. But I’ve accidentally transgressed. That symbol (º) is not in fact a degree symbol, though it sure looks a lot like one. It’s actually an ordinal indicator. Sayonara to my typographic street cred…
To get the real degree symbol (°), type option-shift-8 instead. Now if only I could go back and edit all those tweets… (I blame iOS, where holding down the 0 key does in fact get you a degree symbol.)