Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.
Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.
A fun new font from Jason:
Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.
This is absolutely wonderful!
There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.
This is what the web is for!
Some interesting experiments in web typography here.
A complete digital archive of the famous typography from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
The lettering really is lovely!
I like the approach here: logical properties and sensible default type and spacing.
This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:
The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).
Oh, this looks like an excellent event (in London and online):
Adventures in Episodic Type Design
With David Jonathan Ross
Thursday 17th October 2024
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
I really like the newly-launched website for this year’s XOXO festival. I like that the design is pretty much the same for really small screens, really large screens, and everything in between because everything just scales. It’s simultaneously a flyer, a poster, and a billboard.
Trys has written about the websites he’s noticed using fluid type and spacing: There it is again, that fluid feeling.
I know what he means. I get a similar feeling when I’m on a site that adjusts fluidly to any browser window—it feels very …webby.
When responsive design was on the rise, it was a real treat to come across a responsive site. After a while, it stopped being remarkable. Now if I come across a site that isn’t responsive, it feels broken.
And now it’s a treat to come across a site that uses fluid type. But how long will it be until it feels unremarkable? How will it be until a website that doesn’t use fluid type feels broken?
If you start with a high-quality, legible, free typeface and experiment with size, weight, colour, line height, and (subtle) letter spacing, you might find these free options will get you further than you’d think. These are professional fonts crafted and maintained by experts and they can help your content land the way it deserves to.
There’s a lovely CSS property called hanging-punctuation. You can use it to do exactly what the name suggests and exdent punctuation marks such as opening quotes.
Here’s one way to apply it:
html {
hanging-punctuation: first last;
}
Any punctuation marks at the beginning or end of a line will now hang over the edge, leaving you with nice clean blocks of text; no ragged edges.
Right now it’s only supported in Safari but there’s no reason not to use it. It’s a perfect example of progressive enhancement. One line of CSS to tidy things up for the browsers that support it and leave things exactly as they are for the browsers that don’t.
But when I used this over on The Session I noticed an unintended side-effect. Because I’m applying the property globally, it’s also acting on form fields. If the text inside a form field starts with a quotation mark or some other piece of punctuation, it’s shunted off to the side and hidden.
Here’s the fix I used:
input, textarea {
hanging-punctuation: none;
}
It’s a small little gotcha but I figured I’d share it in case it helps someone else out.
Adam makes a very good point here: the term “vertical rhythm” is quite chauvanistic, unconciously defaulting to top-to-bottom writing modes; the term “logical rhythm” is more universal (and scalable).
Here’s a taste of what Rich will be delivering at Patterns Day on Thursday—can’t wait!
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.
Five lovely monospaced variable fonts.
How cool is this‽ Dan made a font for Wilco!
I had a lot of fun making the website for Patterns Day.
If you’re interested in the tech stack, here’s what I used:
Actually, technically it’s all HTML because the styles are inside a style element rather than a separate style sheet, but you know what I mean. Also, there is technically some JavaScript but all it does is register a service worker that takes care of caching and going offline.
I didn’t use any build tools. There was no pipeline. There is no node_modules folder filling up my hard drive. Nothing was automated. The website was hand-crafted the long hard stupid way.
I started with the content. I wrote out the words and marked them up with the most appropriate HTML elements.
Time to layer on the presentation.
For the design, I turned to Michelle for help. I gave her a brief, describing the vibe of the conference, and asked her to come up with an appropriate visual language.
Crucially, I asked her not to design a website. Instead I asked her to think about other places where this design language might be used: a poster, social media, anything but a website.
Partly I was doing this for my own benefit. If you give me a pixel-perfect design for a web page and tell me to code it up, either I won’t do it or I won’t enjoy it. I just don’t get any motivation out of that kind of direct one-to-one translation.
But give me guardrails, give me constraints, give me boundary conditions, and off I go!
Michelle was very gracious in dealing with such a finicky client as myself (“Can you try this other direction?”, “Hmm… I think I preferred the first one after all!”) She delivered a colour palette, a type scale, typeface choices, and some wonderful tiling patterns …it is Patterns Day after all!
With just a few extra lines of CSS, the basic typography was in place.
I started layering on the colours. Even though this was a one-page site, I still made liberal use of custom properties in the CSS. It just feels good to be able to update one value and see the results, well …cascade.
I had a lot of fun with the tiling background images. SVG was the perfect format for these. And because the tiles were so small in file size, I just inlined them straight into the CSS.
By this point, I felt like I was truly designing in the browser. Adjusting spacing, playing around with layout, and all that squishy stuff. Some of the best results came from happy accidents—the way that certain elements behaved at certain screen sizes would lead me into little experiments that yielded interesting results.
I’m not sure it’s possible to engineer that kind of serendipity in Figma. Figma was the perfect tool for exploring ideas around the visual vocabulary, and for handing over design decisions around colour, typography, and texture. But when it comes to how the content is going to behave on the World Wide Web, nothing beats a browser for fidelity.
By this point I was really sweating the details, like getting the logo just right and adjusting the type scale for different screen sizes. Needless to say, Utopia was a godsend for that.
I was also checking back in with Michelle to get her take on design decisions I was making.
I could’ve kept tinkering but the diminishing returns were a sign that it was time to put this out into the world.
It felt really good to work on a web page like this. It felt like I was getting my hands into the soil of the web. I don’t think it’s an accident that the result turned out to be very performant.
Getting hands-on like this stops me from getting rusty. And honestly, working with CSS these days is a joy. There’s such power to be had from using var() in combination with functions like calc() and clamp(). Layout is a breeze with flexbox and grid. Browser differences are practically non-existent. We’ve never had it so good.
Here’s something I noticed about my relationship to CSS; my brain has finally made the switch to logical properties. Now if I’m looking at some CSS and I see left, right, top, or bottom, it looks like a bug to me. Those directional properties feel loaded with assumptions whereas logical properties feel much more like working with the grain of the web.
What a beautiful website!