Typekit: the font solution we’ve been waiting for?

Published by Jake Goldman on February 8th, 2010 in Design & Creative and Featured. 4 Comments

Ask any front end web developer to describe common challenges involved in converting (or “cutting”) a design. Ask a designer who’s savvy about front end web technology what the biggest creative limitation of the web “canvas” is. In both instances, you’d likely hear an earful about fonts.

For the front end web developer, it’s all about taking someone else’s creative – often designed on a highly controlled and extremely flexible canvas like Adobe Photoshop – and implementing it in the much less controlled and much less flexible world of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Sometimes, a design that look great as a static image or storyboard just doesn’t translate well into web code, especially when not-so-design-sophisticated clients have to maintain the content and some of the imagery.

Fonts have long been a classic example. A storyboard designer can use any font they have installed on their own computer to make a beautiful design, but hacks aside, web browsers have only been able to render text with fonts installed on the visitors’ computers. Since there are only a handful of fonts that are more or less guaranteed to be on  all modern computers (think Arial and Times New Roman), websites have been limited to a handful of uninteresting choices.

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3 simple examples: why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers

Published by Jake Goldman on March 21st, 2009 in Design & Creative and Featured and Programming. 25 Comments

UPDATE: Paul Thurrott, a Windows journalist, has featured some commentary on our post over at his Winsupersite. Check out his post, and the great discussion below it! Thanks for the input, Paul!

Internet Explorer 8 is out, and a lot of people – technically sophisticated and otherwise – are wondering what, if anything, this means for the web. As professional web developers, our view is that while Internet Explorer 8 is an incremental improvement over its predecessor, we’re mostly disappointed by its lack of progress.

Having read a variety of takes on IE8, we were inspired to write this article for two audiences. First, there’s little in the way of concrete examples and clear explanations for a large swatch of the business technology decision makers (that many of our clients represent) who are often savvy about technology, but look to organizations like us for a deeper understanding of the strategic, cost, and technical significance. Second, reading the comments on tech savvy websites like Neowin, Digg, and the Winsupersite have me concerned that there’s a growing and false notion that IE8 is just great, and its rendering problems are the result of web developers writing non-standard code optimized for IE7.

To understand why IE8 is a legitimate disappointment, we need to start by providing background on how different browsers impact web development, both from a cost and design standpoint. If you think you already have a handle on this, you can skip ahead to our 3 straightforward examples of IE8 disappointments.

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New blog series: Designing for the Web Canvas

Published by Jake Goldman on June 30th, 2008 in Designing for the Web Canvas. 0 Comments

As a professional web shop, our HTML / CSS developers are frequently taking a professional graphic artist’s vision of a website’s look and feel and converting it to work with this unique canvas we call a website. The graphic artists’ digital toolbox is full of powerful applications like Adobe Photoshop, that provide near total control over the final presentation, on a fixed sized canvas, down to the pixel.

There’s one big problem: the web developer’s canvas just isn’t that controlled or robust. And it’s not just that the unique characteristics of web layout or the code that defines how a web page should look lacks a good way to pull off a design element (which it does, often enough). There’s a bigger problem: several kinds of interpreters trying to understand the canvas, each with its own quirks and limitations. Welcome to to the world wide web canvas.

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