Fontpark
link Thursday 14th of August, 2008
Useless, infuriating, but still quite a lot of fun. Keep watching for some really clever illustrations made with Japanese characters.
The best ampersand
link Thursday 14th of August, 2008
We've been hearing a fair bit about the humble ampersand in recent months. Much of this is thanks to the efforts of the excellent (and thorough) The Ampersand, but another major fan of the typographer's favourite squiggle is Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits. Today, Dan put up an interesting article about using a separate CSS font-family declaration for ampersands, based on Robert Bringhurst's advice:
“ Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are often the more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text. ”
Thoughtfully, Dan (or more accurately his new colleague, Meagan Fisher) has provided a series of charts showing the ampersands available in the default font sets of OS X, XP and Vista. Also worth noting (for the Semanticists in the room, at least) is Jeremy Keith's comment regarding the use of abbr rather than span tags. Another semantics fist-fight waiting to happen? We can only hope...
The Mario Scarf; More Motivation
link Tuesday 12th of August, 2008
You might have seen this elsewhere — but meh, you weren't doing anything that important anyway. Cassie is knitting the entire of Super Mario Bros, World 1 Level 1, into a scarf! Genius:
Following on from my earlier post on motivation, however, comes this little gem:
“ Jason decided to to offer me a deal- when the Mario Scarf is finished then he will propose. Motivation at last! ”
Double genius.
Just Doing It
blog Tuesday 12th of August, 2008
I spent a whole bunch of my train journey yesterday chatting via IM to a good friend of mine about motivation. I'll admit straight out that I'm not somebody who has an easy time with self-motivation on side projects. I agree to do too many things for too many people, then find it difficult to get started on any of them — or find myself switching wildly between them, like I'm spinning plates. In fact, that's part of the reason I was so anxious to launch this site — I wanted to get it finished, out there, complete.
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Yoshitomo Nara + graf
blog Monday 11th of August, 2008
We visited the Baltic this weekend to check out the new Summer exhibitions. I spent the whole train journey from Newcastle to London (3.5 hours) attempting to put down in words my experience of Yoshitomo Nara and Graf's A-Z exhibition (short version, I liked it). Now I'm going to try and re-explain it without sounding like a wordy tosser, on the fast train from London to Milton Keynes (about 40 minutes).