Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’m back from two-weeks hard-earned holiday in the south of France. What have I missed? Over five-hundred unread RSS posts for starters. I’m not usually one for best of entries, but here, in no particular order, are some things that have caught my attention — too many for a deluge of elsewhere entries.

It’s a secret I need keep no longer — we’re taking For A Beautiful Web to Japan in partnership with our friends at Web Directions.

Typotheque is an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands who offer fonts for PC and Macintosh. They have kindly invited me into the beta program of their new @font-face embedding service.

If you’re planning to attend, or thinking about attending, one of our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in either Birmingham on September 25th 2009 or Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009, here is the schedule for the event workshop to whet your appetite.

With all the buzz around @font-face delivery services such as Typekit, one question remains to be properly answered. How can web designers show concept work to their clients when the fonts they want to use are hosted (and protected)?

I’ve been slowly evolving the design of For A Beautiful Web over the last few months since I relaunched it in April. Back then I stripped it back from its almost universally unpopular first design, then added hints of a future direction on the home page. Now that design has matured and today I launched its sister site at Transcending CSS.

We had such a great time presenting our master-classes in London last year and in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, we decided to host more. ‘Advanced CSS Styling’ will be a one-day workshop in Birmingham on September 25th 2009 and Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009. Ten early-bird tickets are available per event at only £275.00+VAT per person, but get in quick, these are sure to be snapped up quickly.

This morning my inbox popped with an invitation to the preview of Typekit, a technology platform that hosts both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM. Back in May I wrote that Typekit will change everything, here are my first impressions of Typekit in action at For A Beautiful Web.

Joe Drew, one of the people on Mozilla’s graphics team has responded to my comment on First Impressions on Typekit; Studying type rendering closely also calls into question the natural differences between the ways that browsers render type as I discussed in Walls Come Tumbling Down. Safari’s text rendering is clearly more refined and superior to Firefox 3.5.

It’s been one helluva busy, tiring but inspiring week, traveling first to speak at An Event Apart Boston, then, with Jeremy Keith and Jason Santa Maria onto London for @media2009. At both events, I presented Walls Come Tumbling Down. Here are the presentation slides and transcript.