Typekit is king
30 January 2010 ~ 0 notes »
I’ve finally had time to explore Typekit in a little more depth, and my initial reaction is that its a game changer. It’s the service the web design community has been waiting for even if we didn’t know it.
The sphere of ‘web safe’ fonts is as small as it was 10 years ago, things haven’t progressed well in this area at all. But with almost 75% of browsers on the market today supporting some form of font embedding, the timing would appear almost perfect for Typekit to succeed.
It’s pricing is quite aggressive due to the current ‘yearly discount’, with the most appealing being the $49.99 for the year. This gives full choice from the entire font library, 20GB of bandwidth a month, and the ability to roll out unlimited fonts over 5 separate sites.
How often does a typeface strike you as ‘nice to use for x’, or ‘that would fit really well with y on z’.
Now, if it’s on Typekit, simply drop a few lines of code into your site, update your ‘Kit Editor’, and the real font is now shown to your visitors in all it’s glory.
It’s blissfully simple, and takes all the pain out of a sometimes excruciating practice. It finally makes web fonts easy.
Typekit is my shout for ‘must use’ service of 2010. Give it a go, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do so sooner.
Tagged: #Design #Internet #Thoughts #Typography
New icon set – Macchiato Social
28 January 2010 ~ 0 notes »
Consisting of 15 transparent PNGs, the Macchiato Social icon set covers the most popular services on the web.
Comments on additions or alterations are more than welcome.
Read more or download a set…
Tagged: #Design #Icons
Upcoming icon set – Macchiato
27 January 2010 ~ 0 notes »
I’m currently working on a new and shiny icon set, tentatively called Macchiato. I plan to release a sub-set of the icons, a social media pack, very soon.
They will, as with spirit20, be completely free to use for personal and commercial projects.
I’ll shout again, when I release either, but in the meantime…
Here’s a sneak peek of the main set.
…and one of the social media sub-set
Tagged: #Design #Icons
Why the Nexus One needs to succeed
13 January 2010 ~ 0 notes »
With competition comes innovation. Innovation is what the smart phone market needs right now. We’ve quickly arrived at the same place again, where the market leader’s feature set levels out and their competitors begin to catch up.
Take the iPhone, it hasn’t really changed since the launch model. Sure, some hardware specs have increased, but what else. Take the camera for instance. It maxes out at a 3.2mpx on the iPhone 3GS. Many cheaper ‘feature’ phones have far better quality cameras at a fraction of the cost.
The reason it hasn’t been addressed? No competition. At least in the smartphone field anyway. The 3GS’ camera is ‘good enough’. It’s comparable with everything else. For me, Google have missed an opportunity here to have a real good swing at the iPhone, and while they might not knock it from it’s perch, they could just make it wobble a little.
The Nexus One has had some pretty mixed reviews since it’s launch, but the always trustworthy Ars Technica have declared it the best smartphone currently available.
However, is that enough to persuade people that it’s worth the jump from their current phone. Is it that much better than the Droid, Pre or the iPhone?
Probably not. And that is Google’s biggest issue here. The iPhone has the biggest mainstream pull, the Pre has rejuvinated Palm and the Droid has been pretty well received. There’s enough competition out there that would seem to be just as good.
The Nexus One doesn’t seem to offer enough extra to make it an enticing switch, but what it does do is place another excellent handset on the market.
With competition comes innovation… just not enough.
Tagged: #Mobile #Thoughts
Photoshop or Fireworks?
8 January 2010 ~ Notes »
It’s the age old question. Do you use Photoshop or Fireworks? Well both actually.
Although Photoshop is used by many to mock up a design, that isn’t it’s strength. The clue is in the title. Photo. Image production and manipulation is where it excels.
Fireworks has one purpose, rapid prototyping. It has the flexibility of vector components with the look and feel of raster.
So why use one over the other? Use Fireworks for the meat of the design, and Photoshop for any image work. After all they are part of the Creative suite.
I’ve recently moved over to this workflow after years of almost exclusively using Fireworks. For image production and manipulation, the brushes in particular with Photoshop are the main draw, the precision is much better and results far more satisfying.
For sheer speed and ease of layout though, Fireworks cannot be beaten. Either of the two on their own are cumbersome at times, but together, they are the perfect fit.
If you’ve never tried this workflow before, I’d definitely recommend it, give it a few weeks to see if it works for you.
Tagged: #Design #Thoughts
