Fairies, Mermaids, Mummies, Daddies & Babies: A Collage

Scout is a prolific drawer. We’d accumulated so many drawing of hers over the past couple of months that I wasn’t sure what to do with them—we’d given them away as presents, filed them into display books …

Then I got the idea that they would make a great collage. It took a while to put together, but I think it was worth it!

posted: 29.03. 2010, 00:01 Comment (2)

The Future of Web Typography

Version 10 of the Opera web browser was released today, and it’s kind of a big deal.

The reason it’s such a big deal is not really anything to do with Opera. I’ve never really thought much of the little browser, to be honest. I’ve always found the UI to be a little clunky, any time I’ve trialled using it as my main browser, it’s failed to remember usernames and passwords that I’ve asked it to remember, and overall I just find it frustrating. Sure, version 10 is a big improvement, but it’s still not my bag. Firefox and all of its extensions is just too useful, so I’m unlikely to change.

That’s not the point.

The point is that with this release, Opera now supports the @font-face CSS property. And so does the latest version of Safari. And Chrome. And Firefox. That’s all of the major browsers except for one.

OK, so it’s a big one that’s missing—Internet Explorer. However, IE does support embedded fonts using a proprietary format. And that’s where a service like Typekit can come in and offer hosted fonts, and do so in a legal way that successfully navigates all of the licenses that currently make hosted fonts a massive legal minefield.

I had a chance to play around with the beta of Typekit, and wrote about it in my latest web column for Desktop magazine. If you haven’t bought the magazine, you can read my article online for free, if you like.

Incidentally, this is my last web column for Desktop. Working full-time as well as being a husband and a dad takes a fair amount of my time, so I’m in the process of dropping a few extra-curricular activities here and there to do those things properly.

Writing the web column has been fun, and I may contribute occasional articles in the future. But I’m very happy to hand the mantle over to John Allsopp from the Web Directions team. John’s very passionate about the web, very knowledgeable, and a much more widely published writer than myself, so I’m sure he’ll do a great job.

posted: 02.09. 2009, 22:13 Comment (0)

How To Be An Even Greener Web Designer

For my latest article in Desktop magazine, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Burrell, a super nice guy who is co-founder of xert (a small web design team) and co-creator of geofeat, a green business directory.

Roger was full of useful advice on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint on the world. Ever since our chat, I’ve been making headway in my own life. I’m not quite there yet (am on the waiting list for the local food co-op, and find it difficult to justify replacing our hot water system with solar until it actually stops working and we have good reason to).

The article is available online in its entirety, but here’s the essential parts of Roger’s advice, compressed into 15 tips. Some of it is obvious, whilst other tips you may not have considered. The title of this article is a reference to my previous article, which generated quite a bit of discussion on SitePoint.

1. Insulate your home (sounds obvious, but an alarming number of homes are still not insulated)
2. Install solar hot water (it pays for itself, and there are rebates)
3. Shop at local markets (reduces transport cost of the food)
4. Eat seasonal fruit and vegetables (lessens the chance that something is imported)
5. Engage with your community (swap lemons from your tree with eggs from the neighbour’s chickens)
6. Work from home (reduced transport costs)
7. Upgrade your computer or monitor (LCDs and laptops consume less power than CRTs and desktops)
8. Unplug unused appliances (they drain energy overnight)
9. Align your appointments (in order to reduce transport costs … makes sense from a time management perspective too)
10. Install LED lights (they consume even less power than fluorescent energy-saver bulbs)
11. Shred and mulch (shredded paper is great for the garden)
12. Use EcoFont for internal documents (it uses less printer ink than other fonts)
13. Choose a green printer (this can be difficult and requires you to do your research)
14. Use green web hosting (more web hosts are utilising solar energy, rather than just buying carbon offsets)
15. Inspire and educate your clients (yeah!)

Of course, when this green-themed issue of Desktop arrived in the post, it came bundled with a jumbled wad of paper advertising almost as thick as the magazine itself. Irony, anyone?

posted: 31.05. 2009, 00:13 Comment (0)