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Over the years, there has been a lot of effort in getting typography on the web right. With the advent of variable fonts, we’re already witnessing how it improves the experience and even web performance.

We’ll explore how adding modern CSS capabilities such as layout grids and custom properties in the mix truly gives us superpowers to create practical dynamic type systems that are accessible, performant and works across various screen dimensions.

Typography has been one of the great challenges in digital design, particularly on the Web. The arrival of font embedding, and services like Typekit a few years ago extended the range of fonts available to designers significantly, but came with performance costs. And while designers developed ‘responsive’ techniques for layout, responsive typography, that adapts to […]

Regular readers will know of my near fixation with embeddable/downloadable fonts on the web, as now supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10, and long supported (in a somewhat incompatible way with these other browsers) in Internet Explorer. But the technology has never taken off. Foundries and many type designers have been wary of […]

Regular readers will know the issue of embeddable/linkable fonts for the web is more than a passing interest here at Web Directions. Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the perspective of folks who design typefaces, while Jeffrey Zeldman interviews Type designer David Berlow from a similar perspective. There’s little doubt the […]

Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font embedding and standardization from a couple of months back. Why so much on this of late here? We feel at web directions that this is a development ultimately as significant as the rise of CSS for web design and development. We […]

If you want to get up to speed with the who, what, where how and when of Web fonts, this recent article by Jon Tan is the place to start.

Opera had just announced an Alpha of Opera 10, with some excellent support for new and emerging standards, including one of my favorites, font linking. Currently, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.1, and now Opera 10 support font linking via the @font-face mechanism. Internet Explorer has in fact supported this feature for many years, using the […]

Type-setting in CSS: Using typography to enhance your design

CSS might not have been what brought me to the Web, but it’s very much what made me first deeply engage with the technology of the Web. Before its arrival I’d built quite a few web sites, and was teaching a course that involved building web sites at TAFE (post secondary education in Australia that’s […]

When I first started developing for the web, networks were glacially slow by today’s standards. In the early to mid 1990s a dialup modem speed of 14400bps (bits per second) was common, a 56K (kilo bits per second) a very fast connections. That’s bits, so divide by 8 to get bytes per second–we’re talking 1800-7,000 […]

I hear from my children there’s these things called “streaks” on social media (actually Ms just about 13 called out to Ms just turned 11 the other day “streaks aren’t a thing any more”), a game based dynamic for increasing the stickiness of social media (it’s also a useful technique for positive habit forming) so […]

I love CSS. I’ve developed with, developed tools for, written articles, tutorials and even whole books about, delivered workshops and presentations on CSS since almost its very beginning.But it’s always been a bit of the odd one out when it comes to web technologies. CSS arrived just as techniques for developing relatively sophisticated designs using […]

To say the Web’s origins were humble would be an understatement. Considered by hypertext experts at its beginning to be markedly inferior to the then state of the art, its ambitions were in many ways limited. A way to view documents, and link them together, it supported a small number of elements for structuring these […]

Progressive Web Apps–Web sites that can progressively turn into app like experiences and be installed on your devices–were introduced to the world at this very conference in 2015, by Alex Russell.

PWAs now also work on desktop systems, but usually desktop applications have different requirements as they are usually used for creating, in contract to consumption on mobile. As a user you want to be able to access your files, copy paste without issues, not having the screen turn off while giving a presentation, you want access to printers and other devices, access to local fonts. The list goes on! Currently most of those things are only available to native apps and are not things you want your random web sites to have access to. Project Fugu is the project to extend the web with more native like capabilities in a way that is safe and understood by the users. Join this talk to learn more about the exciting things we are working on as part of Project Fugu.

When I was younger the opening lines of the Beatle’s seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band resonated with a sense of genuine antiquity, which no doubt the band intended–20 years seemed an aeon in the eyes of someone young. Especially the years 1947, from the early post war days of genuine privation for people […]

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