webbedENVIRONMENTS
The Intersection of Technology, Culture, and Politics

Over at InfoQ, they are debating whether it’s worth while to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore. The article details several online serivices, vendors, and developmental frameworks that are pulling support, arguing that the browser that once made up 95% of the market share is no longer an online player now that Internet Explorer is on the scene.

On the one hand, deciding not to support IE6 and embracing Web standards can make it easier to create Web sites, expand your design possibilities, and generally allow for a better experience. On the down side, if you do go with a Web standards compliant site and ignore IE6, the do not tend to degrade gracefully and many users can get frustrated.

At the recent Voices that Matter conference, I had the privilege of having dinner with Bill Cullifer, the Executive Director of WOW (World Organization of Webmasters). I hadn’t check in with that group in a while (they’ve been around since 1996), so I was excited to hear about a lot of the great stuff the are doing to help educate Web professionals, including conferences, and “Iron Chef” student competition, and certification. Bill invited me to be interviewed for the WOW Technology Minute, and we talked about Web Typography.

Check it my interview on the WOW Technology Minute Web site.

Last week at the Voices That Matter Conference, I was privaleged to attend a great presentation on how to give great presentations. Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, wowed the crowd by creating a compelling and informative presentation using Power Point (actually he was using Keynote, but Power-Point has become the "Band-Aid" of slide software). Unlike other information design experts (ie. Edward Tufte), Garr has a lot of hope for Power-point presentations, but with a few helpful suggestions (paraphrased here):

• Keep it Simple. As Garr taught us to say in Japanese, "Simplicity is not simple". We naturally want to embellish our slides to show off how much we know, but this invariably ends up clouding the message. Keep it to only one or two points per slide, make them large, and elaborate in your speech not in your slides.
• What’s your point? Too many presentations either do not know the conclusion they are trying to reach or try to make too many points. Know what the goal of your presentation is and how all of your points are connected.
• Slides are not handouts. If your slides can say everything you can, then why are you up there talking? Slides should not be able to stand alone, but should only reinforce of what you are saying. Instead of your entire deck, give your audience a simple hand out a few pages in length that summarizes your main points and provide links to more information and resources.
• Have fun. There is nothing more boring and uncomfortable to an audience than watching a boring and uncomfortable speaker. You are not a stand-up comic, but try not to act like you are delivering a eulogy either. Think about how your presentation flows from slide to slide.

After the presentation, I picked up a copy of Garr’s book, and I can highly recommend you read it. It’s not just for public speakers, but for anyone in information design. His principals are equally applicable to presenting information in print, video, and Web design. And it’s a fun read too!

Web typography is pretty much synonymous with limitations. Limited controls, limited styles, but, most importantly, limited font-family choices. The first two limitations can only be overcome through changes in the browsers, however, there are a surprisingly large number of fonts to choose from, if you are willing to work with a more fluid typography.Most designers are familiar with the 11 “Core Web Fonts” that are industry standards. Primarily, we will use Arial (or Helvetica), Times New Roman (or just Times), and Georgia, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years. You will occasionally see Verdana and Trebuchet MS tried, but these are not the most elegant looking of fonts. We use these fonts because we know that they are pre-installed on most computers. Yet most computers will also have many other fonts pre-installed on them, either by the operating system or by specific applications.

I have created a list of “Web Safe Fonts” showing fonts pre-installed on Windows and Mac as well as fonts installed by iLife on the Mac (which is standard on all Macs) and Microsoft Office for both Mac and PC. Although not all of these fonts will be of general use, it does balloon the list of reliable fonts from 11 to around 200. To make selection easier, I have also indicated which OS the font is pre-installed for, ranked each font on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for fonts certain to be installed and 5 for fonts unlikely to be installed), and the source of the fonts instillation.When choosing fonts to use, in your font-family list, keep these points in mind:

• Test the different fonts in different combinations.
• For headline copy, use fonts with similar widths and kerning.
• For body copy, select fonts with bold, italic, and bold/italic versions.
• If you download a font or use a Web Safe Font, always include a Core Web Font and generic font-family as back-ups.

View the Web Safe Fonts >>

Tags: Typography // Add Comment »

We have gotten some great feedback from designers wanting to help the W3C set the standards for the future of Web typography, but we’re still looking for more. If you participate in any design forums or are a blogger yourself, we would appreciate a mention using the permalink for the Web Typography discussion.

I’d also like to quickly answer a few questions that have come up in the discussion:

• Yes, we are also following the discussion of the CSS Public discussion forum, www-style. However, we are hoping to get input here from designers who may be reluctant to participate in a more technical forum.
• For backwards compatibility reasons, we can’t make changes to the font attribute. Adding anything new to the syntax would break in older browsers.

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• We can not control how browsers behave when it comes to the consistency of how font sizes or colors are rendered. You’ll need to badger the browser and the OS makers.
• Independent control of fall-back fonts is a great idea! Now we just need to figure out a simple syntax for doing that.
• Firefox 3 supports both kerning and ligatures on all platforms. I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself, but we’ll probably use that as the basis for the spec.
• ???????? ????? ????????furniture VidenovSynthesized fonts are being considered in the new specification.
• Webkit is allowingfilling text with an image and we are looking at that for the specification.
• A character pseudo-element is an intriguing idea. Anybody else see a use for that one? Let us know.

That’s all for now. Keep those comments coming.