I promise, this blog will not be only about TypeKit, but seeing as I just got it up and running on my site, I figured this would be the place to talk about the experience of using it.
Updates
It’s been too long. Just wanted to mention that the work section and the contact section are up! Work features various print and web projects I’ve been involved with recently. The contact section has, well, my contact information, plus all the regular ‘about’ information you’d normally find on a portfolio site. More to come!
The end of font replacement?
So I accidentally stumbled across an article about TypeKit today. This looks really, really cool. Essentially, a bunch of type foundries (which ones??) have agreed to a common font license only applicable to the web, cutting out a lot of the legal murk that often lingers around the debate of fonts on the web. It looks like it will be a pay service; from what I gather, they host all the font files, so you’re paying for the license to use the fonts in their library/network, which is a cool concept. I suppose it will depend on what that price actually is, what fonts/foundries are participating, and, most importantly, how it works in practice.
I’m kind of surprised at how many dissenters there are out there already – the fact that it’s activated via javascript has a lot of people in a tizzy. While it’s true that current solutions like sIFR and Cufon use javascript to include type, it really isn’t at all the same. sIFR and Cufon use flash replacement and Canvas/VML/SVG respectively to replace text; TypeKit will actually be text itself. No flicker effect or unselectable text. Rad.
Back online + Redesigned
You may have noticed that for the past several months, this site has been nothing more than a default WordPress page. Between work and my other full time job I seem to have temporarily misplaced a couple of priorities. Plus, inspiration was kind of hard to come by. Either way, I’m back online! Not that my old site wasn’t minimalist or anything, but it certainly wasn’t crafted with as much care as this one. Coming right out of school, I didn’t have a very good grasp of how to formulate a grid or how to handle typography all that gracefully.
After years of being inspired by what people like Jason Santa Maria and Jon Tan are doing with their sites, I decided to read The Elements of Typographic Style since practically anyone who knows anything about type can’t say enough good things about it. Not that I’m an expert in type, but I think my name can be added to that list; it’s a very engaging read and tremendously informative. There’s a lot I can say about it (and a lot I probably will say a lot about it eventually), but for now, suffice it to say that it very much inspired this design. Enjoy!