design

On 9th March I swung by the session hosted by the Preloaded guys. Ten Commandments? The sheer (tongue-in) cheek of it intrigued me...

I was pleased to hear that The Guardian’s graphics team have won a clutch of medals at this years Malofiej Infographics Awards – awards dedicated to communication graphics in newspapaers, magazines and the internet.

OK, so I know I was going to talk about the future of online font display this week, but I’ve changed my mind. I got kind of sidelined playing around with Typetester, so I’m going to talk about really useful tools for design development.

Typetester is an online application for comparing fonts for on-screen use. It handily puts fonts into three different groups:
• safe list
• Win default
• Mac default

This week I want to talk about typography. Well, start a discussion about typography really – as there’s too much to talk about in one post. So I’ll kick off with fonts.

2007 was the year most agencies and clients really started to think of 1024 pixels and upwards as the primary horizontal screen resolution, rather than 800.

Of course the stats have shown that higher screen resolutions have been growing rapidly over the last few years, but until recently many clients still defaulted to the safety of 800 pixels.

Chatting to a recruiter recently I was shocked to hear him say, ‘The problem is we’re interviewing a lot of designers at the moment who don’t think’. I was pretty dumbfounded, as I’ve spent my entire working life believing that is exactly what designers did. However, it did get me thinking more about the way designers in technology work, the way things have changed over the last ten or so years, and the problems that they face.

I love email. Well, I say love, what I actually mean is that it's my primary form of communication at work. Email can be great, especially if its well-crafted, but beware of what you send. Sometimes it can go badly wrong.