Tag: Link

Every month for the past year, David Jonathan Ross has been publishing a new font to his Font of the Month Club. It’s only $6 for a monthly subscription and it provides early access to some of his work. I’d highly recommend signing up because each design is weird and intriguing in a very good way:

Join the Font of the Month Club and get a fresh new font delivered to your inbox every single month! Each font is lovingly designed and produced by me, David Jonathan Ross.

Fonts of the month are not available anywhere else, and will include my distinctive display faces, experimental designs, and exclusive previews of upcoming retail typeface families.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Font of the Month Club is a post from CSS-Tricks

The other day Chris wrote about how the CodePen team added lang=’en’ to the html element in all pens for accessibility reasons and I thought it was pretty interesting but I suddenly wanted to learn more about that attribute because I’ve never designed a website in any other language besides English and it might be useful for the future.

As if by magic Ire Aderinokun published this piece on Localisation and Translation on the Web just a couple of days later and thankfully it answers all those questions I had:

Coming from the English-speaking world, it can be easy to maintain the bubble that is the English-speaking World Wide Web. But in fact, more than half of web pages are written in languages other than English.

Since starting work at eyeo, I’ve had to think a lot more about localisation and translations because most of our websites are translated into several languages, something I previously didn’t have to really consider before. Once you decide to translate a web page, there are many things to take into account, and a lot of them I’ve found are useful even if your website is written in only one language.

I had no idea about the experimental, and currently unsupported, translate attribute or the mysterious margin-inline-start CSS property. Handy stuff!

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Localisation and Translation on the Web is a post from CSS-Tricks

In this talk Monica Dinculescu takes a deep dive into webfonts and how the font-display CSS property lets us control the way those fonts are rendered. She argues that there’s all sorts of huge performance gains to be had if we just spend a little bit of time thinking about the total number of fonts we load and how they’re loaded.

Also, Monica made a handy demo that gives an even more detailed series of examples of how the font-display property works:

This depends a lot on how you are using your webfont, and whether rendering the text in a fallback font makes sense. For example, if you’re rendering the main body text on a site, you should use font-display:optional. On browsers that implement it, like Chrome, the experience will be much nicer: your users will get fast content, and if the web font download takes too long, they won’t get a page relayout halfway through reading your article.

If you’re using a web font for icons, there is no acceptable fallback font you can render these icons in (unless you’re using emoji or something), so your only option is to completely block until the font is ready, with font-display:block.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Fontastic Web Performance is a post from CSS-Tricks

Here’s a good ol’ fashion blog post by Rob Weychert where he looks into the new design system that he implemented on his personal website and specifically the typographic system that ties everything together:

According to the OED, a scale is “a graduated range of values forming a standard system for measuring or grading something.” A piece of music using a particular scale—a limited selection of notes with a shared mathematic relationship—can effect a certain emotional tenor. Want to write a sad song? Use a minor scale. Changed your mind? Switch to a major scale and suddenly that same song is in a much better mood.

Spatial relationships can likewise achieve a certain visual harmony using similar principles, and the constraints a scale provides take a lot of the arbitrary guesswork out of the process of arranging elements in space. Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

V6: Typography and Proportions is a post from CSS-Tricks

It’s relatively easy to get lost in all the new features of CSS Grid because there’s just so much to learn and familiarize ourselves with; it’s much easier to learn it chunk by chunk in my opinion.

And so you might already be familiar with Rachel Andrew’s Grid By Example which contains a whole bunch of tutorials with new layout tips and tricks about CSS Grid. But the minmax() tutorial is one small chunk of Grid that you can learn today and thankfully Rachel has made a rather handy two minute long video that dives straight into it.

In fact, it’s pretty darn impressive how many opportunities just one new CSS feature can give us.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Introducing minmax() is a post from CSS-Tricks

Harry Roberts wrote about design systems and how compromise has to be baked into them from the very start. He argues that we can’t be dictatorial about what is and isn’t permitted because design, whether that’s the design of a product, service or system, is always about compromise.

Harry writes:

Whenever you plan or design a system, you need to build in your own ashtrays—a codified way of dealing with the inevitability of somebody doing the wrong thing. Think of what your ideal scenario is—how do you want people to use whatever you’re building—and then try to identify any aspects of it which may be overly opinionated, prescriptive, or restrictive. Then try to preempt how people might try to avoid or circumvent these rules, and work back from there until you can design a safe middle-ground into your framework that can accept these deviations in the safest, least destructive way possible.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Airplanes and Ashtrays is a post from CSS-Tricks