Category Archives: design

Tags may include css, html, Wordpress, Movable Type, and even things that have nothing to do with the Internet.

Typography for Everyone Makes Texts Much Easier to Read | NOUPE

Typography for Everyone Makes Texts Much Easier to Read | NOUPE:

The starting point for the observation is always the continuous text, which is what we write into the p-tags on the web. This text is the index, meaning it keeps the font size of 100 percent. All other elements are derived from that.

According to this, the first step is getting the text to a comfortably legible size. A lot of this is just a matter of taste. For me, this value is at 18 pixels, I don’t want it to be any lower. Common publications are mostly around 14 pixels. No matter which size you define, it is important that it is the foundation for all other elements.

Headlines (hl) should have 180 to 200 percent of the original size, secondary headings (h2) 130 to 150 percent, and tertiary headings (h3) should only be slightly bigger than the running text. In many cases, you’ll see h3 as a simple bold text. You should be able to go up to 125 percent without problems. Footnotes shouldn’t exceed 75 percent of the size of the continuous text.

This is good advice and reading the entire article is worth your time if you use words. This is also a good time to recommend The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.

Looking up and down while spinning left and right

I have had this “Trippy spinning optical illusion” (found at the always interesting kottke.org open in a browser window since I found it on Feb. 1, 2016.

Spinning optical illusion

From kottke.org:

Somehow, this woman seems to be spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise simultaneously. This is worse than the spinning ballerina. Anyone know who did this? Randomly found it on Facebook and couldn’t trace the source back…

The most mind-blowing of this type of animation I have seen to date. Kudos to the designer!

Fletcher Capstan Table

I’ve seen animated .gifs of this table for a while now. Turns out, it is real. Real expensive, like $50,000 or so. With the engineering, design, and materials DBFletcher puts into each handmade table, I’d say it’s worth it.

Necessary Distractions

Dr. Drang is fun to read for a lot of reasons and should especially appeal to my fellow nerds in the world. In a recent post titled A Free Distraction about writing and the onslaught of “distraction free writing” apps, this bit about his habits hit close to home.

I’ve tried to change my writing habits. I’ve tried to turn my brain’s internal editor off and just let the words come out, trusting myself to fix them later on. It would make writing much easier, regardless of the text editor I use. But I can’t do it.

Yep. That. I am a fiddly writer and have tried the distraction-free environments. The more designers and developers try to strip away, the harder they are for me to work in. Apps like Byword provide a happy medium, but I most often find myself doing all of my writing in a full-blown text editor (Sublime Text these days, dabbling in MultiMarkdown Composer, never a word processor a la Microsoft’s Word or Apple’s Pages).

Drop Dr. Drang’s news feed in your reader of choice for a few weeks and give it a shot. I think he’ll make the cut.