26
Oct

Internet Explorer, you make grown nerds cry.

Okay, I know there are countless IE bashing blog posts out there on the interwebs, I will try to keep my hatred of if to a minimum and infact have a suggestion for the IE Dev team that may help.

We all know, or at least those of us who have coded a single line of CSS in the past 4 years knows, that the level of support that Microsoft has provided web developers is drastically lower than most of it’s competitors. With that being said however, it has also been able to provide to us greater capabilities in other areas. There are quite a few web based applications that were developed back when IE4 and IE5 were called ‘recent’ that were considered innovative. The technology and feature rich content that was available to IE users was something that was because they had hard coded the commands and extra extensions into the browser without opening up the API. The result however, was IT departments making the drastic decision to ensure that IE was not only the only browser installed but also, in many large corporations with security issues, the only browser a user could have on their machine. This brought on what is now considered a monopoly over the Internet browsers.

Although considerable years have passed since the initial benefit of having IE be the prominent application, IT departments for whatever reason; budget, lazyness, inane infatuation with Microsoft products, have a hard time understanding that the common user, infact most users want to be able to view pages and content the way they were meant to be seen. This means allowing designers and programmers the ability to use what has become actual standards across the platform which the content sits. For most of the approximately 70% of users that are still on IE, I blame I blame these IT departments not for locking the system down (because we all know that there are those idiots that click on giant red buttons that says ‘click here’ still) but for not allowing their users the option of switching to another browser. Having other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and/or Opera on the system would take less than 100MB and would take little to know resources on the machine unless actually running. There is a support issue, I know but for the most part, the support questions from users are either about the site content or problems with rendering in IE to begin with.

While CSS3 and HTML5 are new and still shiny, many people have been trying to use some of their features for quite some time. Between Webkit and Mozilla testing and implementing many of the features for a couple of years now, many of the considered ‘new’ features are already in common use. This doesn’t however mean that they have been implemented properly in the browsers like Safari/Webkit and Mozilla. Consider the face that in order to get rounded corners you must put lines with both”-webkit-” and“-moz-” infront of the “border-radius” command. This by no means is a full solution to the problem as both institutions have admitted however, it has allowed designers to implement what was a future technology and ensure that the conversion to the standard would be easily done once the standard had been officially rolled out. A simple find and replace in the code would remove any extra unnecessary tags.

IE has brought none of these techniques to the table. In reality, they have gone so far as to take for instance the CSS transparency and convert it to something that is completely different from the up-and-coming terminology:

Webkit & CSS3 = opacity: 1;
Mozilla = -moz-opacity:1;
Internet Explorer = filter:alpha(opacity=100);

A you can see, the effect is available in IE but clearly the dev team has taken the command and written it in a non-compliant way. This to me is the big problem. IE is trying to implement all these features that should be very simple (to somebody who writes application code, not me) to implement something that is at least similar to others.

My solution? Simple: IE dev team, you need to sit down with the list of standards that have been set in the actual release and ship an update to IE 7 and IE 8 (IE 8 at least) to ensure that it meets these. If that means playing the same trick that Mozilla and Webkit have done by creating a third “-ie-” tag for all those fancy effects that people continue screaming for that do it and say what you’ve done. As a web developer who has spent nights throwing my mouse and keyboard at my screen because of you, let me be the first (that I know of) to say that I will not mind adding 1 line of code for things like drop shadows, rounded corners, gradients, text shadows, columns, proper typography, etc… 1 line of code is a lot less expensive in load times and development time than creating an image to use as a background to a div which I must write a hack around simply to place it in the appropriate location for your lack of good positioning coding, and then get frustrated with it so much that I break down and build 3 tables that contain everything but get upset because you put Microsoft Word web engine inside UK outlook GAH! … pant … pant … phew, sorry about that… where was I? Oh yes, Having to add “-ie-border-radius: 4px;” takes up 1 second of my time to add to a css file, you roll out full CSS3 support when you have the bugs all worked out in IE9, I do a find and replace “-ie-”, “-webkit-” & “-moz-” and I’m in businesses. Great.

All in all, you have made some strides towards making IE more compliant but please don’t take your recent rollout as a sign of stopping. There is still a lot of work you have yet to do to make it up to the original programmers who previously made you what you are today.

Oh, and you may want to think about implementing this or something like it before this becomes more widespread and for your more recent versions

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03
Oct

Google Wave Team are Genius’

The Google Wave team have done it. Either they thought this through and Google is monitoring the growth of the (pun not intended) wave of users joining or they should be.

They’ve created a hype as big as Apple can with their products. The manner in which they are releasing Wave, although the same as Gmail to a lesser extent, is creating a community in and of itself. With people crying out for an invite or buying them on Ebay (no link because I don’t want to be involved in selling the service), I am surprised that it has taken 3 days for this generation to create a community or pyramid.

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17
Jul

Misleading Keyboards

As it currently stands, the keyboard layout for Macs, PCs, netbooks, mobile devices, and a multitude of others currently have a key or button specifically for the supposed apostrophe and quotation mark. This key, at least on most versions of English layout, is beside the Return key.

When the key is pressed however, you’ll find that it creates, not the expected cute little tailed glyph that we’d expect. But rather the harsh and obdurate foot glyph. This obtrusive little speck of pixels has a big brother that accompanies him as well. The supposed combination of the sexy and elegant curl of the closing double quotation mark is disappointingly misleading. Resulting in two daunting and horrific downward spikes that make up the inch glyph.

Why is it so that the keyboard engineers would do this to somebody? Do the designers of modern hardware interface really hate society this much that they would cause this horror movie-esk scenario to happen?

Now, there are ways around this. Of course Microsoft Office has played it’s part in trying to fix this. Microsoft Word implemented an option to add “Typographic Quotes” in replacement. This option however may not be of the best design. As the user or supposed ‘Typographer’ taps away at their TPS report, or whatever it is Word users do, the software recognizes the position of the quotation mark. The upside is proper quotes in all most of the right position. The downside is that the user is stuck with having to fix all the glyphs where they needed inch and foot glyphs.
(Architects and engineers must hate word)

Good morning Mr Smith. I had received and email from your assistant earlier this morning that had stated “We would like to ensure that the 5’6” beams that are being installed are ‘adequate’ for supporting the concrete at a thickness of 20””.
I just wanted to assure you that although your original designed called for 5′6″, we’ve decided to add an extra 2′4″ to ensure sufficient ‘head room’.

What makes me more concerned is that all this code we write for websites all contain these atrocities. Wrapping tags countless language markups with these marks. Programmers throughout the world are using these 2 glyphs to produce pages upon pages of content. Creating a standard based upon a lie.

I understand why it was done. As I had explained in Typography and the Internet, the glyph was implemented as the standard item due to it’s convenience and versatility, but we are now in the era of modernization. To produce a lie like that which is on the iPhone keyboard, which is a digital representation none the less, that clearly shows the appropriate and wanted glyphs yet no way to get to them, is simply unacceptable. For keyboard manufacturers to produce tiny pieces of hardened plastic, giving the impression that if you pound hard enough, you just may get that slanted or curled mark that is printed on it, is irresponsible. To the software engineers out there that write the title “Typographer’s Quotes” or “Smart Quotes”, shame on you for clearly stating that it is only a small portion of people out there that have the understanding, nay the responsibility to know their proper punctuation.

n
n
Should we change the keyboard?
View Results

P.S. I would like to thank Roger Wong, whom had also written a very similar post back in March that I had found while looking for images for this post.

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22
Jun

What’s Your Font?

As an individual in the marketing and design field, I am constantly thinking of identity and maintaining a brand. Although many of us in the print and online media industries have created an identity for ourselves, using fonts and designs that reflect our ideals and principals as well as to attract clients, has anybody ever though of what font they project?

Fonts and faces  play a large part in our designs. They help influence the reader to the content. Now apply that in reverse. What would you sound like? Your voice, translated to a font. And from that perhaps even a face of a family.

Let’s take identity of design out of it and say you have complete freedom of choice. Would you choose a display font? Serif? Sans-serif? How would you sound, written down? Think of extremes; famous people like Golbert Gottfried (which I was going to provide a sample for but couldn’t think of anything extreme and bold enough face), Paris Hilton, or even historical people like JFK, etc…

So as I’ve said, not the look and feel of the ideas you spread, your brand identity and logo most likely already do that, but rather how you present yourself and sound.

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02
Feb

Follow-up: “Typography and the Internet”

I have just been reading an outstanding article at Information Architechs. I agree with most if not all of the observations outlined in the piece.

Web design and site design has now, more than ever before, become information driven. Blogs, news, RSS, these are the common sites that everybody is using. With so much concentration built upon providing written words to users, why is so much of the designs out there driven towards image and style base?

Web designers must understand typography principals and use that to their advantage. Take a look at any of the great designed sites out there right now: Digg.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, etc., these are all based around type and information. Aside from very few image based areas that are more for division of areas, the only images that you really see on them are the advertisements, which most of us ignore anyway.

With the next evolution of CSS3 coming up very shortly, site designers will have more control over how the text and information is presented to the user over a plethora of browsers. From tracking, leading, and even custom fonts (which will most likely turn out to be overused at first), web designers will now have nearly the same set of tools at their disposal as those of us in the print industry. I think the next thing that will bring true typography to the web will be a character by character adjustment ability to a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. Personally, and I would like to think many web programmers, use code to write their sites. Although it is possible to perform these types of adjustments to text, it simply isn’t practical due to both time, and eventual loading time of the site for readers.

Take a look at the site, read the article, and get something out of it!

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20
Jan

ty⋅pog⋅ra⋅phy

-noun

1. the art or process of printing with type.
2. the work of setting and arranging types and of printing from them.
3. the general character or appearance of printed matter.

That was directly from dictionary.com. Note that there is nother regarding “Integrated text within pretty design”. This is because, although designs like these. That’s not to say that they aren’t exquisite but they are not typography. For a true look at type, look at designs like this, or most of these. The designs that are using type as a main element cannot always be called typography. It’s the equivalent of saying: “I’m a designer” simply because you’ve downloaded Adobe Photoshop. Sure you may be able to create fancy designs that awe and impress your friends, and sure they may be well done. But these are simply good designs. These are text treatments, text effects, designs that are driven towards what the text says. Typography is the complete opposite: it’s about creating a feeling using the family, position, scale, rotation, face, alignment, etc…

To create a typographically sound design, the viewer or audience should get a sense of the article, publication, or whatever it may be without the need to read.

To create good editorial typography, readers should barely notice the type. Their eyes should flow with the text, immersing them into the writing without the need to feel as if they are reading.

Typography should not have to bend to the will of the designer, nor should the designer have to feel as if they are restricted by their type. Good design uses the principals of typography to create the layout.

The best typographers are the ones where readers never have to think about their work.

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31
Dec

New Year!

Yay! New year time! Wait, why am I excited? It’s simply another day. Oh well. Tonight will be a very interesting one. For any of you that read this, let me know what you’re doing. Personally, I prefer staying at home and making a lot of food that I normally wouldn’t. We’re thinking of making hot-n-sour soup tonight. The only thing I’m not doing by scratch for it would be the fish stock as I would rather not have my place smell like rotting fish carcass.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year

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09
Dec

Typography and the Internet

First off, let me begin by saying that this is not about avatars, emoticons or leet. That is a discussion for another day, be it good or bad.
Perhaps ‘Internet’ would not be the appropriate word or vice in this situation, but it has indeed been a severe assistant to the ongoing threat that typographers need to be aware of.
Type over the past 20+ years has been having a significant decline. Be it the on-going war between the comma and apostrophe vs foot and inch, or the missing-in-action m and n dashes. Most users, bloggers and general public are, I’m sure, unaware of anything what I’m talking about.
The problem isn’t so much that the appropriate glyphs aren’t available, it’s that they are not the default. For instance, as I am typing the draft for this on my iPhone, the auto correct is applicably adding apostrophes for my isn’ts and I’ms but by default, it is using the foot ’ character. This is even with the appropriate glyph on the keyboard layout, and periods being placed in for double spaces (brought forward from typewriter etiquette).
So how this started. Going back to the initial design of the QWERTY keyboard back in 1874. This layout design did not contain several of todays standards simply for spacing and manufacturing reasons, including the 1 and the zero key to name a couple. The apostrophe was converted to what was and to this day is the foot glyph. The reason being is that when matched with a period, it becomes an exclamation point, when doubled, it simulates the inch glyph. With the average person’s knowledge of typography, the foot glyph could easily represent the apostrophe and therefore not require an extra key.
This went on throughout the years of the keyboard designs. The truth of the matter is, in the research for this, I haven’t been able to find even one sample or version of a keyboard layout that uses the true apostrophe without using alt commands (Windows alt-0146) or dead key commands (Mac option-shift-]).
While typographers that came from the cast metal type era were continuing to use the appropriate glyphs were applicable, deep in the dark, dank garages of parents houses, something was slowly coming to light that would change type forever. In 1984, MacPublisher was released allowing those privileged (and wealthy enough) to have the capabilities to own a computer now had the, what I’ll call ability for lack of a better word, to set their own type and layouts without the need for a press. With the advent of the laserwriter in years to come and the growing popularity of businesses getting these new WYSIWYG machines, more and more people were able to do what they truly never understood: communicate.
So now that computers are in full swing, Aldus has given both designers and the general public a way to produce layouts, without the need of a typesetter, type design made a drastic down-turn spiral. No longer did we have the elegant ligatures, the delicate hanging punctuation, the differentiation between the 3 different dashes. All the rules were out the window now. Periods were trailed by double spaces because fonts were monospaced on a typewriter and teachers were never taught about font character spacing, if you quoted somebody, they were given double dashes because than M-dash was to elusive of a character, and the completely non-existant method of kerning and tracking.
PageMaker finally got some decent upgrades throughout the years but still lacked the complete capabilities of the average designer and typographer team. Sure you could produce a page layout at a fraction of the time but the control and file make-up would make todays printers scream.
Once QuarkXPress came out, Aldus finally had competition that would push them to innovate. QuarkXpress 1 thru 3 was in many people’s opinion was a much stronger asset and tool for users. Typography was getting stronger but was finding new and more difficult problems to overcome. One of which that is to this day, a serious problem for many legacy Quark files (and for anybody using Microsoft applications), the faux faces. The ability to take that Frutiger face at bold condensed and make it into italics. Just thinking about it makes me cringe. For those of you who are wondering why this is, it’s because when a type designer creates the face, there are thicknesses and angles that are done in such was that when altered and shifted angles or fattened up for bolds or condensed by simply squishing, these change and the type looses it’s initial intent. Some might argue that it is the designer using it that determines the communication intended by the face, I say it is the designers responsibility to know what a particular face communicates.
QuarkXPress 3 was a long runner, approximately 7 years! It lasted through the developments of windows, multi-language versions were developed, and it had support for libraries. But soon enough Adobe, who was the inventor of PostScript and being the standard output method of production software, decided to get in on the action. They purchased PageMaker and threw around several versions but could never really compete with the already leading standard, Quark. They decided that with all designers already using their other products; Illustrator and Photoshop, in conjunction with their competitor, they needed to bring something out that did more that just simulate the exact, and outdated competition. InDesign was born. No longer were artists now relying upon converting files to multiple formats, keeping original editable layer files, converting to JPG and EPS files which flatten and destroy information. With Quarks deep and rich typography tools for the time, InDesign did lack some new innovations. It was simply a new skin to PageMaker and a few native application support features that caught the eye of many design houses.
Now without getting into a giant history of the Quark and InDesign wars, lets just leave this branch off at: while Adobe’s InDesign went deeper into innovations and tools for printers (Opentype support, export to PDF, early OS X migration, enhanced stylesheets, GREP find and replace…) and print publications, Quark took to the web. It seems they felt that that was the way of the future and where they could make an impact. This is a great segway to web but lets take a few years off. Back in the late 90’s when most people were still using dial-up, sites that wanted to maintain users needed to concentrate new technologies and bringing images and eye candy to the populace. This is generally known as the Web 1.0. People weren’t too interested in standards or consistency but rather learning and getting into this new medium. Web 2.0 was the initial start of the big boom. Sites started to create rules and regulations. These included standards and new technology, one of which was CSS. Unfortunately one of the main browsers out there simply would not comply. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the top browser for most users using the Internet on both Mac and PC tried to create it’s own coding and languages. By doing so, delaying and even up to this day lacking in even the basic capabilities of many of the other browsers that we’ve only now come to use almost as much. CSS, although very versatile and innovative, hasn’t made too many strides in typography. Sure it can now use line height, character spacing and the many uses of lists but in order to truly grasp hold of your typography on the Internet, you must create an image of it. Doing so creates load time, lower quality, less search-ability, and many more problems. For one, the justification is limited to left, right, centered, full and full-left / full-right with all the glory of being able to drive a truck through the last 3. The problem isn’t so much that doing character by character adjustments, it’s the complexity and requirements that it takes to do so. With the up-coming Web 3.0 design, hopefully some light will shine on the digital type era. With print getting scarcer and scarcer (PC Magazine will be halting their print publication), people are looking to the Internet and digital formats for the future. As it stands right now however, my stance is we will NEVER be rid of the printed form. It may change. It may adapt. I’ve been following E-Ink since first year college but people still need a medium that the can grasp in their hands. It’s a tangible sense that we crave. Sure, it may not me actually printed on a sub-straight but design will always remain different between print and screen. Signs, large publications, white papers, reports, they will all need hard copies and therefore print will always be around.
Here is what I throw out there to all designers: Let’s take the new Web 3.0 and make it print ready. Push for software companies to make it easier and to develop new and more efficient ways to control type on screen. Let’s take back design from the average person and show them why not everybody had printing presses when they originated in the early 1040 AD (China, not western but that applies too).

Thank you to Wikipedia for the date clarifications.
If this ever get’s to Lynne Truss, I’m sorry for all the extra punctuation. Please feel free to correct me.

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06
Dec

It’s been several days…

Sorry, it’s been several days since I’ve wrote. I am still alive but work has been quite busy.

There have been several articles and events over the last week that have been giving me angst. Canadian Politics being on the top of that list of course but I won’t go into it now.

I am in the middle of writing a large post about typography and the computer age that will be released soon so keep that in mind. Check back soon for that.

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23
Nov

Apple lawsuit over 3G speeds

Before I post the link to this story, let me say this: I’m sick and tired of people getting up tight about something that can’t be controlled. Apple has been sued before regarding the same thing. Speeds of the iPhone on other companies networks. People have resources to things like the internet. They can go into a store such as AT&T (US) and Rogers (CA) to find out the network coverages across the country. If they are not satisfied with the results of the reliability of these networks then they do not need to purchase or apply for it. There is no reasoning to sue the company that makes the device on it. It’s the same as if they would take action against Ford, Chevy, etc for the poor quality of the roads.

Please, go to digg, bury this, vote no for this… Lets try to get people to stop being idiots about this and start going after the people who are responsible for it.

$5 million lawsuit charges Apple with fraud over 3G speeds

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