As a web designer, you deal with tons and tons of fonts every single day. Without organization and font management software, analyzing and choosing the perfect font for your website design is tedious and will seriously take a toll on your computer and patience. Basic font management software will allow you to organize your fonts, preview and compare them easily. More importantly, it will let you activate only the fonts you need, while leaving the others deactivated. It should also take care of issues like installing and uninstalling fonts, and diagnose and repair any font conflicts.
Tag Archives: web
What is Web Accessibility?
I use clean HTML because it makes websites that work. I’m vegetarian because I like animals. My favorite alcoholic drinks consist of just two ingredients in equal parts, because they’re easy to remember. These definitions of accessibility are fantastic, but I think it’s time we broaden our collective understanding to include a few other real-world practices that we, the web community, are already engaged in.
I think web accessibility can be more simply described as the practice of making content available to people and machines. Maybe there’s a few words that could be added or removed, but that’s where my general sentiments currently sit. Or, maybe we even need a new term to describe this, like “Content Availability” or something similarly fancy.
The Smashing Guide To Moving The Web Forward
Web standards like CSS3, HTML5 and the foundations of the Web as we know them would also not have been possible without people (just like readers of this post) spending time researching use cases, writing proposals, implementing features and catering to existing and future requirements that could be used by everyone. When you think about it, both standards and open source projects have had a large hand to play in the Web as we know it today.
In this article I’d like to talk about how you can help give back to the Web and a new project that seeks to make this process easier: MoveTheWebForward.org. If you’ve ever thought about contributing to the community but weren’t sure just how, I hope this serves as a good starting point for your journey.
Smashing Magazine: The Smashing Guide To Moving The Web Forward
Easier Is Better Than Better
The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. For example, if there are free samples of jam being given out at the store, you are more likely to get people to buy a jar of jam when only six selections are available as opposed to 24. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.
Hyphenation on the web
I spent a while this week looking into how best to automatically hyphenate text on websites, to improve Today’s Guardian. I couldn’t find anything recent that summarised the options, so here’s a quick run-down of what I discovered.
Bacon Ipsum
I was mocking up a web design one day and needed a few words to fill out a link. ‘Lorem ipsum bacon’ popped into my head, so I plugged that into my HTML. Later that day, it hit me. Make a lorem ipsum generator but use types and cuts of meat.
WebP
WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP lossless images are 28% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports losseless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. WebP also supports features such as animation, ICC color profile, XMP meta-data and tiling.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or “Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with corporate-owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in (and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.