Design, Typography, and the Like

Josh Farmer’s Favorite Typefaces from 2011  →

Josh Farmer:

This was a great year for type. Apple got a bit more serious about their font choices in iBooks. Adobe acquired Typekit. Hoefler & Frere-Jones set to slabbing Gotham for President Obama’s second presidential run. Individual foundries stepped into a new level of webfont prowess. Codex magazine was released. 8 Faces continued its solid run. Typekit partnered with WordPress to add a “customize” feature for type choice, and they made sure to steer the average blogger toward appropriate typefaces for their needs. Matthew Carter’s seminal web typefaces, Verdana and Georgia, received solid updates. Gerard Unger partnered with Type Together. Many familiar families received updates or had more styles and weights added. And some newcomers were given a chance to shine. Here are the typefaces I think are really worth a serious look — my favorite typefaces from 2011.

This is not your average bullet-point list of notable typefaces. Reading Josh’s descriptions of each typeface is better than seeing what he chose as his favorites.

Josh Farmer’s Favorite Typefaces from 2011

The condescending UI  →

Paul Miller, on The Verge:

My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. They’re always dressing up their various functions with glows and bevels and curves, and in the process they somehow become overbearing to my senses. “Did you know you can click this? Don’t forget there’s a save button over here! Let me walk you to your control panel.” Imagine a car that verbally explains all of its various knobs and levers the first time you get into the car. Wonderful, right? Now imagine that car explaining all of these various functions every single time you get in the car for the next five years, until you finally snap and drive it off a cliff.

I’ve never been bothered by the animation of a window minimizing into the Dock, but the new UI of Address Book drives me bonkers. Not only is it ugly, but worse, it is far less usable. There is surely a market for a “Address Book Pro” that harkens to the app of yesteryear and allows us to manage our contacts once again.

The condescending UI

“Taking Away Ugliness”  →

My pal, Josh Farmer, pitches a bold idea: what if Typekit were to buy Comic Sans for the sole purpose of taking it off the market?

Typekit has allowed typographical beauty on the web in a way unimagined before. They accomplish this by giving. They give their service, their code, an exhaustive set of tools, helpful descriptions, a repository of well designed sites, and tips to move you into font mojo territory.

But what if giving is only half of what Typekit could do to remake the web? What if they did something never attempted in the font world?

“Taking Away Ugliness”

Pat Dryburgh’s Sweet Mac Setup

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I am a freelance designer, hobbyist photographer and musician. I am also the designer behind many ads found on the Fusion Ad Network. Recently I joined the team behind QuickCal as the app’s UI designer.

What is your current setup?

Pat Dryburgh's Sweet Mac Setup

Pat Dryburgh's Sweet Mac Setup

Pat Dryburgh's Sweet Mac Setup

I’m using a 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro I bought in 2009, with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of Ram, and the 500GB 7200RPM HD. At home, the Macbook Pro is hooked up to the 27″ Apple Cinema Display. On your recommendation, I recently purchased the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G 115GB SSD. I’ve set up the SSD as my boot drive and use the HDD as my media/working files drive.

I’m using the short wireless Apple Keyboard for typing and the Magic Trackpad for trackpadding. I’ve tried numerous mice over the years, from the Mighty Mouse to the Magic Mouse and even a Logitech MX Revolution. The Magic Trackpad is the first input device that just feels right. For Wi-Fi and Time Machine I use the Apple Time Capsule.

I listen to music through an old Kenmore receiver I bought from a friend for $50 over 5 years ago. Listening to music through headphones for extended periods of time never felt right to me.

I take pictures with a Nikon D90 with a 50mm prime lens. My lighting setup currently consists of an Opus OPL-H250 strobe with a 48″ reflective umbrella, as well as a newly-purchased Nikon SB-600. I trigger my lights remotely using two PocketWizard Plus II transceivers.

Lastly, I can’t write about what I create without mentioning my music setup. I own two acoustic guitars: an old Cort acoustic I bought nearly 9 years ago and a Takamine Steve Wariner Limited Edition a friend gave me as a gift. For my Boss Rebel gig, I go between my white Fender Stratocaster and a custom Telecaster by “Ed’s Guitars”, both of which were purchased from Jonathan Steingard of Hawk Nelson. The signal is sent through my pedal board, consisting of the following pedals:

  • Ernie Ball Junior Volume Pedal
  • Boss TU-2 Tuner
  • Line 6 DL-4 Delay Modeler
  • Boss OD-3 Overdrive
  • Boss LS-2 Line Selector

The signal goes through the pedals to my Vox AC30CC. I use the LS-2 Line Selector to switch between the clean and dirty channels and the OD-3 Overdrive to add a little compression/crunch for solos.

Pat Dryburgh. Photo credit, Edward Platero

Pat Dryburgh. Photo credit, Edward Platero.

Why are you using this setup?

I purchased my first Mac while working at a church. When I started, I was given an old Toshiba laptop that didn’t have enough power to run PowerPoint (in fact, it had been discarded by the children’s ministry for being so terrible). About 3 months into my time there, I bought the 13″ white MacBook and instantly fell in love with the Mac ecosystem.

When I began working in design the MacBook was adequate, but surely not exceptional. I saved up and bought the 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro which was a huge leap forward.

The main reason I stick with the Mac setup is its ease of use and the quality of the software. Software from large companies like Apple and Adobe perform so well on the Mac, and obviously the Mac community boasts some of the best indie developers in the world.

What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

I absolutely love the Mac developer community and use a ton of different apps to make my work and play better.

Design work happens in Adobe’s Creative Suite. Development happens in Coda, though I have been flirting with both TextMate and BBEdit over the last month. Photo editing happens in Adobe Lightroom, which is the only Adobe product I have ever loved.

I write in nvALT, a fork of the brilliant Notational Velocity. This syncs with Simplenote on my iPad and iPhone. I also keep all of my notes as .txt files in a Dropbox folder. Dropbox is also where all of my work files live.

Tasks and projects are managed with Things. I’m still waiting for over-the-air sync.

I work with a great team of guys to develop an app called QuickCal, which lets you enter events and to-dos into your calendar with plain English, and then it gets out of your way so you can get back to work. The version I am working on will be out soon, but you are more than welcome to buy the current version now and receive the next version as a free upgrade.

I use Quicksilver to launch apps and trigger keyboard shortcuts. TextExpander expands common snippets of text. Droplr lets me share screenshots, images and bits of text with friends easily. Pastebot is an incredibly easy way to share text between my Mac and iPhone. Caffeine keeps my monitor awake when I’m watching video. Seamless helps me keep my musical groove when I leave my desk. Take Five pauses my music for a few minutes if I need to take a quick call. 1Password keeps track of my passwords and credit card info securely. RSS feeds are read in NetNewsWire.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

OS X strikes the perfect balance between giving you what you need to do your work, while also getting out of your way if you want to go a different route. The developer community that has formed around this platform is second to none and I owe much of my gratitude to them.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

Other than anticipating what the next 15″ MacBook Pro will look like, I’m pretty happy with my current setup. Oh, maybe a Gibson ES-137.

More Sweet Setups

Pat’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Pat Dryburgh’s Sweet Mac Setup

Do I Need to Know How to Code?  →

Frank Chimero:

The mental leap in coding HTML and CSS is to learn the particular tags necessary to define the structure, hierarchy, and aesthetics. My belief is that learning them is a short step if a designer already understands typographic hierarchy, knows nesting relationships from producing outlines, and grasps separating aesthetics from structure by way of Styles in other software.

Over the years I have refused to allow myself to use a default WordPress theme or to hire an outside designer or developer to work on my site. If there is a certain look, design element, or functionality that I want but which I don’t know how to implement, then I will search out and learn how to do so.

Sure, some people have absolutely no desire to do design work or to learn to code because it’s simply not in the cards them. But for those of you who do think you could learn to code, I think the most important pre-requisite is curiosity.

Actually, that pretty much goes for any venture in life. You can do whatever you set your mind to.

Do I Need to Know How to Code?