Typographic Problem Solving

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I designed a typeface called Platelet. Having been Internationally schooled (ie. how to be dexterous with just one or two of the classics, most notably Univers), it was my first experience of creating letterforms, and there’s no denying that it was a naïve effort in many ways. Notwithstanding that however, the nice people at Emigre took enough of an interest to put it on the market (in July 1994), and the rest, as they say, is history.  More ‣ 

The horror, the horror: one day, you look down at your Dock (coz, like, you’re using a Mac of course) and see that you’ve got the entire Microsoft Office suite running, but none of the Creative Suite. Yup, you’ve kept your head down, kept your nose clean, and done your time – and have now officially become a manager. Your gleaming MacBook Pro is doing nothing more than a corporate drone’s Dull flaptop.  More ‣ 

Discussions of web typography are usually about the frustrating inconsistencies and paucity of decent fonts likely to be available on a user’s machine. But when a client recently made a very sobering comment concerning cross-platform display, I got a rather rude reminder of how easily it is to forget more fundamental issues. Namely, anti-aliasing (or ’smoothing’ in Microsoft-speak).  More ‣ 

Back in December, I read an article in The New York Times (yes, on paper) that contained some staggering statistics about the number of dormant blogs. I’ve been unable to locate it again, but Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere was the undoubted source. The long and the short of it was that, of the 133 million blogs indexed by Technorati up until September 2008, fewer than one-in-ten had been updated in the previous three months.

So, just as the blogging steamroller appears to have run out of, er, steam, here I am stoking the fire again. We’ll see how far I get before running out of puff.