BlogmyQuery – BMQ

For years you have been searching for it. You hear the question being asked in your dreams as you go on an Indiana-Jones-type-crusade to find the answer. When the answer comes to you, you know that the confetti will fall from the ceiling and the band will start playing your favorite song. You might even get a kiss from that special someone. So what is this question?

What is the secret to Web design?

A tough question and one that might not have an answer. In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein wrote Web Design is 95% Typography. Some people loved it, others were not so amused. If Web design was based that much on typography, then what was the point of learning anything else? All you needed to do is understand the elements of typography and you were good to go.

Of course typography doesn’t mean font selection. With the advent of @font-face and services such as Typekit, Webtype, Fontdeck, and Google Web fonts, your skills in typography won’t improve. You can easily create wonderful designs with one font for the rest of your life if you choose to—they had to do it centuries ago and they didn’t have Photoshop sticking things to guides for them. If anything, more font selection will make things worse for you because creativity and beauty become hard to achieves when more options are given to us.

More toys means more fun though, right? If you want to go that route, then by all means go for it. I love to look at the different fonts being used and admire anyone that can successfully pull off using newer fonts for the Web. However, I’ve seen too many times what can happen when development options are given to the masses, and it isn’t pretty (re: Myspace). Instead of having a user agreement it would be cool if Typekit made you read a book on typography before you could begin using a font—the Web would improve tenfold, if that was the case.

I’m not being sarcastic, saying that is all you need to know for a majority of websites. Try going through all of the Web designs that you love, strip out the images and ask yourself “how would that website look with just text and spacing?”. When designers say “text is the interface”, they really do mean it. The iA site is a great example of that.

Information Architects is based around strong typography.

One of my all time favorite designs is A Working Library. The site is a showcase of text being the interface. The spacing is just right and the typography is on point.

A Working Library by Mandy Brown.

Some people find design like this to be dull and boring, they feel that design should have more pop to it. At the end of the day some extra visual flair might be what separates your design from the rest, but you need to get the first 95% down. The website that you are reading this article on now has done a wonderful job of presenting a visual design that isn’t reliant on images to be beautiful.

Well That Isn’t Hard

It’s possible to create a wonderful design without the use of images at all. I know that sounds crazy, but it is possible. I’m not saying it should be done, but if we can create elegance simply with typography and white space, then why shouldn’t we be able to create greatness when we start throwing in images, videos and other effects?

With the use of images I’m not talking about images that are needed to represent something such as icons, but images that are there for flare. Sometimes a picture is worth at least ten better words than any word you could use, so it’s better to go with an image (but you still need to consider using white space with it).

Here are two more examples of beautiful websites that place a heavy emphasis on typography to control the design. The first is Blake Allen Design and the second is The Harriet Series (both use images to represent their typography, but you get the point).

Blake Allen Design uses images, but with great typography.

The Harriet Series by OkayType.

What makes the two designs above so interesting to me is that the typography not only guides you along a journey, but it does so with personality. You almost feel as if the typography is an expression of the person that designed it. Blake Allen uses Helvetica which gives the website a Swiss, clean and structured personality. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Harriet Series website is a bit more playful and experimental—there is beauty in the organized chaos that the typography creates.

For 99% of the designs out there, typography and white space are going to be your underlying foundation. So if you can’t get them right, then the rest of your design has nothing to stand on. Stop worrying about the pop of your design and first worry about how it will stand tall. Once you get that down then you can begin to dress it up.

Clear is a very simple to do list application for iOS devices. While the majority of the excitement around it are the gestures used to control the interface, you will notice that the typography does enough to get out of the way and allow you to enjoy the application. Sure it is nothing more than Helvetica, but what if it was Comic Sans and had bad spacing all around? Great typography doesn’t have to stand out in a good way, but that doesn’t mean it should do enough harm when it stands out in a negative way, either.

Typography In Other Disciplines

Art of the Menu is a great website on menu design.

The Art of the Menu does a great job of showing the importance of typography in menu design. While a lot of restaurants like to add images and illustrations to their menus to give them a bit more pizzaz, they fail in providing a decent typographical structure that allows you to easily browse through the menu.

If you are a designer you have no excuse to say you can’t come up with a decent design. When you create a design that lacks a strong foundation, anything else you add to it is just going to make it worse. Too many designers attempt to save their designs with fluff without understanding they are pouring gasoline onto the fire. If a design is not enjoyable to read then it is not an enjoyable experience, no matter how many images, colors or sounds you decide to add to it.

Looking to understand typography a little bit better? Not too long ago Smashing Magazine did a comprehensive overview of some wonderful typography tools and resources.

(jvb)

© Paul Scrivens for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

This is our sixth article in a series that introduces the latest useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts. The fourth shared a free plugin called GuideGuide with us, and in the fifth we’ve announced Erskine’s responsive grid generator Gridpak.

What Is A JS Bin?

JS Bin was one of the very first public paste bins with the output rendered live in your browser and available to share and edit with the completed output. Released back in 2008, JS Bin is now on its third iteration and after a long and thorough development finally includes some of the original features I wanted to build JS Bin with. It’s completely free to use all its features and open source, and it’s available on Github.

JS Bin, a collaborative JavaScript debugging tool with advanced features.

Essentially, JS Bin exists for two main reasons: a) creating test and debug cases, and collaboratively debugging those cases, and b) to teach and learn from. JS Bin is a collaborative JavaScript debugging tool. It allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

What’s New?

In both current and previous versions, the UX has been a big part of the update. Danny Hope volunteered his UX experience to this open source project and collaborated very closely with me, allowing us to instantly try out UX ideas, see them in action and decide whether they worked or not.

Again in the spirit of open source collaboration, the project needed to be upgraded from entirely PHP (and not great PHP code!) to Node.js. Aron Carroll worked for the last few months in his spare time converting the existing JS Bin logic entirely to JavaScript. So as of today, JS Bin is 100% JavaScript.

This move to Node allows us to introduce two new useful features:

1. CodeCasting
2. Live remote rendering

Both techniques use EventSource and a little technique that I call The Spike.

The key difference between the old and the new JS Bin is that as you type – JS Bin is saving. Means, as soon as your first key stroke lands, you’ve got your own URL. You keep typing, it keeps saving. If you want to stop saving against that version, just create a milestone and live saving will be applied to the new revision.

CodeCasting

Say you’re running a demonstration or a workshop, and you want all the participants attending to see the code being updated and to see the output of the JavaScript, CSS and HTML, in real-time as you type. With the new JS Bin, you don’t have to be on the same connection, just visit the same URL. Instead of ending the URL with /edit, add /watch and they become voyeurs to your live coding. I’d love to see this live at a conference.

Live remote rendering

Ever wanted to check the output on multiple platforms: Firefox, Chrome, IE, iPads, Androids, Windows Phone, even a Boot 2 Gecko phone? Maybe all at a once? Maybe without ever hitting refresh?

JS Bin can do this. Simply point the device or browser to your full preview URL (basically removing /edit from the URL) and any changes you make as you type will cause the target device to refresh its content.

The URL structure even has a shortcut, if you’re registered, you can always point the URL to http://jsbin.com//last and it’ll pull up the last bin you’ve worked on. Along with live remote rendering, I’ve been working with the Adobe Shadow team and they’ve gone ahead and built compatibility with JS Bin directly in to Shadow.

How the live stuff works

Now, that’s an interesting question! And it has a quite simple answer. A while back I tried out a comet PHP based version of CodeCasting which was way, way more complicated. It worked, but releasing wasn’t possible as my server couldn’t take more than just a few concurrent sessions. The move to Node years later fixes that.

As you type, the tool sends an Ajax save request (after an idle time of 200ms). On the server side, this triggers an event which says “the bin with this url has just changed�. Now, when viewing the CodeCasting URL or the live remote rendering, each user is connected to the Spike application. It listens for the event that says that a bin has changed, and when that happens, it just finds all the users watching a particular URL and sends them the updated panel (so we only send the CSS panel if the CSS panel changed).

An EventSource maintains a persistent connection with the server and is listening for those events in the browser. When the event is received, depending on the content type, it’ll either inject the content live, or refresh the page providing users with the latest version of the code.

Other Important Features

There’s a whole lot more to the new release of JS Bin, and I intend to release screencasts on these features on the @js_bin on Twitter.

Some of these features were always part of JS Bin, but hidden inside of the “beta” access – which required a clunkly console command. Now JS Bin 3 adds the much needed UI to do simple things like login to remember your history of bins.

• Login to remember your history
• Your full history on a single page with live previews on hover
• An API to control default settings (useful if you’re preparing a teaching session)
• Processors, so you can use Markdown, CoffeeScript and LESS, amongst others
• CSS panel
• Console panel
• Support for more libraries (including Bootstrap, Backbone, etc)
• Native support in Adobe Shadow (you can point your browser to JS Bin and Adobe Shadow will render the live output automatically)
• “Edit from your editor and render remotely” feature. You’ll have to see it to believe it (idea and code by @wookiehangover)
• Our badass robot mascot: Dave, the JS Bin Bot (stickers will be made!)

Dave, the JS Bin Bot mascot, created by @yoheis (of PhoneGap fame).

Also, I’d like to add GitHub support, export your history, hosting of static assets and further features to the upcoming versions of JS Bin in the nearest future.

Hack, Play, Share & Get Involved

I’m really excited to share this updated version of JS Bin. Watch out for the twitter account @js_bin because it will be posting tips and screencasts, and do send your feedback with issues, ideas or just to tell us where you’re using JS Bin!

© Remy Sharp for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

One of the visual effects that is a mainstay in my Web design toolkit is the letterpress effect. Used properly, it’s a quick way to make text blend better with the layout, as if it were machine-stamped onto the background. Think of what a home appliance marquee or a professional business card looks (and feels) like, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’ve developed a simple workflow for creating a letterpress text effect in Adobe Fireworks that, with the advent of CSS3, can be applied directly to HTML text — no images needed. Here’s the best part: it doesn’t use any Bevel or Emboss Live Filters.

What Is Letterpress?

Letterpress is a venerable technique of printing that involves “pressing� a plate of movable type onto a sheet of paper to produce an effect that is impressed (where the text is pressed down onto the paper) or embossed (where the text is raised above the surface of the paper).

An example of a letterpress business card with impressed text. (Image: Audimas Adomavicious)

The classic charm of letterpress found its place in digital design once designers were able to emulate its effect on screen. To accomplish that, designers observed the effect of light and shadow on the dents on paper that had gone through the printing process. Imagine a light shining down at an angle on a sheet of letterpress text. Impressed text will appear to have a sliver of highlighting at the bottom edge of the letters and a thin shadow at the top edge. Embossed text is just the opposite: highlights on top, shadows on the bottom. These properties create the effect of raised or sunken areas along the surface, and this can be translated using effects made possible by both Fireworks and the CSS3 specification.

Why Not Just Use Bevel or Emboss?

Fireworks’ Bevel and Emboss Live Filters are a bit primitive for my tastes. The refinement controls are unwieldy — for example, you can’t set highlights and shadows independently — and the result is subpar. It works OK for straight edges and sharp corners, but it gets rough around curves. I suspect this is because the effect is raster-based, so that it can work with any object (shape, text or embedded image); a vector-based tool would have allowed for a smoother and more precise effect.

The letterpress effect using the Outer Bevel Live Filter. Notice the roughness of the curved edges.

Letterpress Text In Fireworks

A better way to recreate the effect would be to use the Drop Shadow Live Filter, because it produces smoother edges. This solution hinges on a basic setting: a shadow and a highlight, offset exactly 1 pixel up or down, relative to the text object. For this tutorial, we’ll start with two text objects of different colors, set against a colored background.

Start with two text objects.

Embossed Text

To create an embossed effect, apply two Drop Shadow Live Filters to our first text object:

• Apply a “Shadowâ€� (distance: 1; color: #000000; opacity: 60%; blur: 0; angle: 270;) to the bottom of the text, and
• Apply a “Highlightâ€� (distance: 1; color: #FFFFFF; opacity: 90%; blur: 0; angle: 90;) to the top of the text.

Embossed effect applied to the “Smashing� text object.

The opacity of the Drop Shadow filters will depend on how light or dark the background is in relation to the text’s color. Tweak these values according to how pronounced you want the letterpress effect to be.

Adjust the opacity value in the Drop Shadow Live Filter.

Impressed Text

To create an impressed effect for the second text object, just switch the angle values of the “Shadow� and “Highlight� Drop Shadow filters shown in the previous step, so that the shadow is on top of the text and the highlight is on the bottom. Adjust the opacity values to maintain contrast against the darker text object’s color.

Impressed effect applied to the “Magazine� text object.

Note: These effects work best with text and background color combinations that aren’t black and white, as in our example. If you’re working with black text or black backgrounds, you’ll want to skip the “Shadow� effect, because it will do little for the text. Similarly, for white text or white backgrounds, forego the “Highlight� effect.

Save as Style for Reuse

Now that our letterpress effects are in place, we can save them as Fireworks Styles so that we can use them again later without having to apply each filter manually.

To create a Fireworks Style:

1. Select the “Smashing� text object with the Pointer tool (V);
2. Bring up the Styles panel (Control/Command + F11, or in the menu Window → Styles);
3. Click on the context-menu icon in the top-right corner of the panel, and click on “New Style�;
4. In the “New Style� dialog box, let’s give our style a descriptive name, like “Letterpress Emboss.� Uncheck all properties except for “Effect,� and click OK.
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 for the “Magazine� text object.

Styles panel and context menu

“New Style� dialog box

You should now see two new items in your Styles panel. The next time you want to apply the emboss or impress effect to a text object, just select that object, and click on the new style that you created.

Styles panel with two new styles

Additionally, you can save these new styles as a Style Library file (*.stl), to share with other designers or to back up your styles before reinstalling Fireworks.

To save a set of styles as a Style Library file:

1. Bring up the Styles panel (Control/Command + F11, or Window → Styles);
2. Click on the context-menu icon in the top-right corner of the panel, and click “Save Style Library�;
3. In the “Save As� dialog box, enter a descriptive file name for the STL file, and then click “Save.�

The Styles panel, again.

“Save As� dialog box

To import a previously saved Style Library:

1. Bring up the Styles panel (Control/Command + F11, or Window → Styles);
2. Click on the context-menu icon in the top-right corner of the panel, and click “Import Style Library�;
3. In the “Open� dialog box, browse to and select the STL file, and then click “Open.�

Hint: Need a good library of Letterpress Styles for Adobe Fireworks? Why not check this 16 Letterpress Styles set by Mikko Vartio?

Translating Into CSS

Option 1: Translate the Values of the Live Filters Manually

Aside from the downsides of the Bevel and Emboss filters that I mentioned earlier, the other reason I use Drop Shadow filters is that they readily translate into CSS3’s text-shadow property. Consider this basic syntax:

text-shadow: [x-offset] [y-offset] [blur] [color-alpha];

Let’s break this down:

• [x-offset] is set to 0, and [y-offset] is either 1px or -1px, depending on whether the shadow or highlight is at the top (90°) or bottom (270°);
• [blur] is set to 0, to keep the shadow and highlight effects crisp;
• [color-alpha] is set using an RGBa value: rgba(r, g, b, a).
  • The first three values (r, g and b) correspond to the decimal red-green-blue values of the color itself (for example, #FFFFFF in hexadecimal is equal to 255, 255, 255 in decimal);
  • The last value (a) determines the transparency of the color (where 0 is completely transparent, 0.5 is half-transparent, and 1 is completely opaque).

Let’s apply our effects to the following HTML markup:

<div class="embossed">Smashing</div>
<div class="impressed">Magazine</div>

Our CSS for the embossed effect would be:

div.embossed {
   text-shadow:
      0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8), /* shadow */
      0 -1px 0 rgba(255, 255, 255, 1.0); /* highlight */ }

And for the impressed effect:

div.impressed {
   text-shadow:
      0 -1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8), /* shadow */
      0 1px 0 rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5); /* highlight */ }

Here, I have slightly adjusted the opacity values in the text-shadow property (relative to the original values in the Drop Shadow Live Filter in Fireworks) to better suit the way fonts are rendered in the browser.

Screenshot of the HTML and CSS output in Mozilla Firefox. See an HTML sample.

Screenshot of the HTML and CSS output in Apple Safari. See an HTML sample.

Option 2: Use the CSS Properties Panel in Fireworks CS6

Writing CSS code by hand is what we Web professionals usually do. But in some cases, tools can help us, too.

Fireworks CS6 (which was recently released) has a new feature that could help you when you want to quickly (yet reliably) translate the properties of a visual element in the design to CSS3 code. The CSS Properties panel can extract CSS3 code for virtually any object selected on the canvas, including text objects and live filters.

Let’s see how this could help us in practice when working with the letterpress effect!

If you have a copy of Fireworks CS6 (a trial version would do, too), open the letterpress-effect.fw.png file provided with this tutorial (see the Downloads section further below), and then with the Selection tool, select the first text object.

Open the letterpress-effect.fw.png file, and select the first text object.

Next, open the CSS Properties panel (in the menu, Window → CSS Properties, or Control/Command + F7), and while the first text object is selected, notice how the CSS panel instantly shows the object’s properties.

The CSS Properties panel shows the properties of the selected text object as CSS code. Highlighted here is the code that translates the two Live Filters into CSS.

In this case, we’re interested only in the Live Filters applied to the text object, so let’s copy this bit of code from the CSS panel and see how it looks:

text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.6), 0 -1px 0 rgba(255,255,255,0.9);

As you see, we’ve got results similar to what we achieved earlier with the manual method. Fireworks CS6 has automatically translated the Live Filters that were applied to the “embossed� text object into clean and valid CSS!

Similarly, you can extract and copy the CSS for the Live Filters applied to the “impressed� text effect.

And if you strive for perfection (as many of us do), along with the CSS Properties panel, you can use CSS Professionalzr, an excellent free extension by Matt Stow that can further optimize the code produced by the CSS Properties panel.

Of course, even if you’ve already switched to Fireworks CS6, you can always opt to translate the properties of Live Filters to CSS code manually. But when you’re dealing with a lot of objects, the CSS Properties panel comes in really handy and can save you precious time.

Tips on Using the Letterpress Effect

• Use the effects sparingly.
  Text effects are the last thing you want to abuse, because they could impair readability, especially for people with vision problems. Restrict them to headings and interactive items (such as buttons and menu links).
• Enable them to degrade gracefully.
  While most modern browsers already support CSS3 to some extent (see the note below), Internet Explorer 9 still doesn’t recognize the text-shadow property. In an effort to make things look consistent, you might want to look for a workaround, but I highly recommend that you gracefully degrade the effect in browsers that don’t support the property. Effects should be enhancements, not vital features.

Please note: Browsers that fully support the text-shadow property (with multiple shadows) include Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 4+, Safari 4+ and Opera 9.5. As of version 9, Internet Explorer still does not support the official text-shadow definition; instead, it has a proprietary filter that achieves a similar effect.

Examples

Here are a few real-world examples of the letterpress effect in action.

Veerle’s Blog
The letterpress effect — applied to the (image-rendered) logotype and headings — creates a bit of contrast against the background here, while still keeping everything subtle. Notice the use of both embossed and impressed effects in the column headings.

Stunning CSS3 (teaser page)
Coupled with @font-face declarations for custom HTML fonts, the letterpress effect on the different heading levels makes for a sophisticated look, previously feasible only with image-based text. (Note that the teaser page we’ve linked to here is an archived version.)

Janko at Warp Speed
The use of only one text-shadow effect, and only on the headings, exemplifies Janko’s restraint in order to maintain contrast and readability. Also notice the 45° offset in the highlight effect, which you can achieve in CSS by adding a 1-pixel x-offset to the text-shadow.

Downloads

• Need a sample to study? Download the archive for this tutorial (ZIP, 84.5 KB), which includes the Fireworks PNG (created in Adobe Fireworks CS5) and the HTML sample.
• The Fireworks PNG uses the awesome (and free) Ultra font.
• You can also download the Style Library separately (ZIP, 22.3 KB), created in Adobe Fireworks CS5.

The samples (i.e. the Fireworks PNG and Style Library) should work fine in any recent version of Fireworks (CS4, CS5, CS5.1, CS6).

(al) (mb)

© Jose Olarte for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice out there is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.

In this selection, we’re pleased to present Signika, Plastic Type, Bariol, Alegreya, Metropolis, Typometry and other quality fonts. Please note that while most fonts are available for commercial projects, some are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Also, please read the licensing agreements carefully before using the fonts; they may change from time to time. Make sure to check the free quality fonts round-up from January 2011, too.

Free Quality Fonts

Signika
A remarkable sans-serif typeface with a gentle character, Signika was developed for wayfinding, signage and other media in which clarity of information is required. Developed by Anna Giedrys of Poland, the typeface has a low contrast and tall x-height to improve readability at small sizes and at far distances. The typeface has a wide character set, supporting most European languages, small caps, pictograms and arrows. All weights from light to bold have alternative negative versions, optimized to solve the effect of juxtaposed positive and negative text setting, whereby negative text tends to look thicker. Available at Google Web Fonts and for free download at Fontsquirrel.

Plastic Type
The designers of this typeface were inspired by the plastics industry, exploring how they could use the various forms and imperfections of plastic in their design. The result of their experimentation is a freely available, beautiful, playful font, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Sullivan
Sullivan is a bold display face that comes in three variations. Each variation can be used effectively on its own or layered on the others to create a modern, industrial visual effect. The typeface was designed by Jason Mark Jones and released under the name-your-price policy.

Corki
Corki is a distinctive condensed slab-serif typeface suitable for headlines. Four styles are available: Regular, Rounded, Tuscan and Rounded Tuscan. The typeface includes 134 glyphs: both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, plus two manicules and various arrows. It is available for free.

Bariol
Bariol is a friendly, rounded, slightly condensed typeface, available in four weights and designed with versatility and readability in mind. It’s nice and familiar, without being too sweet, and very readable even at small sizes. Bariol Regular is available for free (a tweet or Facebook update is requested), but each font weight can be purchased for just $1.00.

Alegreya
This beautifully designed serif typeface has a classic, olden feel. The uppercase letterforms seem to be based on Roman script, while the lowercase characters rather have the feel of a humanist book. The family consists of 12 fonts (including regular, italic, bold, black, bold italic and black italic.)

Metropolis
Metropolis is a distinctive, experimental typeface in the Art Deco style. The design was inspired by the industrial movement of the 1920s, when skyscrapers where born. As the designer explains, “Using a double line technique, I wanted to create my own Art Deco style font that represented this era. The result is a bold, bumptious typeface with a stolidly calm disposition.â€� Metropolis could be a good choice when you are looking for a retro or retro-futuristic look. Released under Fontfabric’s Free Font EULA, you may use it in your private and commercial projects for free, but if you use it with a @font-face declaration, then a credit to Fontfabric is required somewhere on your website.

Typometry
An experimental display typeface inspired by geometrical forms. An interesting choice for unique patterns or just playing arond with glyphs. Designed by Emil Kozole. An advanced version of the typeface with 2 weights, 4 styles and 220 glyphs is available as well.

Tikal Sans Medium
Tikal Sans is a family with curved terminating strokes, ending in sharp edges. With a contemporary feel, a tall x-height and OpenType contextual alternate letters, Tikal Sans offers a functional look with a friendly touch. The thin and black weights are great for display sizes, while the light, regular and medium weights are well suited to longer texts. Tikal Sans Medium and Tikal Sans Medium Italic are available for free, but registration is required.

Actor
If you are looking for a workhorse typeface, then Actor might be it. It has a tall x-height, which is why it requires fairly high line spacing. The digits of Actor are created as old-style figures. The font can be used for free via Google Web Fonts.

Veneer Extras and Veneer Extras Italic
Veneer is a versatile, handcrafted “letterpress� font that has an authentic vintage feel with a touch of grunge. The freely available extras include 70 glyphs, in both regular and italics. Registration is required for the free download.

Wayfinding Sans
This type family, designed by Ralf Herrmann, sets a new standard for legibility in signage and wayfinding. Herrmann started this project with extensive field studies, driving tens of thousands of miles to explore the legibilty of road signage typefaces in dozens of countries around the world. The results of these explorations, along with an extensive study of relevant scientific legibilty research, formed the theoretical framework for creating an “ultimate� signage typeface. Wayfinding Sans includes 400 glyphs in one style, with arrows. To get the font, a tweet or Facebook update is required.

Ranger
Here is a playful Colorado-inspired italic typeface, designed by Evan Huwa. It’s a good choice for a bold movie title or a vintage book style. This typeface is sans serif and uppercase only.

Poly
José Nicolás Silva Schwarzenberg of the University of Buenos Aires designed this free font specifically for the South American indigenous language Wayuunaiki. Fortunately, the tyepface can be used not only by the 305,000 Wayuu people, but by everyone across the world. It is a medium-contrast serif font, optimized for the Web and efficient at smaller sizes. Poly is available in the Google Web Fonts library as well.

Adec
Designed by Serge Shi of Russia, Adec is an original experimental typeface. The texture of the glyphs makes the typeface a good choice for distinctive playful designs and graphic branding. The typeface has three styles: Main, Initials and Text. The download contains samples of patterns created using the typeface alone.

Frontage Outline
Frontage is a charming layered typographic system that allows you to combine fonts and colors to achieve an interesting 3-D effect. Add the shadow font or just use the capital letters of the regular and bold cut for a stark effect. Unfortunately, only the Frontage Outline one is available for free (or at least paid for with a tweet or Facebook update).

Andada
This serif typeface might be the perfect fit for the headlines and body copy of your next corporate or personal project. Designed specifically for Spanish text, this typeface is a solid fit for English as well. The free typeface was given the 2010 Desigh Award by Bienal Ibero-Americana. It includes the basic set, accented characters, signs and punctuation, numbers, ligatures and mathematical signs. Released under the SIL Open Font License.

Blanch
Blanch is a distinctive display face, designed for the Fruita Blanch brand, a family-run company. The typeface is a great match for brochures and posters, but can be used for headings on the Web as well. Although it might look a bit rigid, the typeface has a modern, contemporary feel. The family consists of six weights: three condensed weights and three caps weights. Designed by the Spanish design studio Atipus, and released with a name-your-price license.

Valentina
Valentina is a classic “didone� that follows some of the principles of Bodoni from the 18th century, while incorporating many characteristics of the Spanish style of the time. The font contains 457 glyphs, with 125 alternative lowercase glyphs and 46 ligatures. Some of the glyphs can be nicely integrated in a logo or branding design and combined with Ampersand (featured above) or Zeta.

Sánchez
Sánchez is a display serif type family. Similar to Rockwell, it has rounded edges, which provide contrast and balance to the overall square forms. Regular and italic variants are available for free.

Erler Dingbats
This typeface covers the full encoding range for dingbats in Unicode (U + 2700 to U + 27BF). Erler Dingbats is the result of a collaboration between designers Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe to create a consistent, contemporary font that could be used for everyday communication. It includes a range of popular symbols and pictograms, such as arrows, pens, phones, stars, crosses and checkmarks.

Entypo Pictograms
Entypo Pictograms is a set of more than 100 pictograms available as OpenType fonts, released under the Creative Commons license and free for commercial use. The collection consists of many navigation elements and other familiar icons. Its designers, Daniel Bruce and Andreas Blombäck, look forward to seeing usage of it.

Great Vibes
This beautiful, flowing typeface has looping ascenders and descenders, as well as elegant uppercase forms. It is a Unicode typeface that supports languages that use the Latin script and its variants.

Arvo
This typeface has strong contrast without feeling overwhelming. It can be used in headings and design campaigns. The smaller sizes (9, 12, 14 and 16 points) are hinted in TrueType format for better legibility on Windows. The font is published in the Google Font directory as a free open font (OFL).

Banda Free Regular
Banda is a semi-serif typeface with a tall x-height and rounded semi-serifs. Playful and inviting and suitable for logos, headlines and packaging designs, Banda Regular is available as a free download.

Edmondsans
Edmondsans is a free display typeface with three weights (regular, medium and bold). The typeface isn’t suited to every occasion but would be good for bold, conservative headings.

Fenix
Fenix is a serif typeface designed for display and long passages of text, with its strong serifs and rough strokes. Fenix is elegant yet legible at large sizes, probably a good fit for editorial work, books and newspapers. It is freely available for private and commercial use.

EB Garamond
Georg Duffner is recreating the classical Garamond with his open-source project EB Garamond. His goal is to revive Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century. Duffner’s design reproduces the original, with its letterforms taken from a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen.â€� It’s a good, comprehensive Web font, released under the SIL Open Font License, 1.1, and also available on Google Web Fonts. The project is under ongoing development, so if you’d like to help Duffner, feel free to contribute.

Noticia Text
This slab-serif typeface was designed for long passages of texts in digital newspapers and other on-screen publications. Available for free in four styles, the typeface is currently under development, but the first version is available now.

Lusitana
Lusitana is a classic serif typeface inspired by the type found in the 1572 first edition of The Lusiads, a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões. This typeface is made for long passages of text at small sizes. Designed by Ana Paula Megda.

Cardo
Cardo is a large Unicode font designed especially for academic needs. It works well for general typesetting in situations where a high-quality old-style font is appropriate. Its large character set supports many modern languages, as well as those studied by scholars. Cardo also contains ligatures, text figures (i.e. old-style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and spacing characters.

Exo Font Family
A successful Kickstarter project made it possible for Natanael Gama of Portugal to create this typeface and release it publicly. Exo is a comprehensive geometric sans-serif font family with nine weights, in both regular and italic. Each font comes with many OpenType features such as small caps, ligatures, alternates, old-style figures, tabular figures and fractions. Both the OpenType and source files are available to download for free.

NeoDeco
This typeface was designed by Jonatan Xavier to imbue the Art Deco style with a strong modern feel. It is best for brochures and packaging designs, posters and magazines.

Bitter Regular
This slab-serif typeface was designed specifically for literary texts and for reading on screen with eInk technology. The typeface is a great fit for headings in a corporate brochure or on a website. Only one font weight is available, in TrueType and OpenType formats. A description and images are available on the designer’s website. The download link on the official website isn’t working anymore, but you can still download it from Designer In Action. Released under the SIL Open Font License.

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Type Connection
A good relationship can be characterized as two people who fit together. Aura Seltzer adopted this idea for her game Type Connection, which was her MFA thesis project. In this game, you are a procurer who helps different typefaces mate with each other. Each typeface is a lonely character searching for love, and your job is to find its perfect partner. By playing the game, you not only explore type history, but also learn typographic terms, while learning how to pair typefaces.

Just My Type
Picking just the right typeface can be difficult. On this page, Dan Eden presents a collection of beautiful font stacks delivered by Typekit. Some of the combinations aren’t necessarily revolutionary, but Eden delivers a nice, visually pleasing collection nevertheless. Some of the fonts are even free. Whether you’re looking for a new font to please a client or just want to play around, you won’t waste your time visiting Dan’s website. And for a more thorough article on combining typefaces, check out “Four Techniques for Combining Typefaces.�

Novel Constructions
A detailed case study on how Christoph Dunst designed the typeface Novel. Interesting and unique insights into the design process.

Showcase of Typographic Posters
This project is curated by André Felipe, a graphic designer who loves typography and its unorthodox uses. Featuring literally hundreds of posters, this project is a great resource that could serve either as a platform to show off your talent or as a reference for your next project.

Squared Superheroes
How well do you know your favorite superheroes? What kind of weapons do they fight with? What do their masks look like? Instead of drawing the usual fine details (facial expressions, hair, shadows, special visual effects), René Schiffer goes for a rather laconic, minimal style. He has picked out the most important characteristics of each superhero and represented them as squared forms. Placed side by side, the superheroes make for a great composition. Now, see if you recognize your childhood heroes! And no, it’s not a typeface, but… well, it could be one!

Further Resources

• Lost Type Co-Op
  The Lost Type Co-Op is a pay-what-you-want type foundry. Users can pay whatever they like for a font or type in “$0� for a free download. All proceeds from sales go directly to the designers of the fonts themselves.
• The League of Moveable Type
  This open-source type movement brings high-quality tyepfaces to the Web. The creators of the project release quality fonts every now and then, so stay tuned!
• Google Web Fonts
  This growing directory offers hundreds of free open-source fonts optimized for the Web. Google also provides ready-to-use snippets to integrate the fonts on your website.
• Typography and free fonts on Smashing Magazine
  An overview of typography-related articles and free font round-ups on Smashing Magazine.

We sincerely appreciate the time and effort of all of the type designers featured in this post. Please keep in mind that type design is a time-consuming craft that truly deserves compensation and support. Please consider supporting the type designers who create and release these amazing typefaces for all of us to use.

(al)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

We have lots and lots of good stuff here for your weekend reading pleasure in the Smashing Daily, like some thoughts about the first transatlantic communication cable, and some thoughts about brands (and if you can actually care about them). We have a good article about expectations when doing business, and an idea to serve images that are acceptable to the retina. There’s news about jQuery, a post about browser update policies, and much more. Enjoy!

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© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.