Fontshop have just released an online font design and creation tool called Fonstruct. It is fantastic. It was devised and developed for FontShop by Rob Meek, a designer/programmer based in Berlin. Meek has been working on projects like this for quite sometime before joining forces with FontShop.

The Fontstruct interface seems easy to use and there are lots of simple clever functions to make the job of font creation easier. Additional functionality such as the ability to share your font with others via a Creative Commons licence, or to create an embedded Flash version for display on your personal website show how Fontshop have really made the effort to integrate with the best of other successful web technologies and services.

As an educational tool for would be typographers, type designers and design students, it presents a wonderful learning opportunity. It presents a simple entry point to understanding the basics of letterform design and construction without the steep technical learning curve of other professional type design software. It is easy to see how this tool could be integrated with traditional methods of teaching and learning. For example, take a look at Ellen Lupton’s modular type design exercise in her book Thinking with Type as proof of this. I look forward to experimenting with it in class in the next academic year to see how it can augment and extend current curricula.

A couple of interesting things have emerged this week.

Firstly, A List Apart have at last featured another article on How to Size Type in CSS, by Richard Rutter (of webtypography.net). Its pretty good and clearly explains the process in incremental stages. However, I would also have welcomed some discussion on the semantic nature of sizing with respect to H1, H2, H3 etc and Medium, Large, Largest, Smaller and their relationship to web standards. It is also interesting that Rutter is recommending a departure from the 62.5% rule for setting 1 em equal to 10px. It was certainly much easier from a calculations perspective. There is a good discussion about this on ALA.

Secondly, Thomas Phinney published the results of his survey on web fonts (which I previously mentioned). The results are not really surprising – designers want to be able to use all of their print fonts on the web. The main issue prohibiting progress is licensing. Foundries and designers often have divergent views on this. Johnathan Hoefler, of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, suggests that while the will is there on the part of the foundries to make their fonts available for font embedding on the web, they won’t move until someone sorts out a technologically safe solution that will protect them from pirating. It seems like a bit of a deadlock, but perhaps Adobe may take the lead on it. Incidentally, I asked Erik Spiekermann (after his talk in Dublin, during Irish Design Week) what he thought could be done to improve typography on the web – his answer was ‘Sort out the licensing issue’.

I think that we also need a critical reivew of contemporary typeface design to establish what fonts are actually suitable for screen delivery. This would be a significant research project for someone to undertake – ISTD or ATypI maybe? Many of the best contemporary type designers and foundries (Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Underware, Ascender, Bruno Maag, FontFont etc) have already created bespoke fonts for screen. It would be great to see some of them become available. Web design is still the poor relation in typographic terms.

I haven’t posted since August, I have just been too busy, too much work. Here are a few significant things that I have been tracking in the intervening period.

First something nice, look at these delicate type animations as part of the Hyundai teaser campaign by Buck. Animations like these may seem over used, but these examples demonstrate a refined quality in the motion. Meanwhile, Peter Bilak created a strange little application called DanceWriter, which is a video dance alphabet that will convert the word you type into simple dance moves! I will file it with some of the other weird and wondering alphabet generators such as Spell with Flickr or Amaztype.

On a different note, there have been lots of things happening in web typography. Andy Clarke has formed a think tank group called CSS Eleven:

CSS Eleven is an international group of visual web designers and developers who are committed to helping the W3C’s CSS Working Group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow’s web.

The line up is pretty impressive, many of the names you would expect to see there including Richard Rutter, Mark Bolton and Jeff Croft. Jina Bolton is the only woman in the group. Mark Bolton is also giving another talk on web typography, but this time at Web 2.0 in Berlin, should be interesting.

WebKit announced in August that it now supports CSS @font-face rules. With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another. This article on A List Apart describes the feature in detail. All of the examples linked to in that article work in WebKit now. @font-face is on the WebKit feature branch, you can try it out here.

A List Apart published the results of their fairly comprehensive (33,000 respondents!) survey about Web Design. Some of it is interesting because there is little topical research available on a discipline that is changing and evolving so fast, but much of the data is also somewhat ambiguous.

In the blogosphere, John Boardley lauched his I Love Typography to much acclaim in August 2007 and he later published a short review of contemporary web design practice. There have been a few other reviews with a similar viewpoint posted on other sites too – Rainfall Daffinson’s is one example. Minimalism and simplicity are certainly the new zeitgeist at the moment, of which John Maeda is the obvious champion. His recent talk at TED though was anything but simple, reflecting the underlying complexity both technologically and conceptually in his extraordinary practice.

This is what others have been doing while I have finished the first draft of a critical review of contemporary practice for my PhD. It was difficult to write, because there are few examples out there that cover the range of territory I am examining in a single publication. I will publish it here soon in a series of short articles.