The entire typeface is nice, but my oh my, look at Darjeeling Regnaments.
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Tag: Fonts & Design
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Eames Century Modern Font
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A Huge Blogroll, a Nice Font
I’ve made two changes to the blog that you may or may not have noticed…
I’ve been wanting to overhaul the blogroll in the sidebar for some time, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. I thought it would be nice to actually link to all of the blogs that I read (all 100 or so of them), but the list would be waaay too long to fit! I’ve seen some blogs that use Blogline’s exported list, but I switched to Google Reader a few months ago. I wasn’t aware of a way to export my list from the Reader, but I found out that it is possible. If you want to try it, look for “Settings”, then “Tags”, make the list(s) you want to share public, and then get the code from “add a blogroll to your site”.
The new and improved blogroll can be found here.
Now, about that “nice font”. At first, I only wanted to change the font headers for the sidebar sections. I figured I could just make an image for each section, set the h2 to “display, none” in the css, and be done. I started working on it and I realized that it wouldn’t be quite so easy. There are several widgets that don’t work that way (no easy way to add html), and they would have to be edited individually. OK, that would be a lot of work, but it would be manageable. Oh, except updating plugins would overwrite the changes. It just started to seem like one big headache.
I went off in search of an image replacement script and I found a great one at A List Apart. There were a few adjustments that had to be made to my css files (my images are set to have a border, which had to be removed for h1 and h2 elements), but it was fairly easy.
The blog now looks like this:
The font is Natural Script and I love the look, but I’m not 100% sure if I’m keeping it for the blog post titles. The script loads last, so there’s a delay before you see the prettier version. More troubling than that though is the loss of linking. You used to be able to click on the post title to be taken to that page, but now you have to click on the comments count instead. I’m not sure if that’s something that will bother me or not. I could make the date beneath the post title into a link, so maybe that would be an acceptable alternative.
Working on the blog is like working on the house… there’s always more work that can be done.
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Font Crush 2!
I have chunkier, more substantial fonts for you this time around.
Just as before, they’ve been added to the far right sidebar above my wishlist, and each page load will randomly display one of the fonts.
Two fonts are free (for personal use only): Sanka and White Bold. The other three are suitable for commercial use: Mesquite ($29, as seen in the banner above), Hellenic Wide ($49), and Rustler Fancy ($19.95).
Enjoy!
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Using the Mac Keyboard Viewer
There’s a nice tutorial over at Suffix.Abuse about using glyphs. Many fonts have alternate versions of letters that you can use for a more decorative look, and you can access them in Illustrator and InDesign through the glyphs menu.
For those of you on a Mac, the Keyboard Viewer is another helpful way to get the most out of your fonts.
Bring up your System Preferences (found in the Applications folder), and click on “International”.
Next, check the box for the Keyboard Viewer (under the Input Menu tab). You may want the Character Palette as well. Scroll down a bit and choose your language/country too.
You can close your System Preferences now. You should see a new icon in the top right of your screen, in the Finder’s Input Menu (don’t worry… I didn’t know it had a name either). Click and hold on the icon and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”.
A little keyboard will show up on your screen, and it responds to any key you press. Then you can choose a specific font off the Font Menu.
Now you can look for that fancy ‘d’, the ‘y’ with the big flourish, or just find the copyright symbol (hint: it’s option + g).
