Journal tags: type

I really like the newly-launched website for this year’s XOXO festival. I like that the design is pretty much the same for really small screens, really large screens, and everything in between because everything just scales. It’s simultaneously a flyer, a poster, and a billboard.

Trys has written about the websites he’s noticed using fluid type and spacing: There it is again, that fluid feeling.

I know what he means. I get a similar feeling when I’m on a site that adjusts fluidly to any browser window—it feels very …webby.

I’ve had this feeling before.

When responsive design was on the rise, it was a real treat to come across a responsive site. After a while, it stopped being remarkable. Now if I come across a site that isn’t responsive, it feels broken.

And now it’s a treat to come across a site that uses fluid type. But how long will it be until it feels unremarkable? How will it be until a website that doesn’t use fluid type feels broken?

There’s a lovely CSS property called hanging-punctuation. You can use it to do exactly what the name suggests and exdent punctuation marks such as opening quotes.

Here’s one way to apply it:

html {
  hanging-punctuation: first last;
}

Any punctuation marks at the beginning or end of a line will now hang over the edge, leaving you with nice clean blocks of text; no ragged edges.

Right now it’s only supported in Safari but there’s no reason not to use it. It’s a perfect example of progressive enhancement. One line of CSS to tidy things up for the browsers that support it and leave things exactly as they are for the browsers that don’t.

But when I used this over on The Session I noticed an unintended side-effect. Because I’m applying the property globally, it’s also acting on form fields. If the text inside a form field starts with a quotation mark or some other piece of punctuation, it’s shunted off to the side and hidden.

Here’s the fix I used:

input, textarea {
  hanging-punctuation: none;
}

It’s a small little gotcha but I figured I’d share it in case it helps someone else out.

I’ve written quite a bit about how I’d like to see a declarative version of the Web Share API. My current proposal involves extending the type attribute on the button element to support a value of “share”.

Well, maybe a different attribute will end up accomplishing what I want! Check out the explainer for the “invokers” proposal over on Open UI. The idea is to extend the button element with a few more attributes.

The initial work revolves around declaratively opening and closing a dialog, which is an excellent use case and definitely where the effort should be focused to begin with.

But there’s also investigation underway into how this could be away to provide a declarative way of invoking JavaScript APIs. The initial proposal is already discussing the fullscreen API, and how it might be invoked like this:

button invoketarget="toggleFullsceen"

They’re also looking into a copy-to-clipboard action. It’s not much of a stretch to go from that to:

button invoketarget="share"

Remember, these are APIs that require a user interaction anyway so extending the button element makes a lot of sense.

I’ll be watching this proposal keenly. I’d love to see some of these JavaScript cowpaths paved with a nice smooth coating of declarative goodness.

We do quite a bit of prototyping at Clearleft. There’s no better way to reduce risk than to get something in front of users as quickly as possible to test whether you’re on the right track or not.

As Benjamin said in the podcast episode on prototyping:

It’s something to look at, something to prod. And ideally you’re trying to work out what works and what doesn’t.

Sometimes the prototype is mocked up in Figma. Preferably it’s built in code—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Having a prototype built in the materials of the medium helps establish a plausible suspension of disbelief during testing.

Also, as Trys said in that same podcast episode:

Prototypical code isn’t production code. It’s quick and it’s often a little bit dirty and it’s not really fit for purpose in that final deliverable. But it’s also there to be inspiring and to gather a team and show that something is possible.

I can’t reiterate that enough: prototype code isn’t production code.

I’ve written about the two different mindsets before:

So these two kinds of work require very different attitudes. For production work, quality is key. For prototyping, making something quickly is what matters.

Addy recently wrote an excellent blog post on the topic of prototyping. The value of a prototype is in the insight it imparts, not the code.

It’s crucial to remember that in a prototype, the code serves merely as a medium—a way to facilitate understanding. It’s a means to an end, not the end itself. The code of a prototype is disposable and mutable. In contrast, the lessons learned from a prototype, the insights gained from user interaction and feedback, are far more durable and impactful.

This!

It can be tempting to re-use code from a prototype. I get it. It seems like a waste to throw away code and build something from scratch. But trust me—and I speak from experience here—it will take more time to wrangle prototype code into something that’s production-ready.

The problem is that quality is often invisible. Think about semantics, performance, security, privacy, and accessibility. Those matter—for production code—but they’re under the surface. For someone who doesn’t understand the importance of those hidden qualities a prototype that looks like it works seems ready to ship. It’s understandable that they’d balk at the idea of just throwing that code away and writing new code. Sometimes the suspension of disbelief that a prototype is aiming for works too well.

As is so often the case, this isn’t a technical problem. It’s a communication issue.

I’ve been banging the drum for a button type="share" for a while now.

I’ve also written about other potential button types. The pattern I noticed was that, if a JavaScript API first requires a user interaction—like the Web Share API—then that’s a good hint that a declarative option would be useful:

The Fullscreen API has the same restriction. You can’t make the browser go fullscreen unless you’re responding to user gesture, like a click. So why not have button type=”fullscreen” in HTML to encapsulate that? And again, the fallback in non-supporting browsers is predictable—it behaves like a regular button—so this is trivial to polyfill.

There’s another “smell” that points to some potential button types: what functionality do browsers provide in their interfaces?

Some browsers provide a print button. So how about button type="print"? The functionality is currently doable with button onclick="window.print()" so this would be a nicer, more declarative way of doing something that’s already possible.

It’s the same with back buttons, forward buttons, and refresh buttons. The functionality is available through a browser interface, and it’s also scriptable, so why not have a declarative equivalent?

How about bookmarking?

And remember, the browser interface isn’t always visible: progressive web apps that launch with minimal browser UI need to provide this functionality.

Šime Vidas was wondering about button type="copy” for copying to clipboard. Again, it’s something that’s currently scriptable and requires a user gesture. It’s a little more complex than the other actions because there needs to be some way of providing the text to be copied, but it’s definitely a valid use case.

• button type="share"
• button type="fullscreen"
• button type="print"
• button type="bookmark"
• button type="back"
• button type="forward"
• button type="refresh"
• button type="copy"

Any more?

Gerry talks about “top tasks” a lot. He literally wrote the book on it:

Top tasks are what matter most to your customers.

Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s actually pretty rare to see top tasks presented any differently than other options.

Look at the global navigation on most websites. Typically all the options are given equal prominence. Even the semantics under the hood often reflect this egalitarian ideal, with each list in an unordered list. All the navigation options are equal, but I bet that the reality for most websites is that some navigation options are more equal than others.

I’ve been guilty of this on The Session. The site-wide navigation shows a number of options: tunes, events, discussions, etc. Each one is given equal prominence, but I can tell you without even looking at my server logs that 90% of the traffic goes to the tunes section—that’s the beating heart of The Session. That’s why the home page has a search form that defaults to searching for tunes.

I wanted the navigation to reflect the reality of what people are coming to the site for. I decided to make the link to the tunes section more prominent by bumping up the font size a bit.

I was worried about how weird this might look; we’re so used to seeing all navigation items presented equally. But I think it worked out okay (though it might take a bit of getting used to if you’re accustomed to the previous styling). It helps that “tunes” is a nice short word, so bumping up the font size on that word doesn’t jostle everything else around.

I think this adjustment is working well for this situation where there’s one very clear tippy-top task. I wouldn’t want to apply it across the board, making every item in the navigation proportionally bigger or smaller depending on how often it’s used. That would end up looking like a ransom note.

But giving one single item prominence like this tweaks the visual hierarchy just enough to favour the option that’s most likely to be what a visitor wants.

That last bit is crucial. The visual adjustment reflects what visitors want, not what I want. You could adjust the size of a navigation option that you want to drive traffic to, but in the long run, all you’re going to do is train people to trust your design less.

You don’t get to decide what your top task is. The visitors to your website do. Trying to foist an arbitrary option on them would be the tail wagging the dog.

Anway, I’m feeling a lot better about the site-wide navigation on The Session now that it reflects reality a little bit more. Heck, I may even bump that font size up a little more.

I feel like it’s high time I revived some interest in my proposal for button type="share". Last I left it, I was gathering use cases and they seem to suggest that the most common use case for the Web Share API is sharing the URL of the current page.

If you want to catch up on the history of this proposal, here’s what I’ve previously written:

• A declarative Web Share API
• A polyfill for button type=”share”
• The reason for a share button type

Remember, my proposal isn’t to replace the JavaScript API, it’s to complement it with a declarative option. The declarative option doesn’t need to be as fully featured as the JavaScript API, but it should be able to cover the majority use case. I think this should hold true of most APIs.

A good example is the Constraint Validation API. For the most common use cases, the required attribute and input types like “email”, “url”, and “number” have you covered. If you need more power, reach for the JavaScript API.

A bad example is the Geolocation API. The most common use case is getting the user’s current location. But there’s no input type="geolocation" (or button type="geolocation"). Your only choice is to use JavaScript. It feels heavy-handed.

I recently got an email from Taylor Hunt who has come up with a good litmus test for JavaScript APIs that should have a complementary declarative option:

I’ve been thinking about how a lot of recently-proposed APIs end up having to deal with what Chrome devrel’s been calling the “user gesture/activation budget”, and wondering if that’s a good indicator of when something should have been HTML in the first place.

I think he’s onto something here!

Think about any API that requires a user gesture. Often the documentation or demo literally shows you how to generate a button in JavaScript in order to add an event handler to it in order to use the API. Surely that’s an indication that a new button type could be minted?

The Web Share API is a classic example. You can’t invoke the API after an event like the page loading. You have to invoke the API after a user-initiated event like, oh, I don’t know …clicking on a button!

The Fullscreen API has the same restriction. You can’t make the browser go fullscreen unless you’re responding to user gesture, like a click. So why not have button type="fullscreen" in HTML to encapsulate that? And again, the fallback in non-supporting browsers is predictable—it behaves like a regular button—so this is trivial to polyfill. I should probably whip up a polyfill to demonstrate this.

I can’t find a list of all the JavaScript APIs that require a user gesture, but I know there’s more that I’m just not thinking of. I’d love to see if they’d all fit this pattern of being candidates for a new button type value.

The only potential flaw in this thinking is that some APIs that require a user gesture might also require a secure context (either being served over HTTPS or localhost). But as far as I know, HTML has never had the concept of features being restricted by context. An element is either supported or it isn’t.

That said, there is some prior art here. If you use input type="password" in a non-secure context—like a page being served over HTTP—the browser updates the interface to provide scary warnings. Perhaps browsers could do something similar for any new button types that complement secure-context JavaScript APIs.

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is live and it’s all about prototyping.

There’s a bit of a narrative thread in there about airplanes, kicked off by a great story Benjamin tells about testing a physical prototype …of the inside of a transatlantic airliner. Lorenzo recounts his story of mocking up a fake CMS with readily-available tools. And Trys tells of a progressive web app he whipped up for our friends at Suffolk Libraries. There’s even a bit about Hack Farm in there too.

But just to make sure it isn’t too much of a Clearleft love-in, I also interviewed an outside expert: Adekunle Oduye. It was very kind of him to give up his time, especially considering he had just moved house …in a pandemic!

There are some great words of wisdom, immortalised in the transcript:

Prototypical code isn’t production code. It’s quick and it’s often a little bit dirty and it’s not really fit for purpose in that final deliverable. But it’s also there to be inspiring and to gather a team and show that something is possible.

—Trys

If you’re building something and you’re not really sure if it’s a right solution, use the word prototype versus design, because I feel like when people say design, that’s like the end result.

—Adekunle

I always think of a prototype as a prop. It’s something to look at, something to prod. And ideally you’re trying to work out what works and what doesn’t.

— Benjamin

The whole episode is just over 21 minutes long. Have a listen and enjoy the stories.

If you like what you hear, please spread the word. Tell your Slack colleagues, your Twitter friends, your LinkedIn acquaintances. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can remedy that on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and anywhere that accepts RSS.

I’ve been like a dog with a bone the way I’ve been pushing for a declarative option for the Web Share API in the shape of button type=“share”. It’s been an interesting window into the world of web standards.

The story so far…

• I blogged some half-formed thoughts.
• Then I opened an issue on the spec for the Web Share API.
• Meanwhile I wrote a polyfill, releasing the code and a test.
• I responded to pushback I was getting on the issue I filed.
• I also wrote up an explainer document so everything is gathered in one place.
• Finally I started soliciting feedback from people using the Web Share API in order to gather data.

That’s the situation currently. The general consensus seems to be that it’s probably too soon to be talking about implementation at this stage—the Web Share API itself is still pretty new—but gathering data to inform future work is good.

In planning for the next TPAC meeting (the big web standards gathering), Marcos summarised the situation like this:

Not blocking: but a proposal was made by @adactio to come up with a declarative solution, but at least two implementers have said that now is not the appropriate time to add such a thing to the spec (we need more implementation experience + and also to see how devs use the API) - but it would be great to see a proposal incubated at the WICG.

Now this where things can get a little confusing because it used to be that if you wanted to incubate a proposal, you’d have to do on Discourse, which is a steaming pile of crap that requires JavaScript in order to put text on a screen. But Šime pointed out that proposals can now be submitted on Github.

So that’s where I’ve submitted my proposal, linking through to the explainer document.

Like I said, I’m not expecting anything to happen anytime soon, but it would be really good to gather as much data as possible around existing usage of the Web Share API. If you’re using it, or you know anyone who’s using it, please, please, please take a moment to provide a quick description. And if you could help spread the word to get that issue in front of as many devs as possible, I’d be very grateful.

(Many thanks to everyone who’s already contributed to that issue—much appreciated!)

If you’re at all interested in what I wrote about a declarative Web Share API—and its sequel, a polyfill for button type=”share”—then you might be interested in an explainer document I’ve put together.

It’s a useful exercise for me to enumerate the reasoning for button type=“share” in one place. If you have any feedback, feel free to fork it or create an issue.

The document is based on my initial blog posts and the discussion that followed in this issue on the repo for the Web Share API. In that thread I got some pushback from Marcos. There are three points he makes. I think that two of them lack merit, but the third one is actually spot on.

Here’s the first bit of pushback:

Apart from placing a button in the content, I’m not sure what the proposal offers over what (at least one) browser already provides? For instance, Safari UI already provides a share button by default on every page

But that is addressed in the explainer document for the Web Share API itself:

The browser UI may not always be available, e.g., when a web app has been installed as a standalone/fullscreen app.

That’s exactly what I wanted to address. Browser UI is not always available and as progressive web apps become more popular, authors will need to provide a way for users to share the current URL—something that previously was handled by browsers.

That use-case of sharing the current page leads nicely into the second bit of pushback:

The API is specialized… using it to share the same page is kinda pointless.

But again, the explainer document for the Web Share API directly contradicts this:

Sharing the page’s own URL (a very common case)…

Rather than being a difference of opinion, this is something that could be resolved with data. I’d really like to find out how people are currently using the Web Share API. How much of the current usage falls into the category of “share the current page”? I don’t know the best way to gather this data though. If you have any ideas, let me know. I’ve started an issue where you can share how you’re using the Web Share API. Or if you’re not using the Web Share API, but you know someone who is, please let them know.

Okay, so those first two bits of pushback directly contradict what’s in the explainer document for the Web Share API. The third bit of pushback is more philosophical and, I think, more interesting.

The Web Share API explainer document does a good job of explaining why a declarative solution is desirable:

The link can be placed declaratively on the page, with no need for a JavaScript click event handler.

That’s also my justification for having a declarative alternative: it would be easier for more people to use. I said:

At a fundamental level, declarative technologies have a lower barrier to entry than imperative technologies.

But Marcos wrote:

That’s demonstrably false and a common misconception: See OWL, XForms, SVG, or any XML+namespace spec. Even HTML is poorly understood, but it just happens to have extremely robust error recovery (giving the illusion of it being easy). However, that’s not a function of it being “declarative”.

He’s absolutely right.

It’s not so much that I want a declarative option—I want an option that has robust error recovery. After all, XML is a declarative language but its error handling is as strict as an imperative language like JavaScript: make one syntactical error and nothing works. XML has a brittle error-handling model by design. HTML and CSS have extremely robust error recovery by design. It’s that error-handling model that gives HTML and CSS their robustness.

I’ve been using the word “declarative” when I actually meant “robust in handling errors”.

I guess that when I’ve been talking about “a declarative solution”, I’ve been thinking in terms of the three languages parsed by browsers: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Two of those languages are declarative, and those two also happen to have much more forgiving error-handling than the third language. That’s the important part—the error handling—not the fact that they’re declarative.

I’ve been using “declarative” as a shorthand for “either HTML or CSS”, but really I should try to be more precise in my language. The word “declarative” covers a wide range of possible languages, and not all of them lower the barrier to entry. A declarative language with a brittle error-handling model is as daunting as an imperative language.

I should try to use a more descriptive word than “declarative” when I’m describing HTML or CSS. Resilient? Robust?

With that in mind, button type=“share” is worth pursuing. Yes, it’s a declarative option for using the Web Share API, but more important, it’s a robust option for using the Web Share API.

I invite you to read the explainer document for a share button type and I welcome your feedback …especially if you’re currently using the Web Share API!

If you’re using web fonts, there are good performance (and privacy) reasons for hosting your own font files. And fortunately, Google Fonts gives you that option. There’s a “Download family” button on every specimen page.

But if you go ahead and download a font family from Google Fonts, you’ll notice something a bit odd. The .zip file only contains .ttf files. You can serve those on the web, but it’s far from the best choice. Woff2 is far leaner in file size.

This means you need to manually convert the downloaded .ttf files into .woff or .woff2 files using something like Font Squirrel’s generator. That’s fine, but I’m curious as to why this step is necessary. Why doesn’t Google Fonts provide .woff or .woff2 files in the downloaded folder? After all, if you choose to use Google Fonts as a third-party hosting service for your fonts, it most definitely serves up the appropriate file formats.

I thought maybe it was something to do with the licensing. Maybe some licenses only allow for unmodified truetype files to be distributed? But I’ve looked at fonts with different licenses—some have Apache 2 licensing, some have Open Font licensing—and they’re all quite permissive and definitely allow for modification.

Maybe the thinking is that, if you’re hosting your own font files, then you know what you’re doing and you should be able to do your own file conversion and subsetting. But I’ve come across more than one website in the wild serving up .ttf files. And who can blame them? They want to host their own font files. They downloaded those files from Google Fonts. Why shouldn’t they assume that they’re good to go?

It’s all a bit strange. If anyone knows why Google Fonts only provides .ttf files for download, please let me know. In a pinch, I will also accept rampant speculation.

Trys also pointed out some weird default behaviour if you do let Google Fonts do the hosting for you. Specifically if it’s a variable font. Let’s say it’s a font with weight as a variable axis. You specify in advance which weights you’ll be using, and then it generates separate font files to serve for each different weight.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of using a variable font? I mean, I can see how it could result in smaller file sizes if you’re just using one or two weights, but isn’t half the fun of having a weight axis that you can go crazy with as many weights as you want and it’s all still one font file?

Like I said, it’s all very strange.

After writing about a declarative Web Share API here yesterday I thought I’d better share the idea (see what I did there?).

I opened an issue on the Github repo for the spec.

(I hope that’s the right place for this proposal. I know that in the past ideas were kicked around on the Discourse site for Web platform Incubator Community Group but I can’t stand Discourse. It literally requires JavaScript to render anything to the screen even though the entire content is text. If it turns out that that is the place I should’ve posted, I guess I’ll hold my nose and do it using the most over-engineered reinvention of the browser I’ve ever seen. But I believe that the plan is for WICG to migrate proposals to Github anyway.)

I also realised that, as the JavaScript Web Share API already exists, I can use it to polyfill my suggestion for:

<button type="share">

The polyfill also demonstrates how feature detection could work. Here’s the code.

This polyfill takes an Inception approach to feature detection. There are three nested levels:

1. This browser supports button type="share". Great! Don’t do anything. Otherwise proceed to level two.
2. This browser supports the JavaScript Web Share API. Use that API to share the current page URL and title. Otherwise proceed to level three.
3. Use a mailto: link to prefill an email with the page title as the subject and the URL in the body. Ya basic!

The idea is that, as long as you include the 20 lines of polyfill code, you could start using button type="share" in your pages today.

I’ve made a test page on Codepen. I’m just using plain text in the button but you could use a nice image or SVG or combination. You can use the Codepen test page to observe two of the three possible behaviours browsers could exhibit:

1. A browser supports button type="share". Currently that’s none because I literally made this shit up yesterday.
2. A browser supports the JavaScript Web Share API. This is Safari on Mac, Edge on Windows, Safari on iOS, and Chrome, Samsung Internet, and Firefox on Android.
3. A browser supports neither button type="share" nor the existing JavaScript Web Share API. This is Firefox and Chrome on desktop (and Edge if you’re on a Mac).

See the Pen Polyfill for button type=”share" by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.

The polyfill doesn’t support Internet Explorer 11 or lower because it uses the DOM closest() method. Feel free to fork and rewrite if you need to support old IE.

I’ve written about the Web Share API before. It’s a handy little bit of JavaScript that—if supported—brings up a system-level way of sharing a page. Seeing as it probably won’t be long before we won’t be able to see full URLs in browsers anymore, it’s going to fall on us as site owners to provide this kind of fundamental access.

Right now the Web Share API exists entirely in JavaScript. There are quite a few browser APIs like that, and it always feels like a bit of a shame to me. Ideally there should be a JavaScript API and a declarative option, even if the declarative option isn’t as powerful.

Take form validation. To cover the most common use cases, you probably only need to use declarative markup like input type="email" or the required attribute. But if your use case gets a bit more complicated, you can reach for the Constraint Validation API in JavaScript.

I like that pattern. I wish it were an option for JavaScript-only APIs. Take the Geolocation API, for example. Right now it’s only available through JavaScript. But what if there were an input type="geolocation" ? It wouldn’t cover all use cases, but it wouldn’t have to. For the simple case of getting someone’s location (like getting someone’s email or telephone number), it would do. For anything more complex than that, that’s what the JavaScript API is for.

I was reminded of this recently when Ada Rose Cannon tweeted:

It really feels like there should be a semantic version of the share API, like a mailto: link

I think she’s absolutely right. The Web Share API has one primary use case: let the user share the current page. If that use case could be met in a declarative way, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. And for anyone who needs to do something more complicated, that’s what the JavaScript API is for.

But Pete LePage asked:

How would you feature detect for it?

Good question. With the JavaScript API you can do feature detection—if the API isn’t supported you can either bail or provide your own implementation.

There a few different ways of extending HTML that allow you to provide a fallback for non-supporting browsers.

You could mint a new element with a content model that says “Browsers, if you do support this element, ignore everything inside the opening and closing tags.” That’s the way that the canvas element works. It’s the same for audio and video—they ignore everything inside them that isn’t a source element. So developers can provide a fallback within the opening and closing tags.

But forging a new element would be overkill for something like the Web Share API (or Geolocation). There are more subtle ways of extending HTML that I’ve already alluded to.

Making a new element is a lot of work. Making a new attribute could also be a lot of work. But making a new attribute value might hit the sweet spot. That’s why I suggested something like input type="geolocation" for the declarative version of the Geolocation API. There’s prior art here; this is how we got input types for email, url, tel, color, date, etc. The key piece of behaviour is that non-supporting browsers will treat any value they don’t understand as “text”.

I don’t think there should be input type="share". The action of sharing isn’t an input. But I do think we could find an existing HTML element with an attribute that currently accepts a list of possible values. Adding one more value to that list feels like an inexpensive move.

Here’s what I suggested:

<button type=”share” value=”title,text”>

For non-supporting browsers, it’s a regular button and needs polyfilling, no different to the situation with the JavaScript API. But if supported, no JS needed?

The type attribute of the button element currently accepts three possible values: “submit”, “reset”, or “button”. If you give it any other value, it will behave as though you gave it a type of “submit” or “button” (depending on whether it’s in a form or not) …just like an unknown type value on an input element will behave like “text”.

If a browser supports button type="share”, then when the user clicks on it, the browser can go “Right, I’m handing over to the operating system now.”

There’s still the question of how to pass data to the operating system on what gets shared. Currently the JavaScript API allows you to share any combination of URL, text, and description.

Initially I was thinking that the value attribute could be used to store this data in some kind of key/value pairing, but the more I think about it, the more I think that this aspect should remain the exclusive domain of the JavaScript API. The declarative version could grab the current URL and the value of the page’s title element and pass those along to the operating system. If you need anything more complex than that, use the JavaScript API.

So what I’m proposing is:

<button type="share">

That’s it.

But how would you test for browser support? The same way as you can currently test for supported input types. Make use of the fact that an element’s attribute value and an element’s property value (which 99% of the time are the same), will be different if the attribute value isn’t supported:

var testButton = document.createElement("button");
testButton.setAttribute("type","share");
if (testButton.type != "share") {
// polyfill
}

So that’s my modest proposal. Extend the list of possible values for the type attribute on the button element to include “share” (or something like that). In supporting browsers, it triggers a very bare-bones handover to the OS (the current URL and the current page title). In non-supporting browsers, it behaves like a button currently behaves.

Trys and James recently unveiled their Utopia project. They’ve been tinkering away at it behind the scenes for quite a while now.

You can check out the website and read the blog to get the details of how it accomplishes its goal:

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

I may well be biased, but I really like this project. I’ve been asking myself why I find it so appealing. Here are a few of the attributes of Utopia that strike a chord with me…

It’s collaborative

Collaboration is at the heart of Clearleft’s work. I know everyone says that, but we’ve definitely seen a direct correlation: projects with high levels of collaboration are invariably more successful than projects where people are siloed.

The genesis for Utopia came about after Trys and James worked together on a few different projects. It’s all too easy to let design and development splinter off into their own caves, but on these projects, Trys and James were working (literally) side by side. This meant that they could easily articulate frustrations to one another, and more important, they could easily share their excitement.

The end result of their collaboration is some very clever code. There’s an irony here. This code could be used to discourage collaboration! After all, why would designers and developers sit down together if they can just pass these numbers back and forth?

But I don’t think that Utopia will appeal to designers and developers who work in that way. Born in the spirit of collaboration, I suspect that it will mostly benefit people who value collaboration.

It’s intrinsic

If you’re a control freak, you may not like Utopia. The idea is that you specify the boundaries of what you’re trying to accomplish—minimum/maximum font sizes, minumum/maximum screen sizes, and some modular scales. Then you let the code—and the browser—do all the work.

On the one hand, this feels like surrending control. But on the other hand, because the underlying system is so robust, it’s a way of guaranteeing quality, even in situations you haven’t accounted for.

If someone asks you, “What size will the body copy be when the viewport is 850 pixels wide?”, your answer would have to be “I don’t know …but I do know that it will be appropriate.”

This feels like a very declarative way of designing. It reminds me of the ethos behind Andy and Heydon’s site, Every Layout. They call it algorithmic layout design:

Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with @media breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Your future design systems will be more consistent, terser in code, and more malleable in the hands of your users and their devices.

See how breakpoints are mentioned as being a very top-down approach to layout? Remember the tagline for Utopia, which aims for fluid responsive design?

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

Unsurprisingly, Andy really likes Utopia:

As the co-author of Every Layout, my head nearly fell off from all of the nodding when reading this because this is the exact sort of approach that we preach: setting some rules and letting the browser do the rest.

Heydon describes this mindset as automating intent. I really like that. I think that’s what Utopia does too.

As Heydon said at Patterns Day:

Be your browser’s mentor, not its micromanager.

The idea is that you give it rules, you give it axioms or principles to work on, and you let it do the calculation. You work with the in-built algorithms of the browser and of CSS itself.

This is all possible thanks to improvements to CSS like calc, flexbox and grid. Jen calls this approach intrinsic web design. Last year, I liveblogged her excellent talk at An Event Apart called Designing Intrinsic Layouts.

Utopia feels like it has the same mindset as algorithmic layout design and intrinsic web design. Trys and James are building on the great work already out there, which brings me to the final property of Utopia that appeals to me…

It’s iterative

There isn’t actually much that’s new in Utopia. It’s a combination of existing techniques. I like that. As I said recently:

I’m a great believer in the HTML design principle, Evolution Not Revolution:

It is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away.

First of all, Utopia uses the idea of modular scales in typography. Tim Brown has been championing this idea for years.

Then there’s the idea of typography being fluid and responsive—just like Jason Pamental has been speaking and writing about.

On the code side, Utopia wouldn’t be possible without the work of Mike Reithmuller and his breakthroughs on responsive and fluid typography, which led to Tim’s work on CSS locks.

Utopia takes these building blocks and combines them. So if you’re wondering if it would be a good tool for one of your projects, you can take an equally iterative approach by asking some questions…

Are you using fluid type?

Do your font-sizes increase in proportion to the width of the viewport? I don’t mean in sudden jumps with @media breakpoints—I mean some kind of relationship between font size and the vw (viewport width) unit. If so, you’re probably using some kind of mechanism to cap the minimum and maximum font sizes—CSS locks.

I’m using that technique on Resilient Web Design. But I’m not changing the relative difference between different sized elements—body copy, headings, etc.—as the screen size changes.

Are you using modular scales?

Does your type system have some kind of ratio that describes the increase in type sizes? You probably have more than one ratio (unlike Resilient Web Design). The ratio for small screens should probably be smaller than the ratio for big screens. But rather than jump from one ratio to another at an arbitrary breakpoint, Utopia allows the ratio to be fluid.

So it’s not just that font sizes are increasing as the screen gets larger; the comparative difference is also subtly changing. That means there’s never a sudden jump in font size at any time.

Are you using custom properties?

A technical detail this, but the magic of Utopia relies on two powerful CSS features: calc() and custom properties. These two workhorses are used by Utopia to generate some CSS that you can stick at the start of your stylesheet. If you ever need to make changes, all the parameters are defined at the top of the code block. Tweak those numbers and watch everything cascade.

You’ll see that there’s one—and only one—media query in there. This is quite clever. Usually with CSS locks, you’d need to have a media query for every different font size in order to cap its growth at the maximum screen size. With Utopia, the maximum screen size—100vw—is abstracted into a variable (a custom property). The media query then changes its value to be the upper end of your CSS lock. So it doesn’t matter how many different font sizes you’re setting: because they all use that custom property, one single media query takes care of capping the growth of every font size declaration.

If you’re already using CSS locks, modular scales, and custom properties, Utopia is almost certainly going to be a good fit for you.

If you’re not yet using those techniques, but you’d like to, I highly recommend using Utopia on your next project.

I’m at An Event Apart in Seattle, ready for three days of excellence. Setting the scene with the first talk of the event is the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman. His talk is called Slow Design for an Anxious World:

Most web pages are too fast or too slow. Last year, Zeldman showed us how to create design that works faster for customers in a hurry to get things done. This year he’ll show how to create designs that deliberately slow your visitors down, helping them understand more and make better decisions.

Learn to make layouts that coax the visitor to sit back, relax, and actually absorb the content your team works so hard to create. Improve UX significantly without spending a lot or chasing the tail lights of the latest whiz-bang tech. Whether you build interactive experiences or craft editorial pages, you’ll learn how to ease your customers into the experience and build the kind of engagement you thought the web had lost forever.

I’m going to attempt to jot down the gist of it as it happens…

Jeffrey begins by saying that he’s going to slooooowly ease us into the day. Slow isn’t something that our industry prizes. Things change fast on the internet. “You’re using last year’s framework!?” Ours is a newly-emerging set of practices.

Slow is negative in our culture too. We don’t like slow movies, or slow books. But somethings are better slow. Wine that takes time to make is better than wine that you produce in a prison toilet in five days. Slow-brewed coffee is well-brewed coffee. Slow dancing is nice. A slow courtship is nice. And reading slowly is something enjoyable. Sometimes you need to scan information quickly, but when we really immerse ourselves in a favourite book, we really comprehend better. Hold that thought. We’re going to come to books.

Fast is generally what we’re designing for. It’s the best kind of design for customer service designs—for people who want to accomplish something and then get on with their lives. Fast is good for customer service designs. Last year Jeffrey gave a talk last year called Beyond Engagement where he said that service-oriented content must be designed for speed of relevancy. Speed of loading is important, and so is speed of relevancy—how quickly can you give people the right content.

But slow is best for comprehension. Like Mr. Rogers. When things are a little bit slower, it’s kind of easier to understand. When you’re designing for readers, s l o w i t d o w n.

How do we slow down readers? That’s what this talk is about (he told us it would be slow—he only just got to what the point of this talk is).

Let’s start with a form factor. The book. A book is a hack where the author’s brain is transmitting a signal to the reader’s brain, and the designer of the book is making that possible. Readability is more than legibility. Readability transcends legibility, enticing people to slow down and read.

This is about absorption, not conversion. We have the luxury of doing something different here. It’s a challenge.

Remember Readability? It was designed by Arc90. They mostly made software applications for arcane enterprise systems, and that stuff tends not to be public. It’s hard for an agency to get new clients when it can’t show what it does. So they decided to make some stuff that’s just for the public. Arc90 Labs was spun up to make free software for everyone.

Readability was like Instapaper. Instapaper was made by Marco Arment so that he could articles when he was commuting on the subway. Readability aimed to do that, but to also make the content like beautiful. It’s kind of like how reader mode in Safari strips away superfluous content and formats what’s left into something more readable. Safari’s reader mode was not invented by Apple. It was based on the code from Readability. The mercury reader plug-in for Chrome also uses Readability’s code. Jeffrey went around pointing out to companies that the very existence of things like Readability was a warning—we’re making experiences so bad that people are using software to work around them. What we can do so that people don’t have to use these tools?

Craig Mod wrote an article for A List Apart called A Simpler Page back in 2011. With tablets and phones, there isn’t one canonical presentation of content online any more. Our content is sort of amorphous. Craig talked about books and newspapers on tablets. He talked about bed, knee, and breakfast distances from the body to the content.

1. Bed (close to face): reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow.
2. Knee (medium distance from face): sitting on the couch, iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper.
3. Breakfast (far from face): propped up at a comfortable angle, behind your breakfast coffee and bagel, allowing hands-free news reading.

There’s some correlation between distance and relaxation. That knee position is crucial. That’s when the reader contemplates with pleasure and concentration. They’re giving themselves the luxury of contemplation. It’s a very different feeling to getting up and going over to a computer.

So Jeffrey redesigned his own site with big, big type, and just one central column of text. He stripped away the kind of stuff that Readability and Instapaper would strip away. He gave people a reader layout. You would have to sit back to read the content. He knew he succeeded because people started complaining: “Your type is huge!” “I have to lean back just to read it!” Then he redesigned A List Apart with Mike Pick. This was subtler.

Medium came along with the same focus: big type in a single column. Then the New York Times did it, when they changed their business model to a subscription paywall. They could remove quite a bit of the superfluous content. Then the Washington Post did it, more on their tablet design than their website. The New Yorker—a very old-school magazine—also went down this route, and they’re slow to change. Big type. White space. Bold art direction. Pro Publica is a wonderful non-profit newspaper that also went this route. They stepped it up by adding one more element: art direction on big pieces.

How do these sites achieve their effect of slowing you down and calming you?

Big type. We spend a lot of our time hunched forward. Big type forces you to sit back. It’s like that first moment in a yoga workshop where you’ve got to just relax before doing anything. With big type, you can sit back, take a breathe, and relax.

Hierarchy. This is classic graphic design. Clear relationships.

Minimalism. Not like Talking Heads minimalism, but the kind of minimalism where you remove every extraneous detail. Like what Mies van der Rohe did for architecture, where just the proportions—the minimalism—is the beauty. Or like what Hemingway did with writing—scratch out everything but the nouns and verbs. Kill your darlings.

Art direction. When you have a fancy story, give it some fancy art direction. Pro Publica understand that people won’t get confused about what site they’re on—they’ll understand that this particular story is special.

Whitespace. Mark Boulton wrote an article about whitespace in A List Apart. He talked about two kinds of whitespace: macro and micro. Macro is what we usually think about when we talk about whitespace. Whitespace conveys feelings of extreme luxury, and luxury brands know this. Whitespace makes us feels special. Macro whitespace can be snotty. But there’s also micro whitespace. That’s the space between lines of type, and the space inside letterforms. There’s more openness and air, even if the macro whitespace hasn’t changed.

Jeffrey has put a bunch of these things together into an example.

To recap, there are five points:

1. Big type
2. Hierarchy
3. Minimalism
4. Art direction
5. Whitespace

There are two more things that Jeffrey wants to mention before his done. If you want people to pay attention to your design, it must be branded and it must be authoritative.

Branded. When all sites look the same, all content appears equal. Jeffrey calls this the Facebook effect. Whether it’s a noble-prize-winning author, or your uncle ranting, everthing gets the same treatment on Facebook. If you’re taking the time to post content to the web, take the time to let people know who’s talking.

Authoritative. When something looks authoritative, it cues the reader to your authenticity and integrity. Notice how every Oscar-worthy movie uses Trajan on its poster. That’s a typeface based on a Roman column. Strong, indelible letter forms carved in stone. We have absorbed those letterforms into our collective unconcious. Hollywood tap into this by using Trajan for movie titles.

Jeffrey wrote an article called To Save Real News about some of these ideas.

And with that, Jeffrey thanks us and finishes up.

Variable fonts are a very exciting and powerful new addition to the toolbox of web design. They was very much at the centre of discussion at this year’s Ampersand conference.

A lot of the demonstrations of the power of variable fonts are showing how it can be used to make letter-by-letter adjustments. The Ampersand website itself does this with the logo. See also: the brilliant demos by Mandy. It’s getting to the point where logotypes can be sculpted and adjusted just-so using CSS and raw text—no images required.

I find this to be thrilling, but there’s a fly in the ointment. In order to style something in CSS, you need a selector to target it. If you’re going to style individual letters, you need to wrap each one in an HTML element so that you can then select it in CSS.

For the Ampersand logo, we had to wrap each letter in a span (and then, becuase that might cause each letter to be read out individually instead of all of them as a single word, we applied some ARIA shenanigans to the containing element). There’s even a JavaScript library—Splitting.js—that will do this for you.

But if the whole point of using HTML is that the content is accessible, copyable, and pastable, isn’t a bit of a shame that we then compromise the markup—and the accessibility—by wrapping individual letters in presentational tags?

What if there were an ::nth-letter selector in CSS?

There’s some prior art here. We’ve already got ::first-letter (and now the initial-letter property or whatever it ends up being called). If we can target the first letter in a piece of text, why not the second, or third, or nth?

It raises some questions. What constitutes a letter? Would it be better if we talked about ::first-character, ::initial-character, ::nth-character, and so on?

Even then, there are some tricksy things to figure out. What’s the third character in this piece of markup?

<p>AB<span>CD</span>EF</p>

Is it “C”, becuase that’s the third character regardless of nesting? Or is it “E”, becuase techically that’s the third character token that’s a direct child of the parent element?

I imagine that implementing ::nth-letter (or ::nth-character) would be quite complex so there would probably be very little appetite for it from browser makers. But it doesn’t seem as problematic as some selectors we’ve already got.

Take ::first-line, for example. That violates one of the biggest issues in adding new CSS selectors: it’s a selector that depends on layout.

Think about it. The browser has to first calculate how many characters are in the first line of an element (like, say, a paragraph). Having figured that out, the browser can then apply the styles declared in the ::first-line selector. But those styles may involve font sizing updates that changes the number of characters in the first line. Paradox!

(Technically, only a subset of CSS of properties can be applied to ::first-line, but that subset includes font-size so the paradox remains.)

I checked to see if ::first-line was included in one of my favourite documents: Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It isn’t.

So compared to the logic-bending paradoxes of ::first-line, an ::nth-letter selector would be relatively straightforward. But that in itself isn’t a good enough reason for it to exist. As the CSS Working Group FAQs say:

The fact that we’ve made one mistake isn’t an argument for repeating the mistake.

A new selector needs to solve specific use cases. I would argue that all the letter-by-letter uses of variable fonts that we’re seeing demonstrate the use cases, and the number of these examples is only going to increase. The very fact that JavaScript libraries exist to solve this problem shows that there’s a need here (and we’ve seen the pattern of common JavaScript use-cases ending up in CSS before—rollovers, animation, etc.).

Now, I know that browser makers would like us to figure out how proposed CSS features should work by polyfilling a solution with Houdini. But would that work for a selector? I don’t know much about Houdini so I asked Una. She pointed me to a proposal by Greg and Tab for a full-on parser in Houdini. But that’s a loooong way off. Until then, we must petition our case to the browser gods.

This is not a new suggestion.

Anne Van Kesteren proposed ::nth-letter way back in 2003:

While I’m talking about CSS, I would also like to have ::nth-line(n), ::nth-letter(n) and ::nth-word(n), any thoughts?

Trent called for ::nth-letter in January 2011:

I think this would be the ideal solution from a web designer’s perspective. No javascript would be required, and 100% of the styling would be handled right where it should be—in the CSS.

Chris repeated the call in October of 2011:

Of all of these “new” selectors, ::nth-letter is likely the most useful.

In 2012, Bram linked to a blog post (now unavailable) from Adobe indicating that they were working on ::nth-letter for Webkit. That was the last anyone’s seen of this elusive pseudo-element.

In 2013, Chris (again) included ::nth-letter in his wishlist for CSS. So say we all.

Over on A List Apart, you can read the first chapter from Tim’s new book, Flexible Typesetting.

I was lucky enough to get an advance preview copy and this book is ticking all my boxes. I mean, I knew I would love all the type nerdery in the book, but there’s a bigger picture too. In chapter two, Tim makes this provacative statement:

Typography is now optional. That means it’s okay for people to opt out.

That’s an uncomfortable truth for designers and developers, but it gets to the heart of what makes the web so great:

Of course typography is valuable. Typography may now be optional, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Typographic choices contribute to a text’s meaning. But on the web, text itself (including its structural markup) matters most, and presentational instructions like typography take a back seat. Text loads first; typography comes later. Readers are free to ignore typographic suggestions, and often prefer to. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, and Safari’s Reader View are popular partly because readers like their text the way they like it.

What Tim describes there isn’t a cause for frustration or despair—it’s a cause for celebration. When we try to treat the web as a fixed medium where we can dictate the terms that people must abide by, we’re doing them (and the web) a disservice. Instead of treating web design as a pre-made contract drawn up by the designer and presented to the user as a fait accompli, it is more materially honest to treat web design as a conversation between designer and user. Both parties should have a say.

Or as Tim so perfectly puts it in Flexible Typesetting:

Readers are typographers, too.

We have a tradition here at Clearleft of having the occasional lunchtime braindump. They’re somewhat sporadic, but it’s always a good day when there’s a “brown bag” gathering.

When Google’s AMP format came out and I had done some investigating, I led a brown bag playback on that. Recently Mark did one on Fractal so that everyone knew how work on that was progressing.

Today Richard gave us a quick brown bag talk on variable web fonts. He talked us through how these will work on the web and in operating systems. We got a good explanation of how these fonts would get designed—the type designer designs the “extreme” edges of size, weight, or whatever, and then the file format itself can extrapolate all the in-between stages. So, in theory, one single font file can hold hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of potential variations. It feels like switching from bitmap images to SVG—there’s suddenly much greater flexibility.

A variable font is a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts.

There were a couple of interesting tidbits that Rich pointed out…

While this is a new file format, there isn’t going to be a new file extension. These will be .ttf files, and so by extension, they can be .woff and .woff2 files too.

This isn’t some proposed theoretical standard: an unprecedented amount of co-operation has gone into the creation of this format. Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all contributed. Agreement is the hardest part of any standards process. Once that’s taken care of, the technical solution follows quickly. So you can expect this to land very quickly and widely.

This technology is landing in web browsers before it lands in operating systems. It’s already available in the Safari Technology Preview. That means that for a while, the very best on-screen typography will be delivered not in eBook readers, but in web browsers. So if you want to deliver the absolute best reading experience, look to the web.

And here’s the part that I found fascinating…

We can currently use numbers for the font-weight property in CSS. Those number values increment in hundreds: 100, 200, 300, etc. Now with variable fonts, we can start using integers: 321, 417, 183, etc. How fortuitous that we have 99 free slots between our current set of values!

Well, that’s no accident. The reason why the numbers were originally specced in increments of 100 back in 1996 was precisely so that some future sci-fi technology could make use of the ranges in between. That’s some future-friendly thinking! And as Håkon wrote:

One of the reasons we chose to use three-digit numbers was to support intermediate values in the future. And the future is now :)

Needless to say, variable fonts will be covered in Richard’s forthcoming book.

Jon is at An Event Apart in Atlanta to talk about Billboards and Novels. That means: impact vs. immersion.

Who in the audience has ever had to explain layout and design decisions? And who has struggled to do that? Jon has. That’s why he wants to talk about the differences between designing for impact—to grab attention—and immersion—to get out of the way and allow for absorbing involvement.

Jon examines the difference between interruption and disruption. You want to grab attention, but the tone has to be right. This is how good advertising works. So sometimes impact is a good thing, but not if you’re trying to read.

The web is reading.

Understanding how people read is a core skill for anyone designing and developing for the web. First, you must understand language. There’s a great book by Robert Bringhurst called What Is Reading For?, the summation of a symposium. Paraphrasing Eric Gill, he says that words are neither things, nor pictures of things; they are gestures.

Words as gestures …there are #vss (very short stories) on Twitter that manage to create entire backstories in your mind using the gestures of words.

A study has shown that aesthetics does not affect perceived usability, but it does have an effect on post-use perceived aesthetics. Even though a “designed” and “undesigned” thing might work equally well, our memory the the designed thing is more positive.

Good typography and poor typography appear to have no affect on reading comprehension. This was tested with a New Yorker article that was typeset well, and the same article typeset badly. The people who had the nicely typeset article underestimated how long it had taken them to read it. Objectively it had taken just as long as reading the poorly-typeset version, but because it was more pleasing, it put them in a good mood.

Good typography induces a good mood. And if you are in a good mood, you perform tasks better …and you will think that the tasks took less time. Time flies when you’re having fun.

What about type on screens?

• David Berlow describes the web as “crude media.”
• Jonathan Hoefler describes how he produces fonts differently for different media: the idea (behind the typeface) gives rise to a variety of forms.
• Matthew Carter designed Bell Centennial to work at one size in one environment: the crappy paper of the telephone book. He left gaps in the letterforms for the ink to spread into.
• The Siri typeface was redrawn anew as SiriCore specifically for the screen.

When Jon is evaluating typefaces, he is aware that some fonts are more optimised for the screen than others. He tests the smallest text first, in the most adverse environment: a really old HP machine running Windows XP. He also looks at language support, and features and variants like lining numerals: what are the mechanics of the font?

We take quiet delight in the smallest details of a typeface.

Legibility is so important. Kevin Larson analysed how we read. We take a snapshot of a bunch of letters, and our brains rearrange them into a word. We read by skipping along lines in “saccades” with pauses or “fixations” that allow us to understand a group of letters before reading on.

Jon tells the story of how Seb was fooled by a spoof Twitter account for the London Olympics. The account name was London20l2 (with a letter L), not London2012 (with the letter one). Depending on the typeface, that difference can be very hard to spot. Here’s a handy string:

agh! iIl1 o0

Stick that into Fontdeck and you’ll get a good idea of the mechanics of the font you’re looking at. You’re looking out for ambiguities that would interrupt the reader.

The same goes for typesetting: use the right quotes and apostrophes; not primes. Use ligatures when they help. But some ligatures are just showing off and they interrupt your reading. Typesetting should help reading, not interrupt or disrupt.

You can use text-rendering: optimizeLegibility but test it. You can use hyphens: auto but test it. You can add a non-breaking space before the last two words in a paragraph to prevent orphans. It will improve the mood.

A good example of interruption is the Ampersand 2012 website. There’s a span on the letter that should receive a flourish. But you can also use expert subsets. You can use Opentype features. There are common and discretionary ligatures. Implement them wisely. Use discretionary ligatures when you want to draw attention, like in a headline.

Scantastic readability. We wander around the page or screen in the same way as we read with saccades: our eyes jump around the place. Our scan path is a roughly Z-shaped pattern. You can design for this scan path: deliberately interrupt …but not disrupt. Jon uses the squint test when he is designing, to see what jumps out and interrupts.

Measure (line-length) is really important. Long lines tire us out. Bringhurst mentioned 45-75 character measures. But the measure is also bound to the prose: the content might be very short and snappy.

Contrast can give you careful, deliberate interruptions. Position, density, size …these are all tools we can use to interrupt without disrupting. The I Love Typography article on The Origins of ABC is a beautiful example of this. Compare it to the disruption of faddish parallax sites.

But there are no rules, just good decisions.

It’s all so emotional. Sometimes there are no words. Think of the masterful storytelling of the first twenty minutes of Wall-E.

We react incredibly quickly to faces. We can see and recognise a human face in 40 milliseconds, before we even consciously process that we’ve seen a face.

When we try to write about music, the result can be some really purple prose.

We have an emotional reaction to faces, colour, music …and type.

Jon demonstrates the effect on us that a friendly typeface has compared to a harsh typeface …even though the friendly typeface is used for the Malay word for “hate” and the harsh typeface is used for the Malay word for “love.” Our amygdala is reacting directly. It’s a physiological, visceral reaction we have before we even understand what we’re looking at.

Fonts are wayfinding apps for emotions. There’s a difference between designing places and designing postcards of places.

The Milwaukee Police News website is very impactful …but there’s no immersion. It doesn’t communicate beyond the initial reaction.

Places are defined by type and form: New York, London, Paris. A website for Barcelona or Brooklyn should reflect the flavour of those places.

All these things combine: impact, immersion, contrast, colour, type. We can affect people’s experiences. We can put them in a better mood.

Type shapes our experience. It paints pictures that echo in our memory long after we’ve left.

Eric Spiekermann said:

Details in typefaces are not to be seen, but felt.

Those details have to work in the greater context (of colour, contrast, layout).

Bruce Lee said:

Don’t think; feel.

My geek social calendar has been quite full over the past few days. On Saturday, I—along with half of the web developers in the land—went to Maidenhead for Drew and Rachel’s wedding.

Just as with Norm!’s wedding a few weeks ago, ‘twas a lovely, heartwarming affair. The pièce de résistance was the wedding “cake”: a tower of the finest British cheeses. Needless to say, I took many pictures and dutifully tagged them with the official wedding tag.

The weekend’s shenanigans extended into the start of the week. Rather than spending Monday at work, the Clearleft team made an outing to Ditchling Museum.

Despite its small size, the village of Ditchling looms large in the world of typography. Gill and Johnston both lived and worked there. As a result, the museum’s collection is veritable treasure trove of typey goodness.

But we didn’t just spend the day ooh-ing and ah-ing over the wonderful pieces on display. We rolled up our sleeves and started using the printing press for ourselves, under the tutelage of Phil Baines. You may remember him from such websites as Public Lettering and such books as Penguin by Design.

It was a lot of fun. I can only echo what Stan said of his experience with the tactile inkiness of movable type:

I adore the way I can touch the past through the old metal type and really appreciate typography on a new level. I really can’t recommend classes like this enough. If you are a lover of type, you really owe it to yourself to spend some time with letterpress printing.

I was practically giggling with glee as I set 60pt Baskerville with Richard—my font of choice for Huffduffer. Handling the metal, smelling the ink, operating the printing press …it was simultaneously rough and sensual.

If you share my fetishism for the printed word, feel free to browse through my stash on Flickr. More delights are on display from Relly, Cennydd and James.