We were thrilled at the news today that Adobe was releasing the second of two open source fonts: Source Code Pro, to complement Source Sans Pro.
We’ve been using it for our development in the studio today and it’s lovely. Adobe did a great job of making a typeface that reads wonderfully at all sizes, and looks amazingly good on a retina display.
Not to mention, it was very kind of them to make it open source, so that we could use it on the websites we’re building as well!
There was an interesting post this morning in Daring Fireball about yesterday’s iPhone 5 and Music Event. As a designer, it’s hard not to love a company that cares this much about design.
When Schiller unveiled the iPhone 5, it rose from the stage floor on a smoothly-rising and rotating pedestal, pinpoint spotlights hitting the phone and only the phone. The rotation of the iPhone atop the pedestal was in perfect sync with the rotation of the iPhone projected on the big screen at the back of the stage. There’s no store where you buy such pedestals; Apple designed and engineered it specifically for this event. It was on stage for about a minute.
Despite their size, and the loss of a visionary leader, Apple continues to value design. I find that quite heartening.
Love this font. Need to find an excuse to use it!
I stopped by to visit our friend Pete at Signworks earlier this week. Exploring this workshop is always an adventure.
I’ve known Pete for a good 12 years now, and I’ve had many interesting conversations about design and typography.
It was Pete who introduced me to gold leaf. If you see a particularly lovely sign in a window in Portland, you can be certain it was the work of “Knuckles.”
Likely you’ve seen his work on the windows of Stumptown or Woodsman.
Each window is a a work of art, inviting passerby to examine the details. They are often created with a depth and dimension that evades first inspection. The black borders around the windows at The Woodsman work exceptionally well, as they seem to act as picture frames.
We’ve been encouraging Pete to put together a portfolio, and someday we hope to share it with you here.
I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.
Great quote from the article Milton Glaser: We’re Always Looking, But We Never Really See this morning.
There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.
I’ve noticed this subtle touch in Photos on iPad (and iPhone) before, but I guess it never really registered. I was thinking about it last night, and I realized it’s just the kind of thing that Apple pays attention to and does well.
When you’re flipping between pictures, notice that there’s a gap between them. It’s deliberate—and most people wouldn’t think to add a space there. Continue reading
In the short period of time since the release of the new iPads, we’ve been looking at many of our past web projects with curious eyes, to see how they hold up. The new iPad has a retina display, like the iPhone 4 series, which means that it packs 4 pixels into the space of 1, giving it four times the resolution and far more detail. It’s been 10 days now, and we’ve got some suggestions to share.
First of all, be sure to just open your site and play around with it on the iPad. This certainly isn’t a new concept, but we were surprised to find that some of our sites actually crashed the web browser! This was likely due, in our case, to images that were taking up way too much memory at retina resolution, but I expect to see the problem elsewhere.
When loading in a website, often the very first graphic shown is a logo. And since these are typically rendered as images, the first things visitors see on a new iPad—your logo, the centerpiece of your identity—is going to look blocky. That’s a relatively easy fix. Logo graphics are often very small files, so you may be able to replace yours with an image that’s twice the width and height, and tell the browser to show it at the old (smaller) size. On normal browsers, it will look the same, but on the new iPad it will look terrific.
Continue reading
There is a brief but insightful interview with Jonathan Ive of Apple in The London Evening Standard today. My favorite part:
Q: Users have become obsessively attached to Apple products. Why?
A: When I used a Mac I had a keen awareness of the values of those who made it. I think people’s emotional connection to our product is that they sense our care, and the amount of work that has gone into creating it.
One of our highest goals as a design agency is to communicate the values of our clients to their audience. When we achieve that, we feel the most successful.
Saw this old screenshot from Word on a Mac back in the 80s, and I thought the contrast was quite striking.
User interface on an Apple device, 25 years ago:
User interface on an Apple device, today:
