Why would anyone in his or her right mind start a type foundry now? Well, to begin with, it’s often said that it’s a good idea to start a business in a recession. However, the type marketplace has gotten very crowded—there are more foundries and distributors of type in all sizes right now than at any previous time. Even the pre-machine setting peak of typefounding in the 19th century had a smaller number of foundries by many orders of magnitude. Notwithstanding all of the small foundries, a handful of large distributors dominate the general market, leaving the rest of us scrambling to find ever-shrinking niches. Why not just climb onboard with one of the big players and leave the business side to people who know what they’re doing? Would that be too easy?

At left is the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques (BAT), a foundry formed in 2009 by Bruno Bernard, Stéphane Buellet, Jean-Baptiste Levée and Patrick Paleta. Their website launched in April 2010. At right is The Indian Type Foundry, a joint venture launched in 2009 by Peter Biľak of Typotheque with Rajesh Kejriwal and Satya Rajpurohit.

It’s reassuring to know that we’re not the only ones with this crazy idea right now. There are a number of small new foundries that have just launched, or are about to launch, such as the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques in Paris and The Indian Type Foundry in the Netherlands and India.

At top is the ‘g’ from Schelter & Giesecke Grotesk, as revived in FF Bau Bold. Below is the single-story ‘g’ found in many of the clones of this typeface, including Alte Haas Grotesk and Nebiolo’s Etruscan.

My own particular story begins in 2002, when I released FF Bau with FontFont and got an email out of the blue from Paul Barnes, a designer in London, asking a very specific question about the lowercase g. I can’t find the original email, but it was something to the effect of “Where did you find your ‘g’? I’ve only seen the single story version in the historical sources I’ve seen. Did you make it up?” This was the beginning of a nerdy friendship that turned into a working relationship when Mark Porter, then the creative director at The Guardian, threw us together as a team for their 2005 redesign. This worked out well enough that we continued working together on custom typefaces for various clients, including the Empire State Building restoration, The New York Times style magazine T, and Condé Nast Portfolio, a business magazine that sadly became a casualty of the recession in 2009.

Without really being conscious of it it, several years had gone by and Paul and I were doing most of our projects as a team. What’s more the exclusivity on the Guardian family was soon going to expire and we had some decisions to make. To be honest, I don’t think we have another family like this in us. Designing Guardian, with its 6 components (some still not yet released) covering serif, sans, optical sizes, and even an agate in 4 grades, was a massive amount of work. This could be the foundation of a new foundry—a family that, if we were lucky, would sell well enough to allow us to indulge ourselves in some of our more bizarre ideas.

There are many drawbacks to starting a foundry, though, so we were reluctant to simply go ahead without exploring other options first. I’m not a graphic designer, so the idea of branding and marketing a new library just sounded like a big headache. Dealing with credit cards, tech support, bookkeeping, and talking on the phone sounded like an infinitely bigger set of headaches. Considering the hassles, the potential upsides seemed meager at first. Paul is a great graphic designer, so he was far more positive about the task of coming up with a visual identity than I was. The financial upside seemed murky at best—sure, in theory we’d make 100% of every sale, but how much would we have to spend to get to that point, and to maintain the business? And while the intangibles are nice, like the satisfaction of building something from the ground up, do they really outweigh the headaches?

Publishing with one or more established foundries

I had released families with a number of foundries over the years, and so we looked at our options there, but none of them seemed like quite the right fit for Guardian. We ruled each one out for different reasons. Some were too large, making us fear that our work might be lost in the shuffle. Did we really want to be just 8 of 80, 180, or 1080 families? Others didn’t have enough emphasis on the publication market, or had a specific aesthetic that didn’t match Guardian or much of the other work we had done together. Paul and I have eclectic but very specific taste, and we worried that our distinct point of view would likely be lost in a larger library.

The specific terms of the End User License Agreement – boring but important – were another issue. For example, Paul and I have relatively liberal views on PDF embedding, compared to many other foundries. On this and many other issues (such as web licensing) we would of course be able to state our viewpoints, but the final decision would ultimately be with the foundry publishing the work.

The round alternates in Giorgio Sans are pretty strange, but Paul Barnes took things to the next level with his extensive set of swashes and ligatures in the upcoming Dala Floda, used without swashes in the recent redesign of Creative Review.

Character sets were yet another issue. By working through different standards with different foundries for several years, seeing where my retail fonts were being licensed, and producing custom typefaces for various types of clients, I felt like I had been through an almost Goldilocks-like process of elimination: one foundry’s character set was too big, another foundry’s character set was too small, and I felt comfortable coming up with a character set that would be just right for us, with language coverage for most of Europe, (where the vast majority of our licenses sold before we launched our site) plus various bits and pieces that I think are important for good typography and convenience for the user. I am a firm believer in uppercase punctuation, for example. Being in control of our own character sets would also allow us to explore swashes and alternates in ways that an outside foundry publishing our work might not have the patience for.

Guardian Sans Headline is one example of a family featuring uppercase punctuation that we have published. Characters such as ¿, « and » are raised in all-caps text, in order to look more visually balanced. The Extra Condensed shown here was commissioned by the Vocento newspaper group in Spain and drawn by Berton Hasebe.

Finally, we realized that if we were publishing all of our work elsewhere, our working partnership would end up being a closed system. We wouldn’t have the opportunity to publish typefaces by other designers, like Lyon by Kai Bernau, for example. While it was hard to imagine a long-term future of publishing everything through a single outside foundry, continuing to publish with a variety of foundries didn’t seem ideal either. Not only would this break up our body of work, but it would also mean juggling wildly varying production workflows, character sets, release schedules and contract terms, not to mention the backlog of typefaces in each foundry’s pipeline each time we wanted to release something new.

A foundry in name only

Starting a foundry in name only, licensing through one or more distributors, seemed like an attractive option, and appears to be finding popularity with a growing number of type designers. After all, not everybody is the type world equivalent of Radiohead, able to thrive outside the establishment while making and marketing their work on their own terms. Radiohead self-released their 2007 album In Rainbows through their own website and allowed people to pay whatever they wanted for it. Although the band declared this experiment a success, sales figures were never released and the album did later end up in record stores and on iTunes, so maybe In Rainbows wasn’t necessarily the revolution it was made out to be?

If we signed with a distributor, we would be able to have our own website for marketing and showing our work, and send people to the distributor when they actually wanted to buy a license. We would also be able to come up with our own EULA, as well as standards for character sets, technical specs, and our own release schedule. In addition to our own marketing efforts, we would benefit from the distributors’ expertise with things like advertising and marketing through social media. As we thought more about it, though, we realized that we would just be one of many labels, all jockeying for position, promotion, and attention. Ultimately we weren’t convinced that there would be enough overlap between our priorities and a distributor’s priorities, and if we did decide at some point to sell licenses directly, we were worried that we would end up competing head to head for the same customers. If we already have a good idea of who our potential audience is and how to reach them, why not spend the percentage of each sale that a distributor would take on our own infrastructure and printed specimens instead? This left us convinced that a more formal partnership, and starting a foundry of our own, was the best way forward. The first order of business was a name.

Becoming Commercial

The Barnes & Schwartz Type Foundry was the most logical choice for a name, but seemed somehow… derivative; and It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And what would it mean when we started releasing work by outside designers? Having already committed to releasing Lyon, because it was too great to pass up, we hated to think that people would assume that, since our names were “on the front door”, so to speak, we had designed the typeface and Kai Bernau wouldn’t end up getting proper credit for the design.

After spending a full week brainstorming, the name Commercial Type came to one of us. It seemed like a perfect fit for what we were trying to do: It’s a little bit Warhol, a little bit Factory Records. We aren’t pretending that we’re artists, and it makes us seem very upfront – almost cheekily so – about the fact that we are making products for sale. Considering the limited commercial prospects of some of our current and upcoming releases, the name takes on a certain amount of of irony.

The Commercial Type logo was designed by Paul Barnes, based on Dala Floda.

It’s much easier to be an “armchair quarterback,” second-guessing everyone else’s seemingly questionable decisions regarding everything from marketing to OpenType features, than it is to deal with the actual reality of budgets, technology, and timelines. Theorizing about how and why things work is all well and good, but putting our ideas into practice is of course the real test, and it’s been a little bit scary, especially where the web is concerned. Paul and I both have backgrounds in print design, specifically publication design, so we’ve had a hard time wrapping our minds around the totally different paradigms demanded by web design. We worked with Andy Pressman and Renda Morton at Rumors, a small design studio in New York, and they did an amazing job of focusing our thoughts so they could be turned into something concrete. While Paul and I can write, it’s not necessarily our biggest strength, so our main concept for the site has been showing rather than telling, devoting as much of the screen real estate as possible to showing the type. And a bigger screen means showing even more type.

All of the specimen images extend past the right edge of the browser window… unless you like to browse at full width on a 30” monitor, I suppose.

Gauging how long it would take to set everything up proved a lot more difficult than we anticipated. We finally launched at the beginning of January this year, but we had originally planned to launch in September 2008. We had no idea that it would take more than 3 or 4 months to define our brand, get the legal stuff all taken care of, design and build a website, finish some fonts, make specimens, and be approved by an underwriter for credit card processing. Who could have predicted that this would take so long, or that there would be so much to learn!? Now that the site is up and running, we have a whole new set of challenges, like putting together advertising budgets and learning just how much marketing strategies have changed since I last worked at a type foundry. The day to day can be tedious at times, but it is never boring!

So to recap, two years ago, Paul and I somewhat reluctantly decided to start a foundry after weighing all of our options, but gained momentum and enthusiasm throughout the process, and even suddenly find ourselves with an office and staff: a type designer, Berton Hasebe, who graduated from the Type & Media program at the KABK in 2008, and in the coming weeks a new administrator and our first ever summer intern will be starting work.

In the end, we wanted control over the context our work is presented in, and felt that this was worth the headaches of tech support, bookkeeping and payroll. We would like to think we have an interesting point of view, and want our foundry to be an extension of this, so we have been drawing on many of our interests and influences outside the sphere of type design, and even outside graphic design, for the design and text of our site and specimens.

The homepage was the most difficult component of the site to design, and we went in circles for over a year before Andy, Renda, and graphic designer Abi Huynh, who also designed our PDF specimens, came up with a simple and elegant way to introduce some motion and color to the site by constantly transitioning through a rotating set of messages.

What I’ve learned

This article is adapted from a talk I gave at the ATypI conference in Mexico City in October 2009. There were a number of recent graduates from type design master’s programs in attendance, some of whom had expressed interest in starting foundries of their own. While I certainly didn’t want to stand up on stage and give advice that may or may not apply to each individual situation, I concluded by talking about some of the circumstances in my career, some of which were conscious decisions and some of which were dumb luck, that I felt had prepared me for starting Commercial Type:

1. I’m really happy I learned the ropes of production and professional practice before starting Commercial Type, both through working at Font Bureau for two years in the early ’00s and through publishing families with a number of other foundries.

2. I’m glad I partnered up with someone with a different but complementary background, rather than another full-time type designer. Paul draws type beautifully, but his background in publication design is probably more important, because it has pointed us toward the vast majority of our good (or at least interesting) ideas. I think this makes our company more than the sum of its parts.

3. I’m happy that I’ve been able to balance retail and custom projects. There’s no better promotion for yourself as a custom type designer than releasing typefaces that people like, and commissions are an excellent source of retail fonts. After all, the client has already proven that there is some demand. Very different sets of skills are used when designing a typeface for a single specific use, versus designing one intended for general use. For example, Guardian Egyptian Text was designed to be used at 8pt on 9.5pt leading on the Guardian’s presses, mainly in columns that are 54mm wide, and was thoroughly tested with their ink, paper and pressmen; whereas Graphik was designed to be used for text or display at a wide range of sizes in newspapers, magazines, and corporate design. I’m glad I get to do some of each, because they inform one another.

4. I’m really happy that Paul and I waited to start a foundry until we had more than one or two families to release. The ups and downs of each individual family’s sales matter less because they balance one another out. Before we launched the website, enquiries tended to come in groups: one week 75% of the email that came in was about Lyon. The week before it had all been about Graphik, and the week after it was all about Publico. This has continued with direct sales through our web site. We are unable to explain or predict it. It’s very mysterious.

5. I’m glad I didn’t have any illusions that starting a foundry would mean I get to spend more time drawing. The business side of things eats up a lot of time, and luckily I don’t hate it. Which leads me to my final point:

Our PDF specimen for the Austin family, designed by Abi Huynh.

6. I’m glad I had time to learn my limits and learn how to delegate. Abi Huynh works with Paul on the graphic design, because I’m a mediocre graphic designer at best. Berton very handily takes care of much of the custom work these days. Rumors did a great job designing the website and found a brilliant programmer to build it. We have a really good accountant and a really good lawyer. This means that, although I draw less than I used to, I still get to draw, because I’ve made it a priority.   

You can follow @CommercialType on Twitter.

Visit the Font Game web site.

Why did I start a type foundry?

The Seven Deadly Sins represents vices and tendencies that were believed to be misdeeds in early Christian religion.

The sins are as follows: envy, pride, wrath, sloth, lust, greed, gluttony.

Each sin is said to be represented by a colour. For example, envy is best represented by the colour green, which — in many cultures — is also the symbolic color of money.

I thought it would be a fun experiment to compile a showcase of a few web designs based on the colours reflected by the seven deadly sins.

Note: The web designs featured were used for aesthetic purposes only, not to imply that they characterize the sins.

Green – Envy

Envy is best described as a desire for something more and to covet other people’s belongings and status. The opposite of envy is love.

Bam Creative

Free Gobbler

PSDChimp

Violet – Pride

Pride is when a person feels more special or important than others. At its worst, pride is narcissism. The opposite of pride is humility.

idt.net.cn

Newism

shizixiu.com.cn

Red – Wrath

Wrath can be best described as anger or hatred. It is the polar opposite of kindness.

Carsonified

KMX Karts

The Salon

Light Blue – Sloth

Sloth is the act of being lazy or idle. The opposite of sloth is zeal — or eagerness to achieve something good.

philipp doms

Iconjelly

Narhir Design

Blue – Lust

Lust is the act of giving into desire. The opposite of lust is self-control.

Strutta

Blue Water Productions

MediaCore

Yellow – Greed

Greed is the desire for wealth and status. The opposite of greed is generosity.

Nikon Festival

Booreiland

Champagne Warehouse

Orange – Gluttony

Gluttony is the act of consuming more than you need. The opposite of gluttony is temperance — being disciplined and wise with resources.

Cubicle Ninjas

scorchlondon

designedbynelleke

Why do you think these colours represent their respective sins? What emotions do you feel when seeing these colours in web designs?

Related Content

• How to Use Retro Colors in Your Designs
• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
• 14 Brilliant Tools for Evaluating Your Design’s Colors
• Related categories: Web Design and User Interface

About the Author

Nick Burd is a 23-year-old Freelance Web Developer from Ontario, Canada. He can be found at many places on the Net starting at his personal blog and portfolio, Twitter and LinkedIn.

According to the company’s blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone’s camera.

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The new version of Google Goggles will help translate text from English, French, Italian, German and Spanish into many more languages, and will be able to read many more, including non-Latin-based langauges such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, in the future.

Using Google Goggles for this feature is a simple process, as described on Google’s blog:

• Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words

• Press the shutter button
• If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
• Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google has announced several advancements involving translation over recent months, including automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and even software it is developing to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Each of these technologies involves technologies which will help in creating a cohesive augmented reality experience in the future, translating the world we hear and see around us into data, which can then be worked with in other ways. And even at the core, test translation is not perfect, so Google is dealing with an immense problem. As it writes in its blog, “computer vision is a hard problem. [...] The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.”

Google Goggles version 1.1 is currently only available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher and is available from the Android Marketplace.

Discuss

According to the company’s blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone’s camera.

Sponsor

The new version of Google Goggles will help translate text from English, French, Italian, German and Spanish into many more languages, and will be able to read many more, including non-Latin-based langauges such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, in the future.

Using Google Goggles for this feature is a simple process, as described on Google’s blog:

• Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words

• Press the shutter button
• If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
• Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google has announced several advancements involving translation over recent months, including automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and even software it is developing to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Each of these technologies involves technologies which will help in creating a cohesive augmented reality experience in the future, translating the world we hear and see around us into data, which can then be worked with in other ways. And even at the core, test translation is not perfect, so Google is dealing with an immense problem. As it writes in its blog, “computer vision is a hard problem. [...] The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.”

Google Goggles version 1.1 is currently only available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher and is available from the Android Marketplace.

Discuss

The move will go a long way in enforcing a “net neutrality”, which is meant to insure that all content is delivered equally, regardless of its source or type.

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According to the article, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to outline plans today for how the FCC and the federal government will regulate broadband lines. The decision comes after a ruling early last month by a federal appeals court, which said that the FCC had overstepped its bounds in a 2008 matter involving ComCast. The decision said that the FCC had acted outside of its legal authority when it found that ComCast had “significantly impeded consumers’ ability to access the content and use the applications of their choice.”

According to the Journal, the FCC “has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to Internet regulation” for the past decade or so, likely in response to warnings by cable and telecommunications executives that federal regulations would lead these companies to “cut billions of capital expenditures for their networks, slash jobs and go to court to fight the rules.”

Many fear that, without net neutrality rules, ISPs and communications companies will begin charging more for faster access to websites. While customers already pay on a scale according to bandwidth, speed is not capped according to payment on the other end of the equation. That is, if I can download at 1 Mbps, I should be able to get that speed whether I am going to the MTV website or the website for a local business, as long as the servers they are hosted on can provide that speed as well. It should not be up to the communications companies to determine how quickly that content is served up according to how much they might pay.

According to Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton and co-chair of the Arts + Labs Coaltion, the issue is not cut and dry.

“The question is how heavy a hand will the regulatory touch be,” he said. “We don’t know yet, so the devil is in the details. The network operators have to be able to treat some traffic on the Internet different than other traffic–most people agree that web video is different than an email to grandma. You have to discriminate in some fashion.”

It’s likely that the courts will agree and we’ll be hearing about this decision for some time to come.

Discuss

The news comes by way of a leaked press release that temporarily appeared on MarketWatch, but has since been taken down. Several versions remain on the Web, however, thanks to Google’s cache.

Sponsor

payWave for iPhone

According to the release, the new Apple-certifed technology combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that will host Visa’s contactless payment application, Visa payWave.

PayWave, introduced in September 2007, allows cardholders to wave their card in front of terminals in order to pay for purchases at point-of-sale. The technology is similar to MasterCard’s PayPass solution, which rolled out to select markets in 2005.

Visa’s contactless technology already works at over 32,000 retailers from top brands, notes the company’s corporate website, and the list is “rapidly growing,” it says.

The iPhone-enabled payWave technology, too, will be made available at thousands of merchants, claims the release, including fast food restaurants, retail stores, in taxis, during sporting events (such as baseball games) and even at vending machines that have contactless payment terminals.

Beyond iPhone: Works on Any Phone with a Memory Card Slot

What’s even better about this news is that the mobile payment technology won’t be limited to iPhones. It will also work with “a majority of smart phones that have a slot for a memory card,” which means that owners of other popular smartphones won’t necessarily be out of luck. To use Visa’s technology on non-iPhones, users can insert the card into their phone’s memory slot to transform their phones into mobile payment devices.

Visa already released a similar technology in Malaysia and Japan. Last year, for example, the company teamed up with Nokia and Maybank, a leading financial institution in Malaysia, to offer Visa payWave on mobile devices. But at the time, the company claimed that several barriers to U.S. adoption still remained, many of which had to due with the limited adoption of NFC-enabled devices and terminals here in the U.S. (NFC, or near field communications, is a wireless communication technology that enables data exchanges between devices. The technology is popular overseas in Europe and Asia, but has yet to catch on with any real gusto in North America. PayWave uses NFC for mobile transactions.)

Apparently, Visa has found a workaround for the lack of NFC phones by embedding the computer chip needed into specially designed iPhone cases instead.

Is it Secure?

Considering that people often lose their mobile phones, the application has been designed so that it can be password-protected and uses “advanced security technology,” says the release, to uniquely identify each transaction. If a phone was lost or stolen, the phone’s owner would simply call their provider who could then immediately deactivate the account, the same as with lost or stolen credit cards.

The leaked release was accompanied by videos demonstrating the new technology, but sadly those are now unavailable.

Discuss

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Blue Destiny Records first sued Google for copyright infringment in December 2009 over links to copyrighted content hosted on Rapidshare. According to the new lawsuit (PDF) by Google, Blue Destiny Records intented to hold Google liable “for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link”.

According to a Hollywood Reporter article by Eriq Gardner, that original suit cliamed that Rapidshare was running “‘a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works’ and that Google (and Microsoft’s Bing search engine) were helping to prop up the company.” Google states in this latest suit that it responded “expiditiously” to the record label’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaints “by removing, or disabling access to, links leading to webpages allegedly containing material infringing BDR’s copyrights” and that it should be protected by DMCA safe harbor.

According to Gardner, this move also favors Google by moving the lawsuit to the Ninth Circuit court, where Google found favor in “litigation with Perfect 10, an adult entertainment publisher who tried to punish search engines for indexing copyrighted photos.”

The question here is why did the record label decide to ask for a dismissal of its original claims only to wait for a later date to refile? According to Google’s lawsuit, the label told Google repeatedly that it intended on refiling in the future. If Google removed content identified in a DMCA take-down request, safe harbor should apply and the company should be protected. Was the label trying to put together a larger case? It seems that Google wants to preserve its way of doing business, wherein its search engine can index without regard for copyright and only needs to act when a DMCA take-down notice is issued. A decision holding Google responsible for copyrighted content, which it pulled down after the notice, would mean that the company would need to be much more discriminatory in its indexing of content.

The act of linking should not constitute a crime, especially when the company complies with DMCA take-down requests, and this appears to be the argument being offered by Google. A recent removal of a tweet by Twitter brought up similar questions. Should links be criminalized? Or should this sort of copyright infringement claim be reserved for actual hosting of content? And as we asked when we looked at the case of DMCA take-downs and Twitter, how many degrees of separation must there be before a link is no longer a criminal act? If we link to Google, which links to Rapidshare, which is hosting the content, should we also be held accountable for infringing copyright?

We should hope not.

Discuss

Yesterday we ran a contest giving away 5 tickets to the event, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors: CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent, Ipevo and MyCityWay. Here are the winners:

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@garrettdodge
@tedm1
@marcuswandell
@mattstaggs
@alanxing

For those of you who missed out on a free ticket to the Mobile Summit, we encourage you to register now. The event is on tomorrow in Mountain View.

Here’s further information about the RWW Mobile Summit:

As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com, had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb’s last summit:

“There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn’t have to be big and influential to get your ideas across – if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn’t just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively.”

The Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

A big thank-you to our sponsors CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent, plus our two newest sponsors:

IPEVO: Tools for the connected world

IPEVO is the online source for smart and well-designed products that works with your computers, smart-phones and the Internet. We make new experiences for today’s connected lifestyle accessible and affordable by designing and selecting products that best reflect the most current Internet behaviors and emergent technologies.

MyCityWay

My City Way is a One-Stop mobile apps platform for everything needed to live, work, play and visit in any city. Real-time, user-profile driven and experience-oriented, My City Way would be available in over 40 cities across the world on iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and the web.

If you’re a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages.

We hope to see you tomorrow, May 7!

Discuss

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The netbook market saw incredible growth around this time last year. CNNMoney’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who uncovered the chart in a research report about HP’s acquisition of Palm, notes that netbook sales peaked last summer at “an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate.”

But in January, coincidentally (or not?) the same month that Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the forthcoming tablet computer dubbed the iPad, netbook sales took a nose dive. But by nose dive, we mean they only saw 68% year-over-year growth during this time frame, the first month of the new year. That’s not actually all that bad, is it? It only looks bad in comparison to the incredible numbers netbooks saw last summer.

But what’s more telling is that the numbers continued to trend downwards since then: 53% in February, 25% in March and a meager 5% in April.

Did consumers rush out and buy iPads instead of netbooks? Or do they plan to at some point, a decision which is now affecting netbook sales?

Considering that the pre-iPad month of December saw a still respectable 179% year-over-year growth for the netbook market, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Apple’s news and the netbook market as a whole. Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty certainly does, claiming the tanking sales are “collateral damage,” says DeWitt, from Apple’s tablet announcement and launch.

iPad Cannibalizing Other Markets

In case you’re still not convinced that this correlation is also causation, Huberty digs up a Morgan Stanley/Alphawise survey from March focused on consumer buying intent. Here, she found that 44% of U.S. consumers planned to buy an iPad instead of a notebook or netbook computer.

Apple’s Initial Supply Struggles

Apple, too, was caught a little off-guard by the iPad’s initial success, which led to supply issues that delayed the international launch by a month. On May 3, the company released a statement which quoted Jobs as saying that iPad “demand continues to exceed supply…” Some have claimed that Apple is creating artificial demand for the product to generate interest, but analysts believe that Apple is just having difficulty scaling up production due to manufacturing complexity. However, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall says the learning curve the company is facing is “only temporary.”

Even with production delays, Apple sold 1 million iPads in 28 days, touts a recent press release – “less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone,” it reads.

Clearly, there is still a pent-up desire for low-cost, portable computing, but it seems the tide may be shifting from netbook-sized “totables” to touch-screens.

Discuss

  

We love beautiful typography, and we appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools or who just share their knowledge with fellow designers. We are always looking for such resources. We compile them, carefully select the best ones and then prepare them for our round-ups. And now it’s time to present a beautiful fresh dose of typography-related resources.

To help you improve the typography in your designs, we’re presenting here useful new articles, tools and resources related to typography. You will learn the fundamentals of typography, find out how to combine fonts and know what to keep in mind when choosing a typeface. We also present typography-related slideshows, glossaries, layouts and experiments.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
• 25 New High Quality Free Fonts
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
• Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

[By the way: The network tab (on the top of the page) is updated several times a day. It features selected articles from the best web design blogs!]

Typography: References and Useful Resources

The Taxonomy of Type
This article’s purpose is to help us as designers to distinguish basic properties of types. It explains the type classification and provides examples of each type. Short, but nice article.

Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces
Typedia is a resource to classify, categorize, and connect typefaces. It is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them, very much like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type.

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary
Many fonts have abbreviations in their names. Some relate to glyph sets and font formats, others to design traits and foundries, and so on. A comprehensive list of these abbreviations and their explanation can be found in The Abbreviated Typographer from Unzipped.

Typographic Marks Unknown
There are many typographic marks which are familiar to most, but understood by few. Most of these glyphs have interesting histories and evolutions as they survived the beatings given to them through rushed handwriting of scribes and misuses through history. They now mostly live on our keyboards and in our software, and a few are used often, so it seems only fitting to know where they come from and how to correctly use them.

Periodic Table of Typefaces
A reference table for most popular typefaces and their classifications.

Fonts for iPad & iPhone
This reference table features all fonts that are available on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Font Anatomy (Wallpaper)
A nice overview of all typographic terms and subtleties. Do you know what an ‘arm’ or ‘beak’ is? Time to find out.

Typographic Rules Checklist (PDF)
Useful typographic checklist that contains not only some general typographic rules, heuristics and guidelines, but also reminders for typography in your projects.

Typography Checklist (PDF)
Compiled by Jason DewinetzIf, this list contains some useful typographic checks that you may want to consider for before launching your next project or printing your next brochure or book.

So You Need A Typeface (Infographics)
A nice infographics that can actually help you select a typeface for your design work. You may want to search for the path to Comic Sans.

Finding The Right Type

The Right Font for the Job
A few years ago, you had to make a decision between TrueType or PostScript and Mac or Windows. Today, the choice is usually fairly simple: OpenType is the most convenient and full-featured font format, compatible with all modern screen and print workflows. All the extras that are commonly spread across multiple PostScript or TrueType files can live in one OpenType file. Best of all, OpenType is a truly cross-platform format. You can use the same font on Mac or Windows machines without converting the font or fearing reflow.

Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips
With the invention of “desktop publishing”, designers found themselves setting type on their computers for the first time. Until then, they had made type specifications for typesetters and left the job up to the professionals. As a result, you can still see classic inaccuracies in typesetting, even in top-quality printed matter. Here you will find some tips from Erik Spiekermann, designer of FF Meta¨, Meta Design founder, co-author of ’stop Stealing Sheep”, and a FontShop founder, which will prevent some of the more obvious blunders.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
For the first ten years of my career, I worked for Massimo Vignelli, a designer who is legendary for using a very limited number of typefaces. Between 1980 and 1990, most of my projects were set in five fonts: Helvetica (naturally), Futura, Garamond No. 3, Century Expanded, and, of course, Bodoni.

Picking Type for Web
Picking Type for Web As a part of the visual design process for MIX Online’s upcoming redesign, I’ve been experimenting with typography. The task of finding a typeface that’s both aesthetically pleasing and legible, however, is a tricky one.

How To Choose A Font
Have you ever had the problem of not knowing what typeface to use? Well of course you have, everyone has. This is a guide on how to choose a font. These pointers have been gathered from Robin Williams great book “The Non-Designers Type Book” that I recommended in the top 5 typography resources of all time. Have a think about each of these before choosing your next font.

On Choosing Type
Typography is not a science. Typography is an art. There are those who”d like to ’scientificize”; those who believe that a large enough sample of data will somehow elicit good typography. However, this sausage-machine mentality will only ever produce sausages. That typography and choosing type is not a science trammeled by axioms and rules is a cause to rejoice.

Combining Type

Fundamentals: Combining Type With Helvetica
With this issue of FontShop Fundamentals we debut Guest FontLists. Building on our own lists, we asked experts we admire to round up typefaces that share a common use, style, or concept.

Four Ways to Mix Fonts
Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ’s Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

How do I choose paring fonts ?
When I have to chose type for a project, I always rely on my feelings and lots of testing, wating for the love/hate Alchemy to happen and decide for me. This method, mostly based on luck, is often time consuming, and I often found myself needing to ask for help on the forums.

Type Design

Beginner’s Guide to OpenType
OpenType (OT) is a cross-platform type format that includes expert layout features to provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. Using OT technology you can substitute your characters for different glyphs1 using many different methods; Ligatures, Small Caps, Oldstyle Figures, Fractions, Superscript/Subscript, Ordinals, Alternates, Titling Characters and many more. This beginner’s guide will help to illustrate some of the more common features found in OT fonts and when they should be used.

Making Geometric Type Work
For graphic designers beginning to experiment in type design, a geometric or modular typeface is a natural starting point. Illustrator and other programs offer a simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet. This is the same route I took when dissatisfied with the limits of commercial fonts at the time. I twisted and distorted each character to fit into a few simple, incredibly strict rules of construction. Invariably this produced a wide range of exotic letterforms, some more legible that others.

A few things I’ve learned about typeface design
Teaching on a postgraduate course feels very much like a spiral: the annual repetition of projects, each a vehicle for a journey of education and discovery for the student, blurs into cyclical clouds of shapes, paragraphs, and personalities. There seems to be little opportunity for reflection across student cohorts, and yet it is only this process that improves the process from one year to the next. Having passed the tenth anniversary of the MA Typeface Design programme was as good an opportunity as any to reflect, and ILT’s offer to publish the result an ideal environment to get some ideas out in the open. Although my perspective is unavoidably linked to the course at Reading, I think that the points I make have wider relevance.

Case-Study: The Making of Vesper
A nice case-study about the creation process of the Vesper typeface, from its designer Rob Keller. “Vesper was developed over the course of almost three years. For this article, I’ve divided the process into two stages: #1 during my studies at the University of Reading; and #2 After Reading. Hopefully through this highly-condensed-yet-still-rather-wordy account of this project you will learn some interesting bits regarding my first major type family, the design process, and the MATD program.”

Typographic Tools

TypeIt: Type accent marks, diacritics and foreign letters online
The service allows you to add typographic accents and special characters (e.g. punctuation marks) as you’re typing. Instead of clicking on buttons for the accents, you can also use pre-defined shortcuts, like Control + N, to insert the characters: just point your cursor to the desired character and you’ll see a tooltip.

Web Font Specimen
Because web type renders differently with only subtle CSS adjustments, seeing it exercised in a variety of ways can help web designers typesetÑand also help them decide which typefaces to purchase for their projects.

Typograph: Scale & Rhythm
This page is both an essay and a tool. It sets out to explore how two, intertwined concepts, often playful but sometimes cheeky, can be encouraged to dance in web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you are about to play upon it.

TextMod 2.1
Unlike dummy text generators, in TextMod you can modify a real text to match your current character set and use it for testing your font. Your TextMod settings are stored in a cookie. By now, TextMod only works with Latin and Armenian.

Readability
Readability is a simple bookmarklet that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Free Typographic XHTML/CSS-Layouts For Your Designs
A collection of beautiful typographic (X)HTML+CSS-based layouts created by the design community and released for free.

Typography Keyboard Layout
A simple, yet useful tool that lets you enter characters that are usually unavailable on a keyboard with ease. Hopefully it will help you achieve better typography in your designs.

{ font-family }
A resource for web developers and designers to provide recommendations for alternatives in the font-family CSS style.

EmChart
This tool maps the ratio between your base size and your child elements font size.

MyFontbook, A Browser-Based Free Font Viewer
myFontbook is a free tool for viewing, classifying and organizing fonts installed on your system from your web browser.

Font Finder
FontFinder is created for designers, developers and typographers. It allows a user to analyze the font information of any element on a page, copy any piece(s) of that information to the clipboard, and perform inline replacements to test new layouts.

Unicode Codepoint Chart
This chart is broken down neatly by type of character and symbol (and by language in many cases), with a visual reference under each category. From there, just click on the symbol or character you want and you’re brought to a page with detailed information about the character, along with a browser test page, an outline (in SVG format) and a variety of encodings and character sets (HTML entity, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-8, etc.).

Create Your Own @font-face Kits
An online generator for creating ready-to-use kits for your fonts, using @font-face.

XHTML Character Entity Reference
This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.

HTML Entity Character Lookup
Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters. This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an < or the letter c.

CopyPasteCharacter.com
This page allows you to copy one or multiple special characters and paste them in your applications.

Surveys and Research

Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
Even with a relatively limited set of options in CSS, typography can vary tremendously using pure CSS syntax. Serif or sans-serif? Large or small font? Line height, spacing, font size and paddingÉ The list goes on and on.

Visual Search and Reading Tasks Using ClearType and Regular Displays
An academic paper exploring the usability performance of ClearType vs. Regular displays. Result: For most users ClearType-enhanced text produces a significant improvement in performance times on tasks involving extended eye-on-text interactions.

‘Font’ vs. ‘Typeface’: font terms survey results
According to this study, the overall opinion is that in today’s world of digital typography “a typeface” means the general design, including all its styles, regardless of how it’s instantiated, while “a font” means a single style of a typeface, such as Myriad bold condensed italic, in a specific file format. However, this is not necessarily true.

Font or Typeface?
As we”re collaborating with multiple authors on the FontFeed, we compiled a list of guidelines for ourselves and guest contributors. One of our concerns is that we should attempt to ’speak the same language” when using typographic and related terms. Because these terms evolved over a considerable period of time and saw several transitions in technology, they can sometimes be interpreted in varying ways. This resulted in a terminology that is often perceived as at best esoteric, at worst plain confusing.

Rules for good and beautiful typography

A Guide to Web Typography
Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.

The Principles of Beautiful Typography
For most people, typography is simply about arranging a familiar set of shapes to make words, sentences, and paragraphs. Having the ability to set type with only a few strokes on a keyboard has allowed us to forget about the creative and artistic possibilities of this medium.

Simple rules for good typography
Here are some basic rules to improve your typography across either web or print. Of course, these rules are only to start with, and rules are meant to be broken. But if you want something to look neat, clean and generally well designed they are a good set to follow.

Typography is the backbone of good web design
An overview of some typographic techniques to keep in mind for your next website design.

A 20 Minute Intro to Typography Basics
“Typography plays a big role in graphic design and can be one of the hardest things to get right. My aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your design work.”

11 Essential Tips for Good Print Typography
Typography is a huge part of design and design is a huge part of type. You can”t just throw text on a page, it has to be laid out and organized in a clean way that adds to the information being presented. Here are 11 typography tips to help you convey information in print the right way.

It’s Type O’clock!
“One of the key qualities of a good information designer is attention to details and since typography is the new cool trend we now seem to care more than ever about presenting text online correctly. The following article is based on my personal experience, yet there’s great probability that much of the following has already been said by somebody else. What you’ll find here is a few tricks for setting type on web I’ve learned over the past few months some of which, amazingly enough, I hardly ever see being used.”

What is typography today?
“Most people think Typography is about designing and selecting fonts. This is true as far as architecture is about designing or selecting furniture. In reality neither is a purpose but a means to an end. That end with architecture is (hopefully) accommodating its inhabitants, for typography it is accommodating the human mind, making the reader read, the viewer watch (not only look), drawing and keeping the attention.”

The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing
As printed typography enjoys the fruits of high-DPI glory, proudly displaying its beautiful curves and subtleties, its on-screen counterpart remains stifled by bulky pixels, living in a world of jagged edges, distorted letterforms and trimmed serifs. Until display manufacturers produce affordable 200 or 300 PPI monitors, we”ll have to rely on software advances to fix these problems.

Type-Inspired Interfaces
One of the things that terrifies me most about a new project is the starting point. How is the content laid out? What colors do I pick? Once things like that are decided, it becomes significantly easier to continue design, but it’s the blank page where I spend the most time. To that end, I often start by choosing type.

CSS and Font Embedding

Revised Font Stack
Serious efforts are being made to get more typeface choices on the web to enhance web typography. Still, most of us prefer web-safe fonts like: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman and Arial. Though choices are limited, yet the number can be increased by exploring other pre-installed fonts.

Becoming a Font Embedding Master
I’ve spent a couple days worth now trying to figure out the best and most complete approach to font embedding using @font-face. It really is a dark art that must be mastered. It is by no means a straightforward process.

Web Font User Guide
An extensive reference guide for designers, developers and system administrators. It explains how to get started using Web fonts for display on your website. It also contains information for system administrators about which configuration changes may be necessary to successfully serve webfonts from your web server.

Inspiration: Showcases, Blogs etc.

we love typography
A showcase of type, typography, lettering, and signage.

FINDINGS
Yet another blog featuring beautiful typography.

typo/graphic posters
typo/graphic posters is a directory of typographic and graphic posters.

The Journal of Urban Typography
TJOUT is dedicated to the documentation and study of signs, word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent in urban environments.

Pressing Letters: A Collection of Inspirational Letterpress
The project is an effort to catalog work and promote creativity in the letterpress community. Anyone can submit their letterpress work, references, tips and links. The website has many different categories, including business cards, books, calendars, identity design, music sleeves, stationery and posters. A blog definitely worth bookmarking and visiting regularly.

Alltop: Top Typography News
An aggregator of typography-related news, articles and tools.

Last Click: Typography-Related… Games!

FontTrainer
An interesting tool that help to train you pay attention to subtle differences between fonts.

Your Personality, Summarized in a Typeface
If you’ve ever sat down with a type designer, what you quickly realize is that they rarely talk about fonts in purely aesthetic or even functional terms: They talk about assertiveness or calm or friendliness. In short, they talk about personality traits. It makes sense, then, that your personality could be translated into a typeface. And Pentragram has done just that, in this lovely microsite, What Type are You? (Password: Character)

TypePong
TypePong is a retro iPhone gaming with a modern twist. It allows you to play PingPong with your favourite fonts. You can also challenge your friends and the world on our global score board.

Deep Font Challenge
Are you a sharp shootin’ font-master or a no-good calamity who can’t spell Futura? To prove your design know how, shoot the font mounted on a target which is displayed on the banner. Points are scored for each successful round and the speed with which you complete it… but be warned, during the game the tables will turn, so keep on your toes.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
• 25 New High Quality Free Fonts
• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices
• Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: typography