Tom Waits Lyrics On Human Canvas
Finally, my obsessions meet: Fontfeed covers Tom Waits.
[via http://fontfeed.com/]
Latest Entries
Type & Anti-Aliasing
Smashing Magazine has an excellent overview of various types of anti-aliasing (including when to use what types). Read these before you randomly pick one of them in Photoshop.
Interactive Sketching Notation 0.1
Jakob Linowski, over at Wireframes Magazine, has developed the first iteration of an interactive sketching notation. Looks promising.
Time, Fluid and Solid
Vladislav Delay – Toive, Lorenzo Sporiello.
Tom Waits as Photographer
Tom Waits has often claimed he takes pictures of oil stains on the ground. If these aren’t legit samples, they’re great facsimiles.
Rich Web Type
Smashing Magazine has a nice roundup of methods for rich typography on websites: sIFR, FontJazz, Typekit, and many more. Overviews links, and advantages/disadvantages. Nice.
[Max helpfully pointed out that the the first draft of my post was missing the actual link to the roundup.]
[via Dan Mandle]
1984 Review of Original Macintosh
Read up kids: This is what high-end consumer computing used to be like: Larry Magid’s review of the Macintosh for the LA Times.
Of course any computer’s real value is based on what you can do with it. For the first 100 days, Apple is including two valuable programs, MacPaint and MacWrite free with the machine. MacWrite has most basic word processing features with one outstanding addition. It can vary the size and style of your type on the screen and on paper, when used with Apple’s new $495 Image Writer printer. This computer/printer/software combination produces the first truly “what you see is what you get” word processing system on a moderately priced microcomputer. You can vary the type size from 9 point (about the size used in most newspapers) to 72 point headlines. You can also change your type style, selecting an Old English font or one of the more common type styles. Your type can be in bold, italic, underline or even shadow print. All this magic is controlled by the computer itself — the software merely takes advantage of it.
[via kottke.org]
User Interface Design
Peoplesoft, the enterprise app, has many interface problems. Above is one. This dialog box came up after I entered mid-term grades but forgot to click the save button. When I hit the “return” button to go back to the main class page, Peoplesoft helpfully reminded me that I hadn’t saved the grades. Like a of users, I figured I should click “Cancel” to, um, cancel my intended action so I could hit Save. Unfortunately, “Cancel” in this dialog means to actually complete the action (in this case, leaving the page and losing the changes I’d forgotten to save).
Arguably, “Cancel” could mean cancel the changes I’d just made. But I’ve not seen that convention used as far as I can recall. Of course, I could just read every dialog box fully, but users reading all the text in a dialog box is only slightly more common that users reading End-User License Agreements.
