I have the awesome opportunity to work with the Mozilla team in helping with their redesign. Happy Cog did all the initial work, and the new Mozilla.org launched just last night. Now I get a chance to work on designing and building a few areas of the site as well. My first blog post considering one of the new pages is up on the Redesign Mozilla site right now.
In 2007, at An Event Apart Chicago, Jason Santa Maria and I were talking over some pints about typography on the web, and in particular about how challenging it is to discover good typefaces. They are out there, but there’s no good way to find them! I said “we should make something to do that” and he said “I already have something in the works”.
A few months later, I found myself working on Typedia (which was already well underway) with a small army of fellow web designers & developers. Jason describes Typedia quite concisely:
At its simplest, Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces. Think of it as All Music or IMDb for type, but created and curated by everyone.
I remember back in college when I read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. There was one recommendation in that book that really resonated with me: Consider the subject matter when choosing a typeface. For instance, if you are designing a book cover by a British author, consider using a typeface designed by a …
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If you notice anything different around here, it’s because I’m testing Typekit, an incredibly easy-to-use and powerful platform that let’s me serve up custom fonts on the web. This is a pretty huge deal, because until now we’ve had to use a variety of hacks and tricks to even come close to having custom typigraphy like this.
One extra awesome benefit of Typekit is that they host all the font files themselves, and I’m licensing them for this website. Typekit has an enormous growing list of fonts I can choose from, and I pay one low licensing fee to have access to everything. This. Is. Awesome.
If you’re using a current version of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or even Internet Explorer (not that I’d recommend that one, but seriously!) you should be able to see my custom typefaces in the headlines. There is one caveat, and that is that Typekit uses Javascript to handle the licensing of the fonts and include the proper code. This isn’t a hack, though. This is the real deal. It works and it works really well.
After three full years of working for myself, I’m now joining forces with Happy Cog. I’ve enjoyed working for myself so much over the years. It’s been exciting, successful and extremely fun. For those reasons, I never really looked for a “real job”. The idea didn’t appeal to me. I knew if someone came knocking and actually lured me away from this career, it would have to be someone special. So when they asked me if I wanted to move to Philadelphia and work at Happy Cog, I told myself that this time I should really consider it.
Let’s slow down for a sec. In fact, let’s rewind back to 2003 or so. I was living in Alaska and I started reading a book about web design by Happy Cog’s founder, Jeffrey Zeldman. You may have heard of it. I thought to myself, “This stuff makes sense and I should do it”. A few years later, I decide to quit my job and do this stuff full-time.
In 2007 I got a chance to meet …
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Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.