Notes in RGB, blog of Ole Martin Kristiansen

The past couple of months I’ve experienced a scenario I’ve learned a lot from. I’ve got hired as a designer and a front-end developer for a website that is to be launched mid-April. When the project started in the beginning of February I developed an information architecture after the initial chat with the client through quite a simple sitemap. The client had no specific idea of what kind of content they would have on the site, and because of the lack of internet experience they had no idea on how they wanted it presented. No problem – a great part of my job as a designer is formatting and structuring the content properly. However, a problem occurred when the client is delayed with the production of content. The content is not only written by the client, but it’s also coming from third party sources and it ends up arriving 3 weeks after the original content deadline – 1 week before the the site is supposed to launch.

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Back in Oslo I ordered some new business cards which I thought could get in handy when attending design events and meeting new people. Of course, designing business cards for your self is much harder than doing it for a client and I don’t have that much information to give out. My name, a short description and some contact information.

Instead of making it a very advanced card, with super cool graphics and lens flares I decided to make it minimalistic (is it actually a word?) and clean with focus on elegant typography. The typefaces used are Gotham and Mrs Eaves.

Front

Back

The past years we’ve seen some very interesting development regarding the broadening of font availability on the web. We are starting to see a lot of different techniques getting used to obtain the possibility of using your favorite font on the web. Today the most popular technique by far is sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which is a combination of Flash, Javascript and CSS and works in most browsers, and scales nicely back to traditional CSS if the user does not have Flash/Javascript enabled. Recently, Cufón entered the market and it offers a much easier implementation and more bug-free environment and does not require Flash. This certainly is good news, and it proves that we might be heading into a very interesting time where designers no longer need to restrict themselves to the common, cross-OS fonts.

However, I still think today’s restrictions offer some interesting challenges. With only a few fonts available at your hands, you’re forced to consider, play and challenge your self through each and every design – and there are certainly examples out there that displays that it’s very possible to create some amazing results with these restrictions. And then I start to think – are they beautiful for everyone, or only the designers who know that the designer of that page has done some excellent work regarding the typography? Either way I believe that the restrictions in web typography makes the best designers stand out – not just because they’re talented – but because they’ve squeezed out the very best part of that font, through kerning, colors, size and position.

Dan Cederholm creates beautiful web typography.

Until the time comes where we can use our favorite fonts in everything from headings to paragraph’s I suggest we continue to strive to create extraordinary typography from what we have available.

What do you think?