Tag: typography

  • Much ado about phone numbers

    Lately I’ve been thinking about formatting phone numbers. Of course, there are plenty of options in addition to the ones above, but these are some common ones, although the thin spaces option is perhaps not too common. I added it because I’ve been wondering about the value of the separator characters, and if we can…

  • Small-caps, web text, and CSS

    There’s a trick to getting small-caps to work on the web, and it’s counter-intuitive. Let’s say you had an abbreviation, like CSS, that you wanted to put into small-caps, say with a little extra tracking. You might think you could use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps, and you’d be good to go. Not so. Here’s…

  • “P” is for parking–-you could’ve fooled me

    The first time I noticed the green P sign in Owosso, MI, I thought it was trying to tell me that the road was going to make some weird loop back onto itself. After a few seconds I suspected it might actually have to do with parking (which, of course, it does). It was one…

  • Helvetica vs Arial comparison

    I was on the phone with Adam and interrupted him because I noticed a commercial that switched fonts from Helvetica Bold in the middle of the spot to Arial Bold in the closing frames. The fonts are so similar that they really shouldn’t have switched. It was probably an oversight, but I was startled by…

  • Stay up-to-date through our…what?

    Okay, so…when I first glanced at this text, I did a triple-take because I thought it read, “The best way to stay updated with the Design Encyclopedia is through our ass… It’s actually “RSS,” not some kinky techie-mojo. Just thought I’d share. (It’s from The Design Encyclopedia, which is actually a cool project.)