Pencils Down » Design

Help for Web Programmers at the Mercy of Designer Fonts

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:43:51 +0000

Working with a client where the designer they hired produced a nice looking design. However, even though promising to just use standard fonts there are a couple of very conspicuous parts of the design that use non-standard fonts. Sound familiar?

Google to the rescue! (I don’t know how they control what people spend time/money developing) I saw a reference to Google Fonts in a HN post the other day. What’s that?

Google Web Fonts provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Web Fonts API.

Just like everything else you can use google for, (especially CDN access to includes and the like) you can make reference to some non-standard font in the Google font set and then use it pretty much like any other font in CSS (have to quote the font name versus plain text(=standard font)). Again, with their simple example:

Making the Web Beautiful!

So, next time you are graced with a design present you can just smile.

Should a Designer Produce HTML and CSS?

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:23:38 +0000

I have a long term client that wants to rework their web site. We tried a designer I had worked with, but they weren’t happy with the result. Probably too much part-time and indirect contact to convey their needs to the designer.

So, they hired a designer on their own. After selection I talked with the guy to make sure it wouldn’t just be a PSD as the output: he agreed. Once the design was agreed upon he didn’t just give me the PSD, he gave me a bunch of PNG files that he cut from the PSD. How nice.

Now we are going into week two of the process trying to get HTML and CSS out of him. I don’t think he has ever done this before. He is good at coming up with nice pictures with the right color schemes and fonts and the like, probably an art background. He is just lost coming up with the parts of the design you need to actually develop a web site – HTML, CSS and Javascript for any widgets/special effects in the design (there are a few).

Maybe I am expecting too much? Every other designer I have worked with has produced the initial HTML… layouts. Maybe I have just been lucky?

Designer Irony

admin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:02:36 +0000

I am working on a site for a marketing company. They mostly specialize in concept marketing, things like brand and image. And, like every other marketing company on the planet these days, they do a fair amount of web design as well.

The design for the site I am working on was designed using a non-standard font face as the primary font. Like everything else it defaults back to Arial et al if that font is not installed on the client browser. There was originally some discussion about auto-download of the font if it’s not there, but that is really not so cool in the web world.

So, step back and review:

The site was designed using that font.
The people at the marketing company all have this other font installed.
The people that work at the marketing company will see a web site.
Most everyone else on the planet does not have that font installed.
They will see Arial and company, effectively a very different site.
Effectively a different brand image of a branding company.

Neat huh?