Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font

WordPress Blog Theme

The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:

• It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
• It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
• Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
• I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.

Typekit Web Fonts

I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because:

• Frank Lloyd Wright is associated with the Valley of the Sun because of his Taliesin West architectural school and the Arizona Biltmore, the latter of which he did not design but did inspire. To me, Wright’s letter forms are emblematic of the southwest region I live in. (The letters that inspired the Eaglefeather font were from the Eagle Rock project in Los Angeles, California– still a part of the “southwest.”)
• The southwestern themed font ties in with my blog’s current title, “Just Singin’ & Signin’ in the Sun,” which itself is a takeoff on the lyric “Just singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” from the show Singin’ in the Rain. I’m singin’ and signin’ (American Sign Language interpreting) in the [Valley of the] Sun. Get it? I know. I’m so clever.
• This is a full-featured font with real italics, bold, and bold italics.The font’s swash S’s and distinct forms capture the viewer’s attention and have a certain “wow” factor. When you see a blog in a font you don’t have on your computer, you think, “how did he do that?” and the answer is Web fonts.

Typekit Revisited

If you remember when I wrote why I wasn’t using Typekit Web Fonts yet, you might wonder why I changed my mind. Well, it’s basically because I learned from Matt McInerney, the designer of the font I tried, that his font looked bad bolded and italicized because it was a regular-only font. I should know all about regular-only fonts and why they don’t look good bolded or italicized, but I experienced some temporary synaptic leakage.

Once I tried fonts that had a complement of regular, italic, bold, and bold italic variants, I was quite happy with the way they looked on my blog. And the problem with the CSS selectors was mostly solved by David W. Bole’s list of CSS selectors for the Twenty Ten theme. I’m now happy with the way this and my family blog look with Typekit fonts.

Related Posts from Daniel Greene

• Choosing the right font styles & variants
• Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
• The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)