Blog Archives
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: Read the rest of this entry
The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)
For those who are in their TypeKit Editor and just want to know the CSS selectors used in the Twenty Ten theme, I am sharing this list compiled by David W. Boles. Thank you very much, David!
content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
via United Stage
Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
I tried installing Typekit fonts on this blog, and I almost gave up because the complexity of it reminded me of why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. I suppose it would have been easier if Typekit had built-in support for the Twenty Ten theme, but when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, they didn’t. So I had to open one of my blog pages in Safari, select Develop from the menu (because I installed the optional developer tools), select Show Web Inspector, and study the CSS to suss out what the “selectors” were for the masthead and other sections of the pages I wanted to set the new fonts to. Even knowing CSS, it took some searching through the code to see what was styling what, since Classes and IDs are arbitrarily created by each CSS author.
Once I found the Classes and IDs, I had to go back to the Typekit editor (which always took a long time to load, as did everything else on the Typekit site) and manually enter the “selectors” I wanted to apply the fonts to. I found that I had to do it with periods in front rather than hashmarks, or maybe it was the other way around— I would have to be writing CSS on a regular basis to get it right, and who does? (If you do, then you wouldn’t find it complicated at all, but then you might as well have a WordPress.org site and not a WordPress.com site, eh?)
I break for descenders
Notice anything interesting about the sentence in this screenshot? Yes, it contains every letter in the English latin alphabet. Incidentally, it is set in Lucida Grande regular typeface. But what’s interesting about it, to me, is how the underlining breaks around the descenders— those tails of the letters q, j, p, y, and g that "descend" below the baseline.
I learned a long time ago that professional typography calls for minimal use of underlining, and when you must underline, you should place the underlines by hand so that they break before and after descenders. That way, you don’t get aesthetically displeasing line crossings on the letters.
What I didn’t know was that Mac OS X’s TextEdit program automatically breaks underlines before and after descenders. I don’t know when this feature was added, but I never noticed it before now. It’s great that there’s a program that automates the breaking of underlines so that they don’t cross descenders. It’s interesting to me that TextEdit — a program that comes with the Mac OS — does this, but Pages, a more advanced text editing and layout application, does not. I think it would be a good thing if Pages would offer all the features that TextEdit offers. Perhaps they will integrate Pages more with the Mac OS X font panel in the next version. I notice you can use the font panel to choose fonts and styles in Pages, but the underlining does not break around descenders in Pages the way it does in TextEdit— or MacJournal, for that matter, which integrates with the Font Panel as well as TextEdit does.
Am I missing something? Does Pages ’09 automatically break underlines around descenders? Are there other word processing programs that do? I would love to hear more about this from your experience.
Why are there nearly identical fonts?
I learned from the movie Helvetica that the reason Arial is nearly identical to Helvetica is that Microsoft didn’t want to pay license fees to distribute the Helvetica font so they hired Monotype to modify Linotype’s Helvetica slightly. They just made sure to keep the same font metrics so that a document written in Helvetica would have the same layout and pagination in Arial and vice versa.
But I don’t always understand why there are other fonts that are nearly identical but with different font metrics and/or line spacing; for instance, why are Monotype Corsiva and Apple Chancery so similar? Is it because Apple wanted their own copyright on a font similar to Monotype Corsiva? And why are Bordeaux Roman Bold LET and Monotype Onyx so similar? Is it because Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create Onyx in 1992 after LET created Bordeaux Roman Bold in 1990? Or is there just a “me too” factor involved, in which each foundry wants a product to fulfill similar demands?
I’ve spent some time looking at the differences and similarities, and I’ve noticed that Bordeaux Roman Bold has ligatures and a more extended character repertoire than Onyx, though Onyx is a bit bolder and easier on the eyes. Also, I like the tighter line spacing of Onyx. So it’s a hard to choose a favorite between Bordeaux Roman Bold and Onyx. It’s easy to pick Apple Chancery over Monotype Corsiva because Apple Chancery has a beautiful set of of both common and rare ligatures, more calligraphic letters (especially the slashed dot on the lowercase i), and a much larger character repertoire than Corsiva. When it comes to extended characters, Times New Roman beats Times, but I’ll choose Times almost every time because of its pretty ligatures. If I needed to format a text with rarer characters, though, I would choose Times New Roman. As with the choice between any two similar fonts, it comes down to the application— how many extended characters do you need for what you want to write?
