11/02/10

Type Joan Capri, tipografia en moviment

Posted in .in-catalan, Animation, Typography | No Comments » Tweet This Post

11/04/09

Design New post, new blog. Design and usability improvements

Posted in Blogosphere, Design, Interface, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 1 Comment » Tweet This Post

Finally it’s gone live! The fourth design iteration in my blog.

Basically the highlights are:

• Readability: dark text over white background. Graphics and color gone.
• Helvetica, helvetica, helvetica: as much as I love Lucida Grande I found Helvetica to render pages on IE closer to the original than Lucida (blame the usual MSuspects).
• Large fonts: let’s face it, we don’t read blogs. We read feeds and if by chance we land on a blog we skim over the headlines. So I decided to make them really big to make your life easier
• Twitter and Facebook killed the blogging star? No problem. I integrated both of them in the blog. Twitter on the homepage and both in the lifestream section.
• Tweet this: as a Twitter lover (aren’t we all) I usually tweet blog posts I like. Here it can’t get any easier with the Tweet this post link in the header of each post. Look for the birdie.
• My Web 2.0 persona in my blog: Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, my shared items on Google and del.icio.us are all shared in the lifestream section.
• Related posts: under each post you’ll find a list of 3 posts related to the one you’re reading. It’s impressive how the automated selection algorithm gets it right (courtesy of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
• Categories and tags navigation: at the bottom of each page you’ll find the blog categories. Not 2.0 enough? Click on tags and a nice tagclould will appear to satisfy the folksonomist in you.

Hope you like it.

21/12/07

For web designers only

Posted in Design, Programming, Typography, Web 2.0, Wordpress | 3 Comments » Tweet This Post

An excellent pick of resources for web designers. Blogs, tutorials, fonts, themes, stock photos, CSS templates and many more for you to choose from. Not the usual free-for-all crappy stuff you find around.

Head to forwebdesigners.com (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) and start browsing and downloading.

A word of advice: you can spend so much time browsing cool stuff that you may end up doing nothing. But you probably know the feeling if you’re reading this.

08/12/07

Three things you (probably) don’t know about the iPhone

Posted in Apple, Interface, Typography, Usability | No Comments » Tweet This Post

By now, everything has been written, reviewed, praised and criticized about Apple’s iPhone. But there’s three features that don’t hit the highlights too often.

Helvetica everywhere!!!

Yes, Helvetica is the font for the iPhone. No Verdana nor pixel fonts but plain old Helvetica in decent readable sizes of up to 20px with nice antialiasing. Check the iPhone’s design guidelines at Apples Developer Center. (by the way, Helvetica the movie is out. Go and watch it)

Screen resolution of 160 dpi

When I first saw an iPhone I thought it still had the plastic film that covers most phones with some icons printed on it. Wrong. I was actually looking at the bright icons at a resolution of 160 dots per inch. Our eyes are used to dealing with screen resolutions ranging from 72 to 96 dpi. (I had the same impression when I first saw the Sony Reader).

The mic in the headset controls iTunes

This was the last feature I discovered and it was just some weeks ago. The distinctive white headphones come with a small microphone attached to the right chord. Well, if pressed while listening to iTunes it pauses the song, if pressed twice it skips the current song and if pressed while ringing it answers the call.

And all this without ever reading the phone’s manual.

25/11/07

Great motion typography videoclip from Cuarteto de Nos

Posted in Animation, Design, Music, Typography, Videoclips | No Comments » Tweet This Post

Via Smashing Magazine I find this motion typography videoclip from Uruguaian band Cuarteto de Nos. They make use of this technique for their latest song’s video Ya No Sé Que Hacer Conmigo.

Spanish is a bonus as if you happen to understand it you’ll be able to hear/see how the words match the type and the motion graphics.

This video is no doubt a commercial application (rendition?) of some previous motion typography clips such as Pulp Fiction’s What Does Marcellus Wallas Looks Like? or Abbot & Costello’s Who’s On First. For more of the kind search YouTube by Motion Typography.

Cuarteto de Nos page on YouTube.