On Seeing Webfonts

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Mark Boulton is an accomplished designer, author and all-around authoritative contributor on many things Web.

He recently linked to a Stephen Coles-penned article by the name of The Webfont Revolution Is Over, Let the Evolution Begin. It’s a good read, and primarily focuses on the need for producing fonts that render clearly and legibly under many different screen conditions (OS makes, browsers, font sizes, etc.).

The “money quote” for me read as follows:

Demand fonts that render well for the bulk of all web users, not just those on Mac OS X or Windows 7, but also the poor saps on Windows XP who still represent more than half of the browsing population.

What I find particularly curious about said article and the linking to it by said party is that the webfont on MarkBoulton.co.uk, his personal (and recently-refreshed) weblog, looks absolutely terrible under some not-so-unlikely conditions.

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On What’s Possible & What’s Ideal

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

After reading Fred Wilson’s post on creativity, along with its comments, I’ve had plenty to chew on for the past couple days. I obviously suggest you read it as well, but the main points as I see them are thus:

• The Technology industry is historically an engineering-driven one
• Engineering is the “how” and Creative is the “why”
• The Web has matured to the point that the “how” is something of a given
• This leaves the “why” as an area of differentiation
• Thus, bolstering your Creative team is a wise move
• Bonus: Does this significantly alter the nature of the industry?

Let’s get one thing out of the way quickly: “Creative” is a terminological can of worms and unhelpful for the discussion because of its interpretations multitude, which the author basically cops to in the opening paragraphs. I’m assuming for the purposes of the point he was making it was used as shorthand for “a thinker” instead of “a doer”; of course, that’s also a notion that’s difficult to fit in a box, which speaks to an issue of context:

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