Typografriday: Lost World Fairs

The observant among you may have noticed that the type here at the ‘Agree is a little different. We’re dipping our toe in elegant typography using typekit, and we’re pleased as punch about it. If you don’t know much about using good type on the web yet, but want your site to look good (like ours does we hope, or like my brother’s blog which inspired us to take the plunge, or like thedieline) we definitely recommend it.

If you want to figure out how to make your site look unbelievably good, you should definitely head over to Jason Santa Maria’s site. He not only puts together some of the best examples of good web type, but he’s one of the clearest voices on explaining the new tools and finally, not coincidentally, one of the primary developers of those tools, including Typekit and the WOFF format.

His latest blog entry is a detailed behind-the-scenes of the making of the most fantastic typographic things on the web yet. Lost World’s Fairs. This was made to promote IE9’s support of WOFF (just when most of us were about seven years into considering IE dead). Santa Maria’s Moon one shows live type on a slant, shifted baselines and slant within a text box, overlapping text, text behind alpha masked objects and other things you thought the web couldn’t do. Naz Hamid‘s El Dorado has lovely overlapping transparent type, shifted letter by letter. (Yeah that’s all live css type… Crazy right?) And Frank T Chimero‘s Atlantis one is particularly awesome, combining excellent use of extended slab Hellenic and Simonson’s Avenir-contender Proxima Nova plus extended scrolling-as-narrative movement a la the best webcomic I can remember, When I am King.

Anyway don’t delay: go look at the Lost World’s Fairs right now. And if you’re curious for more, all of the contributors wrote about the experience: Jason, Frank, Naz, Trent, and Dave

TypograFriday: Newish Sites for Type Lovers

There are tons of websites out there for type fans. Here are three that we’re pretty excited about.

FontStruct

fontstruct
FontSruct
is a free online modular font creator from FontShop. I haven’t gotten a chance to play around with it yet, but from looking through the gallery, people have created some pretty impressive fonts.

Hype For Type

hypefortype
Hype for Type
is a relatively new site featuring fonts by independent type designers — sort of like an independent MyFonts. Here is what they have to say about it:

HypeForType is a hotbed of typographic talent. An online type foundry with a difference. A labour of love for founder Alex Haigh. In fact all this and more. It’s for anyone who has a passion for well crafted type, and nothing short of the highest quality. It’s the realisation of a vision to create a type foundry showcasing the best in today’s typographic talent, as well providing a platform for keen eyed creatives to find and buy truly unique, hand-crafted fonts to complement their work. HypeForType has an impressive catalogue of exceptional typefaces created by independent designers available to buy.

Typekit

Typekit isn’t actually live yet, but you can keep up to date with their progess on their blog. Typekit just got funding (from people like the founders of twitter, flickr and wordpress) so they can continue with the development of their service. It sounds like it could be pretty awesome. In very basic terms Typekit is going to help designers to have more control over fonts they use on the web. Click here to read more about what Typekit will be.

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