Archive for May, 2009

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

News Bulletin: The Internet Says Hello to Typography

Will it be love at first sight or a bitter, bitter marriage with no possibility of divorce?

Pandora’s little black box is about to be opened. Soon, very soon, most common browsers will support the @font-face CSS directive. Web designers will have at their disposal any TrueType or OpenType font that legally allows for web embedding. What does that mean to you? Well, brace yourself for a web full of unreadable, kooky typefaces, messy grunge fonts, and lots and lots of imitation handwriting.

And that's not all. Designers will want to use commercial fonts that are meticulously designed with readability and balance in mind. Unfortunately, because the directive requires that the font file be downloaded by the client machine (and therefore accessible to anyone on the web), the use of said fonts will constitute a legal violation. So the fonts we hate will be given free reign while the fonts we love will remain private treasures.

That having been said, there is a bright side. I have a few predictions: Reputed foundries will release free, ... READ MORE»

Tags: font-face, typography
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

The 3 Transparencies of Advertising: Part One

Something was bothering me. A quiet nagging in the back of my mind that said, "Are you sure about that?" every time I stated that good advertising is informational. David Ogilvy built an advertising empire by disseminating information the right way—he chose the most relevant information to convey and then did so as clearly and concisely as possible. And it worked. Then he wrote a book or two, and several decades later those books transformed my perspective on advertising.

But Ogilvy's great successes were on paper and ink. His understanding of TV was limited, and I just couldn't wrap my head around this fact: Television commercials are unbelievably expensive. They are tested rigorously, and tested using technology that wasn't even a dream in Ogilvy's time. They are designed to succeed.

So if information sells, then why aren't TV commercials informational? Half the time I see a commercial, I have no idea what it has to do with the product. But we know that these commercials work. The Superbowl is a perfect example, if ever there was one. A company creates a commercial that has nothing to do with its product but keeps millions of viewers entertained for ... READ MORE»

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