Typography & Graphic Design Blog
Today it is a challenge for designers to avoid being seduced by technology. As sophisticated as computer applications may be, they are only tools for the creative mind. Truly successful designs begin with ideas and concepts. As you execute your designs on the computer, your knowledge of typography, combined with your trained eye and aesthetic judgment, will provide the path to the most creative solution.
-James Craig, Designing With Type
It’s time to give a healthy dose of credit where it is due! With so many places to buy shared hosting, reseller hosting, and various VPS services, and with wildly-crazy levels of service and value among the myriad choices, I know it’s helpful to read reviews about web hosting companies from trusted sources. BonFX has been around long enough and has been hosted long enough with the same hosting company to offer a very qualified review. To say the least, Hostnine has been a partner for us and I want to tell you a little about them, and I want you to sign up for them if you need a new web host, reseller or shared, or a cloud VPS. … [Read More]
Simple: at our new sister site Oxbow Domains – the expired domain specialist! If you need high-quality, no-spam expired domains for your PBN, SEO work, or affiliate sites, please check out Oxbow.
We get a lot of traffic about font combinations because of our typography book, font app, font articles, etc. One of the most popular searches that we don’t have any posts or books on is for “free wedding font combinations”. So this is a shout out to anyone searching for some help on how to put together typography for wedding invitations, professional or otherwise, using only freely-available typefaces. Would you be interested in a book dedicated to this topic? From what we can tell there is a lot of interest, but we aren’t sure if it’s enough to justify a dedicated book. Take a look at The Big Book of Font Combinations to get an idea of what a wedding invitation focused book might look like. … [Read More]
The nbcnews.com website was already declining when the silly redesign was launched in February. They had a functional site, but the hyper-partisan cheerleading, I mean news reporting, was the real issue behind their decline in the first place. The overly-picturesque giant-comic-book redesign effort, which was an attempt at a branding turnaround, simply hastened the continued decline in visitors because it was simply unreadable as a source of news. Apparently, some Very Smart People™ at nbcnews.com thought mixing partisan news, coloring books, and Flickr, would equal a turnaround in the decline of their viewership. It did not work. So how does the new design look, which is available for the moment in a preview opt-in section of the site? In a word, improved: 
There are now 17+ story links above the fold, and a full suite of site navigation tools to quickly get you some place else. And if you flip to a mobile device, you get a very-workable no-nonsense sans-comic-book layout and typographic treatment (hidden pun in there, for sharp-readers only). The mobile view looks good too: 
Overall, we can see it’s very much a work in progress, but progress in the right direction. What about Search? Let’s quote my previous post on this: “BTW: Don’t even click “Search” unless YOU ARE READY FOR SOME SERIOUS SEARCHING! WOOHOO! You clicked “Search”, didn’t you. You were warned.” Hopefully they’ll fix that search box before the real site goes live :). In the meantime, if you want a ton of news in a legible format, try Real Clear Politics (for desktop) or the Real Clear Politics app (for mobile). You’ll get a cross-section of headlines from all major news outlet in a cohesive, news-focused UI that knows what it is trying to do. 
