David sent me this article, discussing and demonstrating some of the new text rendering features in Firefox 3, compared to Safari. Finally, we have kerning. Hurrah! It really works, too. Now kern-sensitive souls can read Textism without having to scroll the site name off the top of the viewport.

Firefox also supports contextual and discretionary ligatures, which I was fully prepared to get quite excited about until I read that it appears to be somewhat broken when presented with languages other than English. As Ralf Herrmann points out, contextual ligatures are dependent on more than the context of neighbouring characters - the context of language matters too. Fancy that. The Turkish example is especially interesting, as the dotted-i and dotless-i are not interchangable, and using one in place of the other has caused deaths, quite recently too:

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter - product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system - caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath. Gizmodo - rest of story here

As most of my work involves working in multiple languages, I tend to be a bit sensitive to things like this; where developers of a product build in a cultural or linguistic bias even when that product is destined for an international audience. The Firefox team clearly aren’t just intending their browser to be used within the confines of the United States - just one look at this map shows their global ambition. So they should have fully implemented the rules for contextual ligatures in other languages, if they’re going to do it at all. I’m sure it’s an oversight, but if you’re going to do something, you should always try and do it properly - after all, the ligatures could be turned off for languages where the rules haven’t yet been implemented.

But still, kerning! In a browser!

Yes, more stamps! This time courtesy of Richard at Ace Jet 170 who posted this article about a set of Israeli stamps he bought. They depict three environmental concerns, air pollution, water pollution and noise pollution, and were apparently designed by Eliezer Weishoff (thanks to Yotam for the info). The stamp itself shows the problem situation with an additional detachable design depicting (iconographically) the ideal; butterflies visit flowers, fish swim among seaweeds and ears hear birdsong. Yes, that is an ear - the least successful image of the three I think - though I do like the birds in the tear-off.

I was asked for prints of the Polish stamp designs and I’d certainly like to, but I need to research the copyright. I traced the designs for my own understanding, and I’d love it for more people to see these designs at large scale and up close, but I’m not going to violate anyone’s copyright - I am a designer after all! Of course, if anyone’s a copyright lawyer in the UK/EU and fancies offering some tips, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I saw pictures of these stamps on Ace Jet 170, and was absolutely fascinated by them. I love the illustrations of the orbits and paths taken by the space vehicles - the Łunnik 3 (Luna 3) one especially. As usual, I felt compelled to redraw them so as to understand them better, and they really are very well done - the orbits of Mars, Earth and Venus aren’t drawn perfectly circular, and the relative sizes of the planets are nicely visualised. The whole collection looks to have been a celebration of 60 years since the publication of Konstanty CioÅ‚kowski’s treatise on powered spaceflight “Изслѣдованiе мировыхъ пространствъ реактивными приборами” (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices), in 1903 - showing some of the results of the research his work started.

The first (or tenth?) stamp in the collection was devoted entirely to him, and the illustration is that of a design for a powered spacecraft from the cover of published versions of his paper - my redrawing of it is at right. The others show a variety of space missions, with the interesting date convention of having the month depicted with roman numerals. It’s not something I’d come across before, but it looks quite useful*. No longer would Americans and Europeans have any doubt over whether 01/03/08 is the 1st of March or the 3rd of January. Anyway, that’s another one of my must-do-something-with-this bookmarks cleared up, and it’s been quite a fun process in redrawing them. Here are the images I made based on the stamps. I’ve got them as vectors, so I’m thinking of getting them printed out A3 size.

* Update: Piotr Szotkowski sent me a useful bit of info regarding this, “Using Roman numerals for denoting months is still quite popular in Poland. The popularity is a bit waning since the fall of the Eastern Block, but the elder generations still use them quite often, especially in hand writing.”

Well, not quite, and I don’t think even I would go that far. However, as Swissmiss (from where I got this link) rightly points out, this is more of an Enhance Flickr, which is good, as Flickr certainly needs a serious redesign. From the site itself:

DestroyFlickr explores alternative methods for viewing and sharing Flickr content. Its user interface provides an environment that benefits photos rather than hindering them.

Go and take a look, and have a play round with it.

This video I found while trawling through Computerlove - apparently it’s old and may well have been posted elsewhere, but when has that ever been a concern? I’ve never seen it before today, so I’m going to put it here. So there.

I like the shapes that form different letters depending on which way you look at them. I wonder if you could have a set of shapes that each show different characters (say, from three directions) with no repetition? It’d be tricky, especially if you restricted it all to one typeface… Even if not, I wouldn’t mind a couple of the ones in the video, just to play with, you know?

It’s got to that point: I’ve got three browser windows open with more tabs in each than there’s room for (hello little arrow at the right of the tab bar) so maybe I should get on with doing something about them.

First up is the work of Jason Munn. I’d come across the books poster before, but for some reason not gone on to Munn’s website, The Small Stakes which has the added bonus of allowing you to buy some of his work. There’s a short, but interesting, interview with him on Grain Edit too. Go and have a look at his site though… it’s a shame the National Novel Writing Month one isn’t available to buy! It’s one of my favourites, along with the book one of course:

Note: I found the NNWM poster here.

I spotted this in a recent copy of Wired Magazine. It’s an advert for (of all things) the Zune, making use of stacked, 3D-rendered type. Nowadays, such an effect is quite simple - just see some of the tutorials in PSDTUTS - but looks rather impressive. Massing the type together like this adds to the effect and makes for a pleasing composition. So I nabbed the pages out of the magazine and scanned them in*.

* Which makes it sound oh-so-simple, but when Canon insists on hiding its drivers, obfuscates the filenames of said drivers, provides multiple near-identically labelled files with only a minor difference you can barely spot, and then none of which turn out to work on OS X 10.5 (because really, you should buy a new scanner every two years shouldn’t you?) So you end up paying some dollars to the marvellous VueScan to take the pain away. Why is it that manufacturers’ printer and scanner software is so bad?

I (re)discovered PSDTUTS today, with this rather nice grass effect. I must admit to having a certain soft spot for tutorials like these - a lot of them are just fun to play with and are usually too limited for any kind of professional use in themselves, but there’s always something useful to be discovered. Take this lighting effect for example, I’ve created similar things to this before and they’ve been very effective - some subjects (and clients) demand near photo-realism like this. Be sure to have a play around with the grass, fire and the lighting tutorials. If nothing else you can make a nice vanity desktop for yourself.

I just read this fascinating article on GT!Blog, presenting a theory of why Japan never made the iPod. The basic premise is due to the increased memory and processing requirements of representing Japanese text on screen adequately, Japanese manufacturers tended to develop appliances, rather than general purpose computers. So Japan (and by extension, east Asia in general) became leaders in electronic gadgetry such as games consoles, fax machines, watches, stereos and the like, with the trend reaching its (possible) apotheosis with the mobile phone - not one of which devices required a general purpose personal computer as the connecting hub. Each device did its thing, and was specialised for that - if anything became close to a general purpose device, it was the mobile phone itself, though it was, and is, quite limited in what it can do and what people want it to do.

Now, as the article points out, modern computers can handle Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, etc.) and the computer-as-hub idea is gaining popularity in east Asia, but it’s fascinating how the typographic requirements of a language have apparently altered the entire economy (and culture!) of not just a country or region, but the whole world.

Using the characters from the GT!Blog article, you can see how an 8×8 grid is inadequate for representing Kanji.

I’ve had this link on Hello Bauldoff hanging around for ages - the design of the box and the bold typography are fantastic, and the colours in the photo really appeal. One thing I noticed was the old-style General Mills logo which is far nicer than the version on their website, though they still use the crazy ‘G’ symbol. It’s the kind of thing that would drive me bonkers if I had to stare at it at breakfast every morning - is it a ‘G’? Is there an ‘M’ in there? Or is it some bonkers ampersand?

I know it’s the main point of the campaign they’re doing, but I’d remove the t-shirt promo flash, or massively simplify it - to me it looks like it’s trying too hard for that retro-Americana thang. The rest of the box carries that off perfectly, so it’s just not necessary.