Yes, I am a Typegeek, but I don’t know near as much about type and typography as I’d like. That’s why I’m glad David Airey pointed out this reference to Font Shop’s Education resources.

There is a wealth of information at Font Shop’s Education site, in fact about 72 pages worth of typographic goodies and information, broken down into sizable bits. The largest e-book (they are all .pdf files) is Meet Your Type: A Field Guide To Typography weighing in at 52 pages.

The other booklets are easier to handle at 9 pages or 2 pages. I think I’ve found my bedtime reading tonight! It’s a great way to learn about fonts and typography used in graphic design.

I’ve just returned home from a week vacation in the Mexican Mayan Riviera, and now I want to store my pictures on my netbook so my wife can look at them, and easily share them with friends. An probably post them to my Flickr account!

The problem is, my 8 mega-pixel camera generates images that are 3296 x 2472 (that means 3296 pixels wide and 2472 pixels tall) but the screen on my netbook (an Asus eeePC) is only 800×468.

Storing them directly on the netbook takes up a lot of storage space as each image is 2.01 MB  in size, and viewing them in the slideshow method is very slow since the images are so large and are being rescaled to appear on the small screen.

The way to fix this is to resize all the pictures to make them smaller (screen-wise AND according to the amount of space they take up on the hard drive) and keep those on the netbook.

I’ve chosen Photoshop CS4 to do this. I’ve just downloaded the 30 day trial version from Adobe.com (its Photoshop’s 20th anniversary!). If you have a different version of Photoshop on your computer, try the methods and see how far you can get… it might still work!

To start, store all your pictures in a folder on your computer, such as My Documents\My Pictures\Vacation.

Then:

1. Open Photoshop
2. Click File -> Scripts -> Image Processor
   1. If you don’t see the Scripts option, click “Show All Menu Items”



3. Click the Select Folder button in area (1) and browse to the folder where your images are stored, then click OK.
4. In area (2) Select Location to save processed images, you can choose a new location. If you leave it as Same Location, your images will not get overwritten.  A new folder will be created and the modified images will be stored there.
5. Choose your file format (your options are JPEG, PSD or TIFF) and also you can set the Resize to Fit option… which is what we want! I’ve specified 800×600 as it is a standard size, and the netbook will scale it rather nicely.
6. Make sure you set the Quality setting to 10 or 12 (the default was 5), as 12 is the highest level of JPEG compression you can have.  This process will cause a bit of a loss of image quality, but by setting the quality to 12, you probably won’t be able to notice with just your eyes when viewing the image on a computer screen. People concerned with printing high-quality images will probably use TIFF instead.
7. In area (4) at the bottom of the dialog, you can even add some copyright information for your images if you want. This appears in the advanced properties of the file, and is not written onto the image.
8. When you are done setting things up, click the Run button in the top, right corner of the dialog box!

Photoshop will then open every photo individually, make the change, and save the modified photo (with its original name) into the new folder. Since I chose JPEG, folder named JPEG was created. All the images will be modified and have their original file names, but will be stored in the new folder. In my case all the images were JPEG to begin with. If you decide you want all your pictures to be PSD or TIFF, the new folder will have that name instead.

Now with my camera I can take some movies as well. There was a movie file stored in the folder along with the other images, so at the end of the process I received a message saying that the .AVI file could not be processed. All other images were modified… and they look great.

Now I just have to through and crop them all!

Added Bonus:

• My 2.10 MB pictures are now 282 KB each with a Quality setting of 10.
• I re-ran the process again with a Quality setting 12. Each images is now 510 KB but I cannot detect any noticeable difference in quality when viewed on-screen.
• The second run of the procedure didn’t delete the first batch of photos, it renamed them with an _1 at the end of each file name.

As time goes on I’m learning more and more about Google Analytics, and how I can use it to fine-tune my web site.

I’ve recently found a feature called a Site Overlay, which is a tool that lets you see what parts of your site visitors click on when they visit it. After the redesign of my navigation tabs a few days ago, here is what the click patterns look like now:

Click to view larger.

Before the change I had noticed that 25% of my visitors clicked the heading of the blog to get to the main page. 25% also clicked the Home navigation tab, but that was the only tab I had at the time.

Now that I have identified different “content groups” that I have written about in the past, I can now measure which areas of my site are the most widely read. Now this data is still from less than 100 visitors, but over time I will be able to see what articles are gaining the most interest. Not surprising, the Typography category of posts is receiving the most attention, most likely due to the way I am marketing my blog currently.

To see your site overlay:

1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. click on View Report for the site profile you want to see the overlay for
   - Click content in the left menu
   - Click Site Overlay

   Click View Report for the site you are interested in. Click on Content in the left hand menu and you’ll see the Content options:
   

3. Click Site Overlay (you can also find it in the middle of the screen).

At this point a new browser window will open up and you can see your very own site overlay with click percentages!

Other sites of interest:

• Alternatives to Site Overlay when Site Overlay has shortcomings
• A short overview of the Overlay
• It sounds like something Jakob Neilsen would recommend, but here is a link on how to improve site usability which is really the goal

Enjoy this new found power, and use it to improve your site for your readers / visitors. If you have any tips related to site overlay or usability, drop me a comment or send a Tweet.

A few weeks ago I finished reading The Non-Designer’s Type Book by Robin Williams and have been interested in smart quotes ever since. Using smart quotes makes your documents and web pages look more professional, and here’s how to create them.

It’s important to remember that the book itself is aimed at non-designers, so full-time designers will probably find her writing annoying and possibly offensive (in a design-geek sort of way) but for beginners it is a really great book and I’ll probably review it in detail in the future.

Regarding “smart quotes”, they are the curly quotation marks that should be used when quoting a word, phrase or statement that has been stated by another person, or sometimes when something is meant to be said in an ironic sort of way. The quotation mark key on your keyboard doesn’t actually make smart quotes. See a problem here? At the beginning of this paragraph I have used quotation marks incorrectly, but at least I used the proper quotation marks.

The book discusses how to use smart quotes in desktop publishing software but does not mention word processing software such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Although both (and probably all major) word processors have the ability to turn on smart quotes and convert them automatically, this doesn’t always work, and can cause problems.

When using Word, whenever I want a set of smart quotes I am getting into the practice of inserting them using the ALT key in combination with their ANSI/ASCII representation. For example, in Word holding down ALT+0147 will give you a left smart quote, and ALT+0148 will give you a left smart quote. You can try this in Word or simply use the text area below:

Try putting smart quotes around something.

This will work in word processors (Word, Wordperfect, Google Docs, OpenOffice…) as well as web pages and commenting on blogs.

However, when writing HTML you might be safer to use the SGML/XML method. In HTML there are character codes such as   and á (displays as á) for displaying special characters. There is also “ and ” but its recommended that you don’t use them because they are not cross-platform enough.

Instead, use “ to get the left double curly quote like this ( “ ) and ” to get the right double curly quote ( ” ). Remember, this only works if you are editing HTML tags directly.

Now the only thing that ticks me off about using smart quotes is how they are rendered by certain fonts. Verdana is a very popular web font, but to me the smart quotes look awful. As well, Microsoft Office 2007 has switched the default font to Calibri which has better looking quotes than Verdana (at least they are curly) but are still horrible looking IMHO. Check them out, click the image to see its fullsize glory:

When using quotation marks in pull-quotes, I especially like the way Georgia looks… although Adobe Caslon Pro is a close second but they look better large and appear to render badly in MS Word, but I could be wrong.

For more details, Font.com has an excellent article on Smart Quotes. To learn how to use quotation marks properly within a written work, you might want to check this guide and this guide at the OWL at Purdue University (Online Writing Lab).

So there you have it. A short look at smart quotes. Did you know about using smart quotes? Let me know if you’ve had any experiences or if you found this post helpful.

I have written about my curiosity with the Thesis theme for WordPress before and I’ve finally purchased a developer license for it. Here are some thoughts…

My thoughts regarding a fresh install of WordPress and Thesis 1.4.2.

Yesterday I purchased and installed Thesis theme for WordPress (WP) on one of the sites I’ve recently started. A few months ago I had installed WP 2.6 for one site and then abandoned work on it for a while. This month when I went back to it, and decided to upgrade to WP 2.7. Well, because I didn’t really know what I was doing before (possibly because I changed some default settings) the blog is no longer reachable.

One of my skills I feel is being able to present technical information to people in a way they can understand, which is one of the reasons I started this blog. I hope to produce more how-tos and tutorials as time goes by.

Here is one of my favourites. I actually didn’t know until recently that you could produce drop caps in Microsoft Word. While looking for ways to do it in Word 2007, I found ways to do it in the other versions as well.

To add a drop cap to a Word 2003 document:

1. Select the first letter of the sentence that you want to convert to a drop cap .
2. Choose Format -> Drop Cap.
3. A “Drop Cap” dialog box should appear. Select whether you would like a Dropped or In margin drop cap, or you can remove a previously existent cap. In the example above I have used a Dropped cap.
4. Select the font you wish to use.
5. If desired, select a different Distance From Text to make the Drop Cap letter more or less removed from the paragraph.
6. Increase or decrease the Lines to Drop to increase or decrease the size of the Drop Cap letter.
7. Press OK to apply your desired changes.

Details for Word 2007 can be found at this blog article at How-To Geek Blogs, but I may put my own up here eventually. Its really easy.

By the way, the font I used in the above example is Old English and should be available on most computers. Its definitely one of my favourites.

Other links:

• A lesson from Microsoft
• Drop caps in CSS by Mandarin Designs
• Another, more spiffy lesson from M$oft
• Drop Cap in Word 2007, from … uh… Microsoft…

I was actually trying to find one of the video lessons from Redmond but its seems to be hiding. Hmm, I wonder what happens to Google Adsense and my blog search links when I use the word “Microsoft” too often.