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.

For years I’ve wanted to design a t-shirt. Actually, I have already designed a t-shirt, and it was worn by over 1000 first year students at my university during my 4th year of a 3 year degree (it actually took me 5 to finish, but that’s another story).

So over the years I’ve come up with a few ideas but haven’t committed them to pixels yet. So in David Airey fashion, here are a few designs I finally chose to put together. Tell me what you think, and if you hang out on any t-shirt design sites, tell me which sites you like best.

I do still have one of the first shirts I helped design. It was done using CorelDraw! 5, one of my all time pieces of software so perhaps I’ll post a pic sometime soon.

Follow me on Twitter here, and check out my Flickr. But like I said, write some comments and let me know what you’re thinking!

Admittedly not the greatest example of hand typography, but dang funny at the right time:

I have a few other items posted on my Flickr page, so check it out!

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.

In celebration of my 1 year wedding anniversary, I wanted to revisit something that completely blew my mind, and renewed inside me my love of typography, font design and letter shapes – my visit to Dublin, Ireland to see the Book of Kells.

One year ago today my wife and I travelled to Ireland for our honeymoon. I really could go on and on about how great it was, and how we wish we were back there even now, one full year later. Perhaps especially now as the weather here is very similar to the weather there last year. But before I digress too much, I wanted to talk about the Book of Kells.

You’ll have to find examples on the sites listed below, but the illustration and illumination of the Book is simply incredible. There is such precision and fine mathematical detail that scholars are still unsure exactly how a 7^th century scribe (or three) could have created the works. The image here shows a page that was never completed… over 1200 years ago. You can see some text through the page on the other side. The image illustrates how a complex illuminated manuscript page was laid out.

I didn’t get to see the Book of Kells until much later in our journey when we returned to Dublin around June 18th, 2008. But when we were in Knowth I picked up a copy of George Bain’s Celtic Art – The Methods Of Construction.

This book *completely* floored me. George Bain is said to have been responsible for the resurgence of celtic inspired art beginning in the early 50′s. Celtic Art contains an entire chapter on Lettering and an incredible collection of copies of the letters and ornamented capitals from not only the Book of Kells, but also the Book of Durrow as well as the Lindisfarne Gospels… two other famous illuminated manuscripts. I counted more than 5 different versions of the letter A! All hand-drawn by George Bain from copies of books as well as stonework he had seen while travelling the countryside.

There are chapters on knotwork, including the use of knotwork for use in clothing, metal and stone carving. There is also a chapter on zoomorphics, which is the inclusion of animal images within the shapes of the letters themselves (like this one) as well as anthromorphs, where images of humans are tied up in the letters such as the ones in the corner shown here.

Bain’s book really is an incredible achievement, and it gives an amazing taste for the type of design found in the Book of Kells. If you want to create celtic art, you NEED Bain’s book Celtic Art.

Ok that’s enough for me. Its late. I could keep writing but I think I should get some sleep

References for this post:

• Book Of Kells DVD - http://www.bookofkells.com – I bought it, its FANTASTIC.
• Kells Travel Info – http://www.myguideireland.com/kells
• History of the Monastery - http://www.heritagetowns.com/kells.shtml
• An article by Michelle Brown of the British Library - http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/c-d/celts07b.html
• Dunn, J. (1910). Book of Kells. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.Retrieved June 11, 2009 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08614b.htm
• Wikipedia contains some excellent images and far more references and resources –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_kells
• Review of the facsimile edition, 1958: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2865000 – man, I would LOVE to have a facsimile of this. Article starts at the bottom of that page, but you’ll need access to JSTOR to read all of it.
• Location of Facimilies – University of Rochester (acquired 1952): http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=2457, University of British Columbia: http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/kells.html (Yay a Canadian copy!)
• Another book about the Book of Kells

I saw this and just had to share it:

And now… for some beautifully kerned Helvetica. Ok just kidding. I don’t have Helvetica installed! I know, its a crime. I’ll have to track one down.

Image of Arial created in Adobe Illustrator with some tracking applied.

I suppose either Arial or Verdana can both fight for the spot of “the new Helvetica”.

Check out XKCD for social commentary… but mostly jokes for computer and tech geeks.

I am working on a new website regarding Google Chrome and I started doing some preliminary thoughts on the design, so I did a search for “font used in Google Chrome” and came upon this great site at chromium.org: http://dev.chromium.org/user-experience/visual-design

Turns out the default font in Chrome is the system font… duh! On XP, that means Tahoma (11pt). I remember working as a graphic artist and being able to recognize fonts and recall their name on sight… a skill which has sadly drifted away. I mean… I know the difference between Arial and Lucinda! But I should have picked up on the Tahoma thing. Admittedly, sometimes the differences between Tahoma and Verdana escape me unless I’m comparing them directly…. no actually Verdana is pretty recognizable on second thought.

(Although none of them look that great at 18pts as shown above. Verdana really shines when its really small, which is actually one of its main advantages).

So on XP, the text in the tabs is Tahoma, and on Vista it is Segoe, and so on for each operating system that will eventually run Google Chrome.

I plan on spending more time looking at the design notes of Chromium and Chrome and we’ll see how in-depth I can submerge myself in the development of Google’s newest (and first!) web browser: Google Chrome!

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.