Bent on Creation

What to Ship?

Posted May 15th, 2010 at 12:47 am

I love Seth Godin. I take his blog posts like a daily multivitamin (and enjoy it like I would dessert).

Lately, he’s focused a lot of attention on what keeps people from doing the important work they want and need to do.

To succeed, you must “ship.” (The artist ships by finishing a painting, the writer ships by getting the manuscript out the door.) People fail to ship primarily because of fear. If we never ship that great idea we’re always talking about or the pet project that’s been languishing, we never have to find out that it wasn’t such a great idea after all, or that people didn’t like it, want it or need it.

But what if you have too many ideas, too many projects? What if you can’t decide which project to work on? What if you find it impossible to focus on only one thing at a time and the time you have is already limited? How do you choose? And when you choose, how do you make yourself stick with that one thing, rather than jumping to something else?

That’s my problem. I like having a lot of projects going at once. Projects that are larger than the free time I have to devote to them. So no one project ever receives enough time to actually get finished.

Perhaps what I need is outside pressures: wagers with friends, a splurge purchase as reward or just a personal deadline — if 1.0 isn’t shipped by X date, the project is permanently grounded, never to be picked up again.

Or, perhaps my projects are overly ambitious and just need to be reduced in scope, so my “deliverables” are more managable. Maybe I’m not being firm about fixing project time and costs, leaving everything completely open-ended. Maybe if I took a more professional approach to my personal projects, I’d see better results.

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Goodbye, Arial

Posted May 8th, 2010 at 12:03 am

2010 is shaping up to be the year of web fonts. More and more sites I visit these days are using services like Typekit to give them broader font options. This makes a huge difference for body type. (I still don’t mind making graphics for headers and nav buttons and so on, but when it came to body copy, there was no way around using Arial, Verdana, Georgia or Times.) It’s so enjoyable to be reading content on sites like Frank Chimero’s in fresh typefaces.

So, with my new redesign, I started looking at options. I tried Typekit (which seems to be the darling of the font services), but hate the idea that I’m relying on a paid web service to provide me something so integral to my site design. Not only do I have to keep paying every month, but if the service has outages, readers are left with the old stand-bys.

I started looking for other options and came across FontSpring. FontSpring isn’t a web service — you pay once (and only once) for a web license. Then you serve the font from your own server in a variety of formats (TrueType, EOT, SVG, etc.) to get maximum browser coverage. (See Browser Font Support on this page.)

I’d been looking for News Gothic and found a version digitized by FontSite Inc. (News Gothic was originally designed in 1908 and has been digitized by several font foundries.) I believe most people are using the Monotype version, and not having heard of FontSite Inc. before, I was concerned. But I went ahead and paid the $19.44 for the complete family in OpenType format, plus the web license for unlimited domains and everything needed to serve up the web fonts.

I uploaded the stylesheets and font formats allowed by the web license with relative ease. Initially there was a flicker as the font loaded. (The site would load in Arial and then switch over to News Gothic in a split second.) This is annoying, but I’ve seen it on other sites using services like Typekit. But I noticed Jeffrey Zeldman was using a web font for some of his headers and I was getting no flicker on his site. Turns out he is using FontSpring as well, and he had the Base64-encoded TrueType version of the font embedded right in his stylesheet (one of the options that came with FontSpring). I switched to that and no more flicker!

My grievance is that News Gothic isn’t comparable in size to the default san-serif web fonts. (13px News Gothic is closer to 11px Arial.) So if the browser had to fall back to the standard fonts, the copy would be unreadable and ridiculous looking. I don’t know if these kind of size differences are common, or if it could be a problem with FontSites’ digitization. Still not sure what to do about that, but given that FontSpring covers all major browsers, it shouldn’t affect the vast majority of visitors.

Overall, I’m happy with the results! I’m using News Gothic Medium for the body copy and New Gothic DemiBold for the headers. (Medium is a tad stronger than I’d like for the body, but it was that or News Gothic Book and Book looked too thin.)

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Bent on Creation

Posted May 5th, 2010 at 5:43 pm

And there was title, and there was body–the first post.

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Jeremy is an interdisciplinary web designer who has been building websites for nearly 15 years. Equal parts graphic designer and programmer, he’s as much at home in Photoshop as code. He’s a wannabe entrepreneur, writer, musician and urban homesteader. He spends most of his free time with his wonderful wife and two adorable kiddos. More ›