The Hickensian

12.04.07 Oxford Geek Night 2

18 comments

Oxford Geek Night presentation - showing the difference between Helvetica and Arial

Photo of me pontificating about Helvetica by Drew

Last night was the second Oxford Geek Night, and it was a success, with an even bigger turn out than last time. BBC Oxford were there to cover the event! What particularly warms my cockles is the way that the GeekNights are promoting Oxford as a hive of new media activity, and Natalie really has a lot of credit to take here.

I was also chuffed to pieces that Leigh could come with me this time. Babysitters make it an expensive night out, but it was worth it. We had a good system going where people would talk to me about upcoming projects, and she would kick them. Unintentionally of course.

I had a 15 minute slot, talking on ‘Web Typography: Choosing typefaces for the web’. I was concerned that it was pitched too low, and that the lasting feeling would be one of “we know all this”, but some people said they’d enjoyed and got something out of it. 15 minutes feels like hours when you’re rehearsing, but its no time at all when you’re doing it for real. There’s a lot to cram in, but Josh gets the applause for best use of the 5 minute microslot, with his frenetic rundown of Diarised.

All the links mentioned in my talk are available on de.licio.us, and a pdf of the slides are available here: Web Typography.pdf. There will also be vidcasts of all the sessions available from the GeekNight site soon.

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No.1

∞ Paul Morriss said 1034 days ago:

I’m a bit of an amateur typography buff and I learnt some stuff, particularly the CSS hints at the end. I enjoyed it too. Thanks for doing it.

No.2

∞ Garrett Coakley said 1034 days ago:

I learnt more about effective web typography in that 15 minutes than I have in all the time I’ve been reading books and sites about the subject. In fact when I got home I immediately removed any instance of Arial from my CSS where it came after Verdana *:)

Thank you, it was a very useful talk.

No.3

∞ Colin Richardson said 1034 days ago:

The Web Typography PDF is excellent, thanks for that. How does Tahoma (falling back onto Geneva for Mac) fare? It’s not in the list of ten but according to this it’s an option.

No.4

∞ Tim Beadle said 1034 days ago:

Hi Jon!

If you want zero-financial-cost babysitting, get together a babysitting circle on MyNightOff (replete with doesn’t-realise-it’s-a-parody 2.0-compliant logo).

That assumes you have friends with kids for whom you could babysit in return, of course, but still.

No.5

∞ Jon Hicks said 1034 days ago:

@Colin – yes absolutely!

@Tim – if we had friends and family able to babysit, we’d use them! Wasn’t possible in this instance however. If MyNightOff was able to magically clone babysitting friends and family I’d be interested! ;o)

No.6

∞ Bart said 1034 days ago:

I might be mistaken, but is Times New Roman in the Top 10 Web Fonts actually set in Palatino?

No.7

∞ Mark James said 1034 days ago:

Thanks for the talk Jon (and everyone else, was a really great night even despite sat-nav leading Josh and I on a bit of a wild ride before the event).

You mentioned Lucida Grande in your talk, I just want to add that I’ve been having trouble with using Lucida variants (I’m a code monkey at heart, so any little CSS problem can throw me for weeks). Firstly is that Windows tends to mess up rendering of bold/italic variants of Unicode, which can be fixed by specifying ‘Lucida Sans’ as a replacement only for strong/em/etc which is a fairly common font coming in at around 60-70% of PC users.

The second issue, which leads directly from using Lucida Sans is that some Windows users to my website have reported the body text displaying like garbage at small sizes (entirely illegible) in both Firefox and IE, with no dependence upon character antialising. I havn’t had the time to track it down — or update my website for the past year, come to that — but I’m pretty sure it has something to do specifying Lucida Sans when users have installed the Java runtime (only on Windows). The options are to put up with shoddy rendering of type on bold/italics for all Windows users, use the ‘fix’ (which creates an entirely illegible page for a very small minority), or switch to a different font altogether. Bit of a shame really.

On a different note, any ideas for a OS X equivalent of Corbel? I’ve been using it in OS X/iWork (and Consolas in TextMate) recently, and I’d love to be able to use it on the web other than SIFR’d.

No.8

∞ Julian Bennett Holmes said 1034 days ago:

I also may be mistaked, but wasn’t Arial in the Top 10 Web Fonts actually set in Helvetica? I see a tail on the A…

No.9

∞ Chris J. Davis said 1034 days ago:

I am sure the talk was excellent. I am thinking of turning up for one of these sometime soon…

No.10

∞ Simon Whitaker said 1034 days ago:

Hi Jon, it was such a mixed crowd last night that it would have been impossible for anyone to pitch a talk that was right for everyone, but personally I’d echo the other comments here – I learned a lot about a subject I know much less about than I’d like and I thought the presentation was really smooth and clear. Plus anyone who can stand in front of 120 geeks and defend Comic Sans deserves some credit in my book! :-)

Simon

No.11

∞ Josh said 1034 days ago:

Thanks for the kind words Jon. It’s not a presentation style I plan on repeating often!

Sorry, I have to ‘fess up, it was me hissing at Comic Sans. That font still haunts me from the earliest days of desktop publishing. But the presentation was great. Any chance to wach someone who really cares talk about type is a joy.

Oh, and I’m sad about Mark’s observations about Lucida. I’ve been desperately trying to stick my head in the sand on that one for nearly a year now – http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/001371.html – anyone got any suggestions or fixes?

No.12

∞ paul haine said 1034 days ago:

Sigh, just as I leave Oxford…

No.13

∞ David Hughes said 1034 days ago:

It’s all your fault Hicks!

You’ve turned me into a type junkie.

First your talk at @Media 2006, then I spotted the Loxley Type book on your site which I bought and loved and now I just can’t stop thinking about type!

So I do type now and again… I can handle it…

PS thanks for the feedback on Segment Publishing – they are fantastic.

No.14

∞ Ben said 1034 days ago:

Ahh the Jericho Tavern. Do they still put bands on there?

No.15

∞ Will said 1033 days ago:

Thanks for the pdf – very informative :D. Wish I could have been there.

No.16

∞ Sebhelyesfarku said 1033 days ago:

Comic Sans is retarded.

No.17

∞ Steven Tew said 1033 days ago:

It was good to finally see you talk in person Jon. I missed you at @media2006 because I was in the other room watching Jeremy Keith plug holes in CSS with an Irish accent. However, I did download your podcast from the Vivabit site, and Wednesday was a nice refresher for me.

Was that Rachel Andrew I saw working the floor?