WebVisions Barcelona, June 27-29th 2013

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WebVisions Barcelona is happening June 27-29th! n with leading web, mobile, UX, DIY and strategy experts, including our own, Thomas Phinney.

WebVisions Barcelona 2013 Thomas Phinney

Thomas Phinney, Guru of Fonts & Typography, is hosting a workshop and session.

 

90% of Design is Typography: A Hands-on Guide to Great Web Fonts & Typography

Thomas Phinney presents an immersive, hands-on workshop on using CSS3 typographic controls to create great web typography. The workshop touches the basics of ideal type setting to enabling custom web fonts with @font-face. A live web site will be provided for each participant to practice and experiment on, along with access to WebINK web fonts.

He’ll also talk about:

  • How “real” web fonts are transforming the web, and exactly how to implement them
  • How to pick the perfect web font for a web site
  • How to choose web fonts that work together
  • The common crimes against legibility and aesthetics, and how to avoid them
  • Issues around color, spacing, line length and font size

 

Typography is the New Black

In recent years web and motion designers have woken to the power and centrality of typography in visual communication. Thomas presents an array of of the best cutting-edge typography, alongside a few cautionary tales of how crap typography can contradict a message or damage a brand.

The best typography can inspire, reinforce a message, or even become the message. You’ll see awesome web sites and videos that show you how that synergy can happen, from simple and elegant to complex and kinetic.

At its worst, lousy typography is like going out in public with your virtual pants down. It can make the brand presented look amateur, absurd, or even racist.

These real-world examples will show you how typography enhances or dismembers your intended messaging, and how you can create typographic design that supports your desired messaging instead of undermining it. You’ll also leave with resources for further education and inspiration.

WebINK WebVisions Barcelona 2013, narrow street in El Born

Don’t forget to explore the city!

After celebrating Nit de Sant Joan, get out there and explore. Check out a night club, get lost in the ancient streets or hit the beach for a mojito. Check out this 5 Best & Essential Things To Do In Barcelona Insider’s Guide. Ben‘s got it dialed.

Carol Twombly Web Fonts: An Impressive Body of Work

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Carol Twombly on her last day at Adobe

Carol Twombly on her last day at Adobe

Carol Twombly is one of a handful of type designers whose typefaces impress on a bunch of levels at once: in its variety of styles, depth of craft, inspired design and overwhelming popularity. She designed type for just over a decade, retiring in 1999 to pursue her other craft interests in textiles and jewelry. But in that relatively brief time, Carol created an amazing body of work. She was always quiet and unassuming, so I’m happy to have any opportunity to sing her praises. We are pleased to have all of Carol Twombly’s professional typefaces available as web fonts on WebINK.

Carol Twombly Web Fonts

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WebINK Team Profile: April Johnson

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Welcome back to our third in a series of posts where we profile some of the key team members at WebINK (check out Part I and Part II). We’ll peel back the curtain to reveal their contributions to everything from engineering to marketing, foundry procurement to customer service. Through these interviews, we hope to provide a strong sense of the WebINK mission, upcoming innovations, our culture, and maybe, depending on the subject, a little bit about their hopes, dreams and what makes them happiest, aside from typography. Our second subject is developer April Johnson, a WebINK web developer who’s been with Extensis for over thirteen years, with four months on the WebINK team.

WebINK Web Developer April Johnson

WebINK: What’s your favorite thing about your job?

April: Writing code that compiles.

Why do you believe in Extensis WebINK?

Web fonts make the internet pretty.

Tell us a little bit about your day-to-day role and responsibilities. How do they contribute to the overall WebINK offering?

On a small team, like WebINK, all team members contribute to all parts of the process. Everyone is a jack-of-all-trades on this team. We all chime in on spec’ing new features, figuring out the best implementation and making sure WebINK is a high quality product for our customers.

What quality do you most appreciate in your co-workers?

Ability to do cartwheels.

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WebINK Team Profile: Andy Nelsen

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Welcome back to our second in a series of posts where we profile some of the key team members at WebINK (see Part I here). We’ll peel back the curtain to reveal their contributions to everything from engineering to marketing, foundry procurement to customer service. Through these interviews, we hope to provide a strong sense of the WebINK mission, upcoming innovations, our culture, and maybe, depending on the subject, a little bit about their hopes, dreams and what makes them happiest, aside from typography.

Our second subject is Andy Nelsen, a WebINK web developer who’s been with the team for almost three years.

webink-team-profile-andy-nelsen

Andy Nelson, WebINK Web Developer

WebINK: What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Andy: The people. It’s a refreshingly open and healthy working environment. Nobody is overly territorial or weird about asking for help and we have some folks here who are really, really good at what they do.

Why do you believe in Extensis WebINK? 

We’ve built the fastest, most reliable font delivery network on the planet by paying attention to the evolving web font market and staying in close communication with each other day to day.

Extensis gets fonts, and the company has allowed us incredible flexibility in our choice of tools and technologies. That helps us build on emerging technologies to solve complex problems quickly and, when necessary, change direction in pace with what’s happening in the web font universe.

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New Aktiv Grotesk web font styles on WebINK

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Dalton Maag’s Aktiv Grotesk has long been one of WebINK’s most popular typefaces, ranking sixth last year and third in 2011 (when we had many fewer fonts). We profiled type designer Bruno Maag as one of our “Titans of Typography” and went into excruciating detail about how his hatred of Helvetica led him to design Aktiv Grotesk. So, of course, we are thrilled to announce that Aktiv Grotesk now has four more weights (eight new web font styles) on WebINK!

DaltonMaag-AktivGrotesk-2

The family now goes both lighter and bolder. The new hairline, thin, extra bold and black weights are best used only at large sizes—what we typographers call “display” sizes.

Because of their relatively closed counterforms, grotesque typefaces tend to have a blocky feeling, and look monumental in heavier weights. As the name suggests, Aktiv Grotesk brings a little more liveliness than usual to this genre, making it a pleasing alternative to its more static forebears such as Helvetica and Arial.