This is a great interview with Rich on all things related to web typography—including, of course, variable fonts.
I’m so lucky that I literally get to work side by side with Rich; I get to geek out with him about font stuff all the time.
Rob attended the excellent Ampersand event last Friday and he’s made notes for each and every talk.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
There’s a veritable smörgåsbord of great workshops on the horizon…
Clearleft presents a workshop with Jan Chipchase on field research in London on May 29th, and again on May 30th. The first day is sold out, but there are still tickets available for the second workshop (tickets are £654). If you’ve read Jan’s beautiful Field Study Handbook, then you’ll know what a great opportunity it is to spend a day in his company. But don’t dilly-dally—that second day is likely to sell out too.
This event is for product teams, designers, researchers, insights teams, in agencies, in-house, local and central government. People who are curious about human interaction, and their place in the world.
I’m really excited that Sarah and Val are finally bringing their web animation workshop to Brighton (I’ve been not-so-subtly suggesting that they do this for a while now). It’s a two day workshop on July 9th and 10th. There are still some tickets available, but probably not for much longer (tickets are £639). The workshop is happening at 68 Middle Street, the home of Clearleft.
This workshop will get you up and running with web animation in less time than it would take to read all the tutorials you have bookmarked. Over two days, you’ll go from beginner or novice web animator to having expert level knowledge of the current web animation landscape. You’ll get an in-depth look at animating with CSS, JavaScript, and SVG through hands-on exercises and learn the most efficient workflows for each.
A bit before that, though, there’s a one-off workshop on responsive web typography from Rich on Thursday, June 29th, also at 68 Middle Street. You can expect the same kind of brilliance that he demonstrated in his insta-classic Web Typography book, but delivered by the man himself.
You will learn how to combine centuries-old craft with cutting edge technology, including variable fonts, to design and develop for screens of all shapes and sizes, and provide the best reading experiences for your modern readers.
Whether you’re a designer or a developer, just starting out or seasoned pro, there will be plenty in this workshop to get your teeth stuck into.
Tickets are just £435, and best of all, that includes a ticket to the Ampersand conference the next day (standalone conference tickets are £235 so the workshop/conference combo is a real bargain). This year’s Ampersand is shaping up to be an unmissable event (isn’t it always?), so the workshop is like an added bonus.
See you there!
I’m soooo excited that Mandy is speaking at Ampersand here in Brighton in June!
Be there or be square.
I really, really like service workers. They’re one of those technologies that have such clear benefits to users that it seems like a no-brainer to add a service worker to just about any website.
The thing is, every website is different. So the service worker strategy for every website needs to be different too.
Still, I was wondering if it would be possible to create a service worker script that would work for most websites. Here’s the script I came up with.
The logic works like this:
So HTML files are served network-first, while all other files are served cache-first, but in both cases a fresh copy is always put in the cache. The idea is that HTML content will always be fresh (unless there’s a problem with the network), while all other content—images, style sheets, scripts—might be slightly stale, but get refreshed with every request.
My original attempt was riddled with errors. Jake came to my rescue and we revised the script into something that actually worked. In the process, my misunderstanding of how await works led Jake to write a great blog post on await vs return vs return await.
I got there in the end and the script seems solid enough. It’s a fairly simplistic strategy that could work for quite a few sites, but it has some issues…
Service workers don’t perform any automatic cleanup of caches—that’s up to you to do (usually during the activate event). This script doesn’t do any cleanup so the cache might grow and grow and grow. For that reason, I think the script is best suited for fairly small sites.
The strategy also assumes that a file will either be fetched from the network or the cache. There’s no contingency for when both attempts fail. So there’s no fallback offline page, for example.
I decided to test it in the wild, but I expanded it slightly to fix the fallback issue. The version on the Ampersand 2018 website includes a worst-case-scenario option to show a custom offline page that has been pre-cached. (By the way, if you haven’t got a ticket for Ampersand yet, get a ticket now—it’s going to be superb day of web typography nerdery.)
Anyway, this fairly basic script seems to be delivering some good performance improvements. If you’ve got a site that you think would benefit from this network/caching strategy, and it’s served over HTTPS, then:
serviceworker.js,script element at the bottom of your HTML pages:
if (navigator.serviceWorker && !navigator.serviceWorker.controller) {
navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js');
}
You can also use the script as a starting point. You might find issues specific to your particular website. That’s okay—you can tweak and adjust the script to suit your needs.
If this minimal service worker script proves in any way useful to you, thank Jake.
The gorgeous website for this year’s Ampersand conference might well be one of the first commercial uses of variable fonts in the wild. Here, Richard documents all the clever things Mark did to ensure good fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support variable fonts.
Save the date! The best web typography conference in the world is back in Brighton on June 29th, and this time it’s at the best venue: The Duke Of York’s.
In fact, you can do more than saving the date: you can snap up a super early bird ticket for whopping £85 saving.
A great run-down of this year’s excellent Ampersand conference.
I wish I had known that Robin was there—I’d like to thank him for his kind words about Chloe.
The audio is now up from all the talks at this year’s excellent Ampersand conference.
In the space of one week, Brighton played host to three excellent conferences:
I made it to two of the three—alas, I couldn’t make it to Meaning this year because it clashed with Richard’s superb workshop on Responsive Web Typography.
FF Conf and Ampersand were both superb. Despite having very different subject matter, the two events have a lot in common. They’re both affordable, one-day, single-track, focused gatherings.
Both events really benefit from having a mastermind overseeing the line-up: Remy in the case of FF Conf, and Richard in the case of Ampersand. That really paid off. Both events were superbly curated, with a diverse mix of speakers and topics.
It was really interesting to see both conferences break out of the boundary of what happens inside web browsers. At FF Conf, we were treated to talks on linguistics and inclusivity. At Ampersand, we enjoyed talks on physiology and culture. But of course we also had the really deep dives into the minutest details of JavaScript, SVG, typography, and layout.
Videos will be available from FF Conf, and audio will be available from Ampersand. Be sure to check them out once they’re released.
The weather is glorious right now here in Brighton. As much as I get wanderlust, I’m more than happy to have been here for most of June and for this lovely July thus far.
Prior to the J months, I made a few European sojourns.
Mid-may was Mobilism time in Amsterdam, although it might turn out that this may have been the final year. That would be a real shame: it’s a great conference, and this year’s was no exception.
As usual, I had a lot of fun moderating a panel. This time it was a general “hot topics” panel featuring Remy, Jake, Wilto, and Dan. Smart, opinionated people: just what I want.
Two weeks after Mobilism, I was back on the continent for Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I opened up the show with a new talk. It was quite ranty, but I was pleased with how it turned out, and the audience were very receptive. I’ll see about getting the video transcribed so I can publish the full text here.
Alas, I had to miss the second day of the conference so I could down to Porto for this year’s ESAD web talks, where I reprised the talk I had just debuted in Germany. It was my first time in Portugal and I really liked Porto: there’s a lot to explore and discover there.
Two weeks after that, I gave that same talk one last spin at FFWD.pro in Zagreb. I had never been to Croatia before and Jessica and I wanted to make the most of it, so we tagged on a trip to Dubrovnik. That was quite wonderful. It’s filled with tourists these days, but with good reason: it’s a beautiful medieval place.
With that, my little European getaways came to an end (for now). The only other conference I attended was Brighton’s own Ampersand, which was particularly fun this year. The Clearleft conferences just keep getting better and better.
In fact, this year’s Ampersand might have been the best yet. And this year’s UX London was definitely the best yet. I’d love to say that this year’s dConstruct will be the best yet, but given that last year’s was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to, that’s going to be quite a tall order.
Still, with this line-up, I reckon it’s going to be pretty darn great …and it will certainly be good fun. So if you haven’t yet done so, grab a ticket now and I’ll see you here in Brighton in September.
Here’s hoping the weather stays good.
An incredibly detailed write-up of Ampersand.
Jon’s glowing write-up of Ampersand. Feel the love!
Excellent notes from Ampersand by Laura. Rather than describing each talk individually, she has documented the emergent themes.
Remember when I said that the Ampersand conference was going to be great? Yeah, well, I wasn’t wrong. If anything, I underestimated how great it would be.
Make a venn diagram of web nerds and type nerds; Ampersand was all about the intersection of those two circles. There was something special about having so many domain-specific nerds in one place at one time. It made for a very special atmosphere. It also helped that all the speakers were excellent. I particularly liked the fact that Ethan’s book was pimped in four different talks.
You can read more about the individual talks in an article over at Eye Magazine called Web typography comes of age at Brighton’s Ampersand conference.
All in all, it was an excellent day. The only bittersweet note came from the fact that it marked Sophie’s last day at Clearleft—she’s off to Lanyrd. But Sophie left us on a high note: she and Rich put together one hell of an event.
A nice write-up of the Ampersand conference. Such a great day.
Getting the background on Ampersand from Richard is getting me very excited for the conference.
What with all the overseas travelling I’ve been doing lately, I’m quite looking forward to going to some conferences here in the UK. I’m definitely looking forward to Web Directions @media in London later this month and DIBI in Newcastle next month although there’s something about both events that troubles me: they’re both double-track conferences, splitting the talks into “design” and “development” categories.
Don’t get me wrong—I think the line-ups look great. But that’s just the problem. I know I’m going to have make some very hard choices when two excellent speakers are on at exactly the same time. It’s a guarantee that I’ll have strong feelings of FOMO.
Personally, I’d rather not have to make those decisions. That’s one of the reasons why I really like the single-track format of dConstruct and An Event Apart. I think that the playlist-like curated single-day line-up of events like Build and New Adventures In Web Design really contributes to their special atmosphere.
The single-track single-day format works especially well for tightly-focused conferences like the JavaScriptastic Full Frontal.
If you’re looking for a single-track, single-day conference devoted entirely to typography on the web, then you simply must get along to Ampersand right here in Brighton on June 17th.
Yes, I am biased: we at Clearleft are organising it, but if you’ve been to any of our other events—dConstruct or UX London—you know that we kick ass when it comes to crafting conferences.
To say that I’m excited about Ampersand would be an understatement. I mean, come on! A day of font geekery with speakers like Jon Tan, Tim Brown, David Berlow and Jonathan Hoefler …it’s going to be typography heaven! It’s also a good excuse for you to come on down to Brighton at the start of a Summer weekend …and you could stick around for the typography tour around town with Phil Baines the next day.
There are some other reasons you should register for Ampersand:
Oh, and if you’re a student …it’s half price. Not that the price is much of a limiting factor: a mere £125 is pretty excellent value for such a great line-up.
So book your place and we can get together for a beer—either at the pre-party or the after-party—and we can geek out about typography on the web together.
If you're at all interested in web typography, be in Brighton on June 17th, 2011.