Blog for Friday, 22nd June 2007
22/06/2007: A New Look for TobyInkster.co.uk
This site has had a few facelifts recently. Hopefully this one will stick. It’s based on two main principles:
- Use Hoefler Text for copy. It’s an absolutely gorgeous font which comes with Mac OS X that I was recently using on a printed document. Hoefler has a delicious set of italic glyphs — they were properly designed in their own right — they’re not just sloping versions of the roman (non-italic) glyphs. It also uses ascending/descending numerals, which look a lot nicer in the normal flow of text than block numerals do. Garamond and Georgia are reasonable substitutes when it’s not available.
- The Guardian (newspaper, not website) looks good; copy it! That’s where I got the idea for the small blue “TobyInkster.co.uk” heading at the top of each page.
I’ve combined this with a few other minor ideas:
- Numbers and bullet points from lists hang into the margin. The last couple of versions of my site did that too.
- Use classical ratios for font sizes. Assuming your browser default text is 12pt, then…
22/06/2007: Typography in demiblog
I’ve said it already, and I’ll say it again: typography is a very important and oft-neglected aspect of web design. demiblog is my CMS; although great typography requires the conscious effort of the author/typesetter, and can’t be handled automatically by a CMS, there are certainly steps a CMS can take to ease the burden on its users; in this article I’ll outline some of demiblog’s features that help typography.
The Asterism
Let’s start with the most suprious of features. In printing, it is common to mark a break in the flow by a centred paragraph consisting of just three asterisks (* * *).
If you create a paragraph in demiblog which consists of just three asterisks and no spaces in between then demiblog will detect this as a dividing mark and can be configured to replace it with a different dividing mark. This can be something as dull as an HTML <hr> tag, which adds a bevelled…
22/06/2007: Political Map of the UK
(Requires Javascript.)
The Axes
A two-dimensional graph requires two axes — that is, two sets of scales on which the data points must be assessed. In politics there are many candidate axes, some listed below, of which we can only choose two:
- Traditional Left–Right division. Left– and Right-wing ideologies encompass a whole variety of different policy areas and are the standard method of classifying a political party.
- Libertarian–Authoritarian. This is a method of classifying parties according to how “free” they aim for citizens to be.
- Environmentalism. You could assess a party by how friendly its policies are to the environment.
- Euroskepticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-EU.
- Atlanticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-US.
I’ve chosen the first two from that list, as I felt they were likely to provide the most interesting picture of politics in the UK…