Hello!
Today I’m going to talk about a passion of mine – Typography!
What does typography mean to you?

What do you mean I can only use seven fonts?

Breaks down into four things on the web.

• Type as language – Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing – emil ruder
• Type is Information – designer’s task is to bridge the gap between the author’s conceptual structure and the readers conceptual structure
• Type as Structure – Typography is currently treated as adornment, but it actually goes much deeper into the structure and is related to UX and IA design.
• Type as Data - 

There’s a bit missing…..

Everybody is a designer at the moment – see Design it Yourself – “wtf have they done to my layout?”

A lot of people screw it up! Comic sans is not inherently bad – it depends on context – they have the tools but not the experience\information.

Comic sans – 9 times out of 10 is the wrong tool.

Lot of talk about font embedding – not a good idea – yet – technical stuff aside  - Lot’s of fonts aren’t designed for the web – see Times New Roman.

Lot’s of designers go through life not being arsed about how fonts look on the screen as they will look different when printed – the font Georgia was designed the other way around.

Drupal(tm)

Mark is working on fixing Drupal for designers – 6 out of 7 Drupal sites will be ugly.

Drupal makes it hard for people to make good design decisions – current tools make it difficult to produce good designs.

Too much choice is not good – we need to scaffold the experience – we need to help users make good design choices. Don’t currently know how this would work.

The typographic cascade _

• Choose a headline typeface: Georgia or Helvetica
• Then cascade that font choice down the rest of the document e.g. body, lists, etc.

@font-face – let’s have a think before we open the flood gates.

Thank You.

Q & A.

Web Safe – just means that it’s installed on everyone’s machines – Verdana, Tahoma, etc. were designed for the web. Also the Microsoft “C” fonts.

Sifr is a pain in the arse – technically. The constraints on the web help us push the boundaries of type on the web.

Align best choices with customers needs. Type choice comes after hierarchical design.

The business end of web design
Buster Rhymes is the answer!

1. Design is a commodity – profit margins are being squeezed, more competition – 99 Designs 32,000 designers 1.6M Designs, $4.6M awarded – that’s a couple of dollars per design!

2. Websites. Are. Dead. – expectations are so much greater, websites are just the beginning! Learn how to code? – Wrong! (unless you have a passion for coding)

“Are you worth it?” – Strategy – you join the dots, Experts – know things you don’t. but how do you explain it

B-U-S-T-A

• Talk Business – Talk to the client, and try to understand their business. It’s not about the website it’s about the business.
• Understand why they want to go online – Continue the conversation.
• Talk Strategy – Connect the dots between their business and the web, make the uunderstand the importance of the web
• Set Business Targets – 3 to 5 business goals.
• Talk Action – Explain timeline, tools, what comes next, etc.

Why bother with busta?

• More effective websites.
• Less conflicts.
• Repeat Business
• Higher Profits

Remeber you’re awesome! :D

The number of mobile web users is increasing at around 20% per month.

“The mobile web is a hot topic”

Mobile web design seems really scary – I can relate to that.

Meagan is highly recommending Cameron Moll’s mobile web design book.

There are three levels of mobile support

• “naked” – “ad some style” – “deck it out”

Recommend “deck it out”  - although it has downsides of adding another site to maintain, and has the most initial design work.

Start simple and iterate to better design

Step 1 : Write clean accessible HTML – designing with web standards - Jeffery Zeldman

Step 2 : Mobilize your layout – One column, no large images

Step 3 : Stay Branded – Header graphic, colours, typography

http://bit.ly/mobile-stylesheet

http://mobify.me

Update: Well FOWD is now officially started and we are being treated to an interesting talk on Agile Creative Design. Being a developer who strongly believes in Agile/XP/2080 I can see that this might work for a lot of designers… find his blog here http://dannysomekh.wordpress.com/

Now we have Jim Coudal talking about playing photoshop tennis on fridays – Coudal Partners sounds like a fun place to work. Now he’s talking about playing games in the bathroom at work, trust me it does have bearing on design.

“The creative process is the act of bridging the known and the unknown, the constant and the variable”

Web designers have a short attention span – that’s you @lollylu