Em & M’s

Posted July 30th, 2008 by Beau

Flexibility in typography is important. It’s important for usuability, accessibility, and design. As I understand it, Em is a realitive unit and comes from the height of a capital ‘M’. Typically, default text size for 1 em is 16px…….therefore .75 em to a default textsize is equal to 12px.

 This is a great article that goes more into detail:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss/

Unobtrusive Spry Techniques

Posted July 29th, 2008 by Beau

I listened to Greg Rewis at Web Design World conference in Seattle this last July. He does a great job of explaining new and complex techniques in coding and all things Adobe.

AJAX and Flash seem to have been battling each other for admiration and commitment from the design community. While Flash has made itself more accessible to search engines in the past month, Spry techniques for unobtrusive development have also made Spry more appealing.

http://blog.assortedgarbage.com/?p=57

Basically, He is hiding the attribute tags in the javascript code and using select DOM tools (’Spry.Utils’) to assign ajax behaviors. A good start to progressive enhancement.

Top Types from TypeCon 2008

Posted July 28th, 2008 by Beau

It’s nice to know the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and preffered fonts if you were stuck on a desert island:

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/3465/
top-types-from-typecon-2008.html