I have been getting a handful of inquiries about a print version of Professional Web Typography. Even my professor suggested that I should go for it. And here’s an email from a reader:

Hi Donny!

I just discovered your book, it is fantastic. I’m a graphic design student who has learned a lot of typographic specifics, but none directed at web usage, so this is a really great tool.

As much as I love what you’ve done, this is exactly the kind of book I would want to buy as a physical thing. Do you have any plans to setup some kind of publishing? If not, I’m considering copying the content, laying it out myself and printing and binding it myself (only to be used for personal use of course).

Thanks,
J
Graphic Designer and ProWebType.com Enthusiast

I have no plan to make a print version for several reasons. First, the book about web typography should live and be read on the web. Second, I took the advantage of the web to keep the book as succinct as possible. If readers want to learn more, I have provided links to other resources throughout the book. Third, readers can download and practice the examples I have uploaded to GitHub. Forth, I am about to graduate with a MA in graphic design, and yet I am still don’t know my way around InDesign. I am getting really good with Illustrator though. All the illustrations in the book are created with Illustrator because I love SVG. With all the benefits of the web, I don’t see any reason for me to go print, even though, I must admit, I still love reading books on paper.

When I set out my price my book based on the pay-what-you-want model, I put my trust in the readers. I am glad to see readers like Kevin Lorenz supporting it. He tweeted:

If you enjoy reading @visualgui’s book ‘Professional Web Typography’ on https://prowebtype.com please be fair, share and pay for it! <3

I chose the web because I wanted to deliver valuable information in a legible, readable, and accessible format—anyone with an internet connection can read the book. The book is available to be read, but it is not free, as Kevin puts it:

@visualgui thank you for writing such an amazing book and making it accessible for so many people.

Readers have been paying for the book in various amount: $1, $3, $5, and $10. Thank you.

Yesterday I saw the following tweet from Ben Tambling:

Love type resources, and this is a gem, but is it just me that finds the site itself a bit lacking in readability?

As I was processing what he meant, Ben sent me a personal email explaining to me that the text is a bit small on a large screen. Within minutes, I made the update to make the type much bigger on desktop. All I did was uncommenting some of the CSS lines I had in my SASS file. When designing for the site, I had the text size larger for desktop, but then I decided to stay at 16 pixels for consistency across devices. After I made the update, Ben tweeted:

Update #2: Very honoured to have Donny listen to my feedback regarding the site, now reads like a dream.

I am glad that Ben pointed it out because I like the new changes. Not only the text is more readable, but also the justified text looks like you’re reading a book. Another issue got fixed is the drop cap. It looks much more consistency now in different browsers. In the previous design, the drop cap was inconsistent because I only used CSS. Firefox was always a few pixel off the baseline. Someone at Adobe pointed out to me that although I talked about dropcap.js in my book, I was not using it on the site. Although I played with dropcap.js, I didn’t implement it because I didn’t want to add JavaScript and the drop cap didn’t behaved as it should in Firefox. Somehow the drop cap blew up twice the size it was supposed to be. The problem had to do with Adobe Caslon Pro, the typeface I used for the body copy. When I use Myriad Pro or Source Code Pro, the drop cap looked fine in Firefox. As a result, I kept CSS for my drop cap. I hope that browsers will implement the initial-letter property soon to make drop caps work consistently on the web.

As for the buzz, Professional Web Typography was featured in issue 23 of “Product Design Weekly.”

Love this tweet from Sonia Su:

Aspiring to make my website & résumé as simply beautiful as @visualgui’s! #obsessed #typography

I am also getting contribution from some readers. To show my appreciation, I added some CSS demos to “Practicing Typography” for them to play with. Thank you for supporting this project.

Lastly, thanks to Ms. Nguyen for a big shout-out.

On Sunday night, I spent several hours polishing Professional Web Typography. At around 2am on Monday, I launched the site, published the announcement, and notified Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Went to sleep and woke up three and half hours later when my iPhone gave me this notification. One tweet from Tim took off.

Jeremy Keith has written up about it in his 100-word series. The Pipe has chose it to be “Pick of the Day.” BeBe Ragsdale, my MA classmate, says: “This book is definitely one of a kind!” I couldn’t be happier. I am glad that the book is well-received.

One of the things that I seem to give the wrong impression is that the book is free. Although all the contents are available to the public, the book is not free. If readers find this book is useful, they can pay what they want for it. I explain the pricing model in the support section. I take on this project with deep passion and serious intention. I wanted readers to enjoy reading the book, learning from it, and supporting it.

The SNDDC’s two-day conference, “The Future of News Design,” was informative and inspiring. Although journalism is not my field, I have always interested in the news space. It was such an eye-opening experience to see how these news organizations including The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, and The Quartz stepping up their digital game. Vox and Breaking News have embraced the digital space from the start; therefore, it was intriguing to see where they are heading in the future. Many problems they have solved could easily apply to higher education. I was so glad to be at the event and had a two-minute talk with one of my design heroes: Jason Santa Maria.

The first day of the Society for News Design’s workshop in DC is impressive. The News Type session was filled with exceptional presentations from respected type designers and typographers such as Roger Black, Christian Schwartz, David Berlow, and Indra Kupferschmid. Francesco Franchi showed off the amazing work he and his team had done for the printed IL magazine. Greg Manifold shared the redesigns of the printed edition of The Washington Post and Dan Zedek gave some insights on The Boston Globe’s digital experience. The News Type session alone is worth the price of the admission, which is quite cheap for educators. I can’t wait to attend the next two days.

I have been avoided implementing responsive images for a while simply because most browsers aren’t support it yet. Furthermore, I am too lazy to cut up various versions of the same image. Nevertheless, I spent a few hours over the weekend reading and researching for the simplest solution to jazz up my portfolio. Since most of the works I am doing are responsive web design, I want to showcase some screenshots of the sites I have done. Wouldn’t it be nice to show visitors the mobile screenshot of they browse through my portfolio on smartphone, tablet screenshot if they use a tablet and desktop if they use a computer? So I cut up three different sizes for each site I want to showcase.

I read through a handful of articles on responsive images including Eric Portis’s “Responsive Images in Practice,” Jason Grigsby’s “Don’t use <picture> (most of the time)” and Yoav Weiss’s “Native Responsive Images.” Looking at Can I Use, SRCSET is only supported in Chrome and Opera. In order to get responsive images to work across browsers, I needed Picturefill. The deal-breaker for me with Picturefill is that it doesn’t work with the fallback SRC.

In the past few days, I have been thinking whether I should use it or not. Today, I decided to go forward with it since it is my personal site. I am now using native support for responsive image with the hope that it will work in the future when more browsers are implementing it. Check out the work.

A friend recently went on an interview for a graphic design position and she was asked to do a design assessment. She thought the assignment was extensive and asked me if she should do it. Below is my response.

Design assignment is like spec work. I wouldn’t do it unless they pay for the time that I spend on it. If they can’t make a decision based on the design in your portfolio and what you have presented at the interview than you might not be the right fit for them.

With that said, I did spend the entire weekend (day and night) working on a take-home assignment for my current job. They wanted to make sure that I was able to import data into the database and display the information on the web page. They also wanted to know if I could access the server through the command line. Even though I did some web development prior to this job, I never had to touch the database and never had to use the command line. I reached out to some of my developer friends for help and I didn’t sleep until I got it to work.

It was very hard, but I wanted the job. I also wanted to challenge myself and I learned quite a bit doing it.

Due to my conflict of schedule with family reunion, I can’t attend the TypeCon conference, but I managed to signed up for the Type & Design Education Forum, which allowed me to hear Tobias Frere-Jones’ keynote presentation.

This is my first time at TypeCon. Even though I haven’t made to the main event, I am already impressed. The attendees were very friendly, at least the ones at the Education Forum. What I learned was that most people who came to the forum are design teachers at universities and colleges. They shared their teaching processes, experimentations and student projects. I was very impressed and inspired. These speakers’ knowledge of type and typography were way above me. While all of the presentations were excellent, the one that stood out for me the most was Mitch Goldstein’s on Delightful Confusion. In a nutshell, he made his students embrace the idea of confusion: “Design what you don’t know.” In the process of searching for what they don’t know, they would find a solution that is unexpected. I don’t think that theory could apply to web design, but it worked on graphic design projects.

The highlight of the day was Frere-Jones’ keynote. His topic titled In Letters We Trust, in which he documented the history of bank notes starting from how Benjamin Franklin used type to make currency hard to counterfeit to the state of our bills. All the details he pointed out, such as reversing italics, using an upside down q for b and little nuances to avoid money fraud, were fascinating. Just the ways he took notice of these things alone proved that he is a brilliant type designer. I was so glad to get the opportunity to hear him speak.

Another person caught my attention was the sign language interpreter. I was sitting in the second row and couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Even though her sign language was amazing, what mesmerized me was her expression. One of the male speakers spoke in a monotone voice, but she translated with so much passion. Watching her helped me stayed awake. I loved it when a speaker took a pause to think, she expressed the same emotion on her face and body language. I don’t know how to describe it, but she was like a cartoon voice-over for sign language.

I’ll definitely attend the TypeCon next year or every year if I get the chance.

• “Type is Visible Language” by Erik Spiekermann
• “My Life In Typefaces” by Matthew Carter
• “More Perfect Typography” by Tim Brown
• “On Web Typography” by Jason Santa Maria