In his second issue of “Web Fonts & Typography News,” an excellent weekly newsletter, Jason Pamental shares some tips on creating a drop cap on the web. As demonstrated in Jason’s technique, making a drop cap with the first-letter property requires some finessing until the initial-letter property is supported in major browsers.

In the latest iteration of this blog, I wanted to create a drop cap, but ended up with a swash cap instead. As you can see, the first letter in the opening paragraph of each blog post is a bit fancier than the rest. Pliego, designed by Juanjo López, has some beautiful OpenType features including swashes and stylistic alternatives. To activate them, I simply need one of CSS:

p:first-of-type:first-letter {font-feature-settings:"swsh","salt";}

The initial letter is subtle, but does add a nice touch to the text.

Let it be known that I am a strong supporter of Elizabeth Warren. She is an intellectual figure who has serious policy proposals. If you are considering her nominee for the primary, I urge you to zone out all the noise on her background. I highly recommend and encourage you to read her first book, A Fighting Chance, to find out for yourself how she has been fighting for the middle class. Let’s give her a chance.

George Zornick has a fantastic piece on Warren in The Nation. He writes:

What Elizabeth Warren has going for her is the fact that Democratic voters have never particularly liked Wall Street bailouts or big international “free-trade” deals. She, for one, won’t have to renounce her record to appeal to their beliefs. Her presidential campaign is a bet that someone who has been a strong critic of the political system and the Democratic Party can become the leader of both by being consistent, credible, and right.

Paul Krugman explains:

The logic of the Warren plan is fairly simple (although some commentators are trying to make it sound complex). Child care would be regulated to ensure that basic quality was maintained and subsidized to make it affordable. The size of the subsidy would depend on parents’ incomes: lower-income parents would get free care, higher-income parents would have to pay something, but nobody would have to pay more than 7 percent of income.

Sounds logical to me.

After tweeting my blog post on why I am moving off Adobe Fonts, a designer friend asked me to share the pros and cons of self-hosted vs. subscription-based fonts. Since I started off using subscription services and made the transition to self-host on all my sites, which include this blog, my portfolio, Professional Web Typography, and Vietnamese Typography, I would like share my experience.

When web fonts first took off, subscription-based method seemed like an easier and a more convenience choice. I just needed to add one line of markup to my site and a third-party hosting took care of the rest. Services like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts have done a great job of optimizing their font files, keeping them up-to-date, and making sure they work on different browsers. Furthermore, they separated their fonts into different subsets to keep the file size small. For instance, I don’t need to load subsets with Vietnamese diacritics if my site only used English. In Adobe Fonts, I can choose specific OpenType features. The more features I use, the larger the file size. The biggest advantage of using a subscription service is that I have instant access to thousands of fonts, although only a handful with Vietnamese support.

The disadvantage of using a subscription service is the dependency. Google, so far, is reliable, but no one knows how it is going change in the future, giving Google’s history of abandoning projects. Since Google Fonts only hosts open-source fonts, I have the choice to host them myself, which I will be doing for Vietnamese Typography in the near future. As for Adobe Fonts, they have already discontinued Typekit standalone plans. I can sign up for InCopy, which is $4.99 a month, but what is the point of getting something that I am not going to use? I already have all Adobe programs through my work; therefore, I don’t need additional copies for myself. I just want to keep my Adobe Fonts account separate. What if Adobe decided to sunset InCopy or raise the price in the future? I would be screwed again. I featured many typefaces from Adobe Fonts on Vietnamese Typography and all of them will break if the subscription changed. I have no plan of taking Vietnamese Typography offline; therefore, I need to make sure all fonts will continue to work decades from now. That is one of the main reasons I decided to host the fonts on my site.

Self-hosting method takes a bit more work, especially in the early days of web fonts. Browsers didn’t render fonts consistently. CSS font support was not reliable. In recent years, browsers are getting better and CSS has font display property to control how fonts are rendered; therefore, hosting fonts on my own site is getting easier and more reliable. The only disadvantage is that I have to write a bit more CSS and keep the font files up-to-date.

With self-hosting method, I am limited to the fonts that I have. Whereas subscription gives me far more choices. Then again, I am fine with working with a handful of typefaces than thousands to browse through. It comes down to renting versus licensing. I prefer the licensing model.

I have been following Bethany Heck on Twitter for a while. I even tempted to apply for the opening positions at Medium she tweeted. It appears that she has been let go recently, which led her to update her portfolio website. It looks amazing, particularly the typographic showcase on the homepage, which has a similar concept to my portfolio site.

Elizabeth A. Harris writes in the New York Times:

For decades, lawyers for the disabled have used the Americans With Disabilities Act to force businesses to make their spaces more physically accessible, by adding ramps, widening doorways or lowering countertops.

But the steady migration of commerce and culture to the internet has given rise to a new flood of litigation, over the accessibility of websites to the visually impaired. The number of such lawsuits nationwide nearly tripled in 2018 over the year before.

Making your website accessible is a must.

Paul Krugman:

By the way, I don’t know whether Warren will or even should get the nomination. But she’s a major intellectual figure, and is pushing her party toward serious policy discussion in a way that will have huge influence whatever her personal trajectory.

Agree.

Jane E. Brody writes in The New York Times:

Because manufacturers try to hit all bases, over-the-counter cough remedies most often contain combinations of three or four ingredients when a patient may need only one or two. Typical ingredients include a cough suppressant, an expectorant and an antihistamine, when better hydration or drinking hot tea with honey may be all someone really needs to quell a nagging cough.

I’ll try hot tea with honey next time.

Moira Donegan writes in The Guardian:

Like Sanders, Warren has a long career of railing against the injustice of a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Unlike him, she has a proven track record outside of the Senate, helping to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Obama administration and writing the book – actually, writing several books – on how to help working families by making finance and debt laws more fair.

This one is important:

The fact is that Warren is to the left of Sanders on some issues, notably gun control.

I concur.