This Site

A Few Details

Here’s a little information about this website for those who are into that sort of thing.

Design

The design of this site is meant to focus the attention on the type. That’s why there’s a relatively dark color scheme. You will notice, however, that some pages change slightly in their highlight colors based upon context (font specimen colors, for example). The body copy of this site is set in Weathersbee Sans, my version of a workhorse sans-serif font. Using alternates and other Opentype features, this font has considerable variability, credibly and expressively fulfilling many typographic tasks.

I use a fair amount of scripting and some modern coding methods in this site to achieve effects that can’t be properly done (or require far too much effort) without them. So if you want to get the full experience of the site, you should use a reasonably modern web browser and allow javascript. You can still use the site without javascript, but some features, like the handy type tester and some user-friendly toggling actions, will not work.

This site is responsive using progressive web methods; I use media queries to tweak the design based upon browser size (and consequently, based upon user device). I didn’t wish to weigh my site down and waste resources making every feature work in browsers that aren’t up to date. In client websites, I do work to ensure that there is a degree of backward-compatibility. But I view some compatibility tasks — particularly ones whose design changes drastically to accommodate obsolete devices — as a waste of valuable time.

Site Scope

As explained and justified in the FAQ section, the size and nature of this site were originally a little out of proportion with my type offerings. A couple reasons: (1) I’m a designer and developer, so I much prefer to control how my type is presented. Since I build sites for others most of the time, it’s likely that the desire to use these abilities for my own project is a motivating factor. (2) I prefer building things to last (as much as that is possible in the world of web); since I have dozens of typefaces that exist in my head or in partial states, I needed something that would allow me to easily offer them to the world as I create them without relying on third parties.

The above statement has become outdated as my library has grown, but I desire to preserve it for posterity.