So, this awesome guy named Chad Mazolla made a page showcasing some of the best Google Web Fonts- in some really nice pairings. He says:
There are over 400 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look.
Check it out here!
A new project that I worked on is live! Ka’ana Belize, a hotel in Belize, wanted to create an interactive map that displayed travel times, local attractions, and amenities for their guests.
The site is a single-page with three different maps; World, Region, and Resort. In the World section, flight paths and times are displayed based on which city the user clicks. I’m particularly stoked on the flight path animations in this section! The Region and Resort sections both allow the user to check out different places by clicking points on the map that pop up sliding image galleries.
Art-directed by the incredibly talented Amy Weibel and originally developed by PixelCrayons, the project fell in my lap when Amy brought me in to do QA. After I compiled a bug list, I was asked to fix all the bugs I caught by the client and make some creative tweaks. Additionally, I polished the art assets and added an extra layer of parallax scrolling; the water, map sections and individual land masses move at slightly different speeds, which adds dimension and movement to the map. I also had to make this site cross-browser compatible, and responsive for the iPad.
In a boutique site of this nature, typography is everything. When I inherited the site, the kerning was not yet complete; as you can see in the example above, the spacing between the letters was very uneven. Kerning.js to the rescue! Joshua Gross’ awesome open-source library allowed me to adjust the kerning down to the letter.
Special thanks to Jared who helped me with some JS woes & thanks again to Amy for bringing me in on the project!
Hey guys!
Come visit me at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland this weekend!
I was the Art Director for the fest this year, so I was responsible for designing all the collateral this year!
I’ll be doing a *huge* post later to talk about all the stuff I made for the fest, but I’ll keep it mostly under wraps right now so you can see it in person if you’re heading there.
The sweet poster above was illustrated by Bill Mudron and Mike Russell, and designed by me.
I’ll be at table I03 so please come say hi, okay?
So, as you guys may know, I am a big fan of letters. I mean the things that make up the alphabet, as opposed to the things you get in the mail. Although I do also like mail, and obviously you can’t write a letter without writing letters.
Point being that I like talking about lettering, typography, etc. and it would be cool to have a spot to feature that stuff. So here’s my first shot.
Balkan Sans is a typeface that represents both Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets. Each character shows a pairing of the Latin letter and it’s Cyrillic equivalent. In the cases where they are the same, the letter is shown once, just at double height.
The applications for a typeface of this nature, with regards to education, are pretty cool!
It can be used to translate Croatian Latin into Serbian Cyrillic, for example.
The uses are even more expansive when using all the available faces:
Balkan Sans and Balkan Sans Stencil consist of four styles – three of them have different alignments (e.g., all uppercase characters are Latin and lowercase characters are Cyrillic) and one style consists of uppercase Cyrillic and lowercase Latin characters.
So you can use it in Latin or Cyrillic as you please, not just in the paired version I mentioned above. To truly understand it’s brilliance, check out the video below.
Balkan tiposistem from Marija Juza on Vimeo.
You can buy Balkan Sans from Typeonine and you can also pick up the handsome poster shown above.
Unrelated, I relaunched my site and accidentally turned comments off. Sorry about that! As of this post it should be turned back on- with the new jetpack integration so you can comment using twitter or facebook as well as the default WordPress.
<3!
Hurray! After months of work, my new website is live!
This new version has been designed to put a greater focus on my portfolio, which now has its own page. I’ll be doing a breakdown of all these new projects on my blog in the coming weeks!
The new site layout has a hefty amount of flat design influence, as well as some parallax scrolling effects that I’m totally stoked on.
The site is fully responsive, meaning that the layout shifts depending on whether the site is viewed on a desktop, tablet or phone. I’ve also switched to Jetpack for comments, which means that you can now comment using your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Typography on the web is getting more and more dynamic as new web fonts and plugins become available. This site is set in a combination of Brandon Grotesque and Hypatia Sans. I also made use of FitText.js, an excellent plugin that allows designers to make text on their webpages resize in a fluid fashion.
Special thanks to Nadya Lev, Nubby Twiglet, and Tim Riot for their unending support while I put all of this together. Let me know what you guys think of my new look, and be sure to check out the work page to see lots of new stuff!