TypeSites

I love typography.

It’s true. I always have. I think think that, in the same way that most writers love words, for some of us, it just keeps cascading down. A love for prose and poetry leads to a love of words, which leads to a love of letters, which leads to a love of the shapes of letters… and then the spaces between letters… etc… etc…

Today my friend (and co-worker) Kyle launched http://www.typesites.com/, “a biweekly showcase of websites with interesting typographic design”. There’s just one review there… (for now), but it’s getting some attention already.

There was a brief time when I thought I would become a designer. But really I just wanted to shape letters on a page. I think this is part of the reason I ended up designing everything in black and white. For example, my brother Dan’s website, which I designed for him back in something like 2000, basically just uses his old email signature’s ascii art as navigation and design element. (I spent part of this last weekend re-vamping that site so he could use wordpress to manage his pages.)

In my present occupation, programming does actually fill some of these same needs. (I’m a bit of a syntax fascist, enforcing strict whitespace rules whenever I can.) Which leads me to an article on the typography of code, which another co-worker sent around the office today. I liked the article, but think it spent all its efforts on the fonts the author uses (or has used) to write code, which is really only one aspect of typography. I’m contemplating writing my own article, about the arrangement of code independent of font, a sort of field guide to whitespace in fixed width font environments. Then again, I’m lazy, so don’t expect it any time soon…