Font Your Face: Terrible Name, Great Drupal Module
It bears a truly unfortunate name, but this is a great Drupal module: Font Your Face (download). It’s stable and at the recommended release stage for both Drupal 6 and 7. Here’s a YouTube demo.
As a web designer and front-end developer, it’s possibly the most useful module I’ve come across in the past six months. Nearly any font is now available to web designers without using Javascript. It supports Google Fonts with no need to edit theme CSS documents or page templates. Caveat: it will stipulate the “font-family” characteristic in tandem with the module CSS, where the font-size, color, decoration, etc. still should be defined within a certain class.
Font Your Face supports Typekit (given a valid API), Font Squirrel (among others) and even accepts uploaded typefaces from your own library. Additionally, he UI/UX design is pretty great, especially if you’re a designer stuck using Windows rather than OS X.
Using OTF is a bit sketchy and forget PostScript fonts—works best with TrueType fonts—but it literally opens up thousands of possibilities for the web designer to style a site with its own unique typography. On the downside, it’s a bit scary to imagine less experienced web designers going insane with too many fonts. That “nightmare” awaits our eyes when this type of functionality becomes more common.
Hey, with great power comes great responsibility, no?
How the Rolling Stones and Microsoft Found Each Other
It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly seventeen years since Microsoft rolled out Windows 95. For those of you who don’t recall the DOS-based Windows 3.1, it was a revolutionary change that actually, believe it or not, made Microsoft cool for a while. With Apple’s influence on the PC market virtually non-existent in the mid-1990s, Windows 95 was the new industry standard for operating systems. Even the START button was an innovation.
It’s also where technology and marketing come together. Famously, Microsoft used the Rolling Stones’ 1981 song “Start Me Up” as the anthem to introduce Windows 95 to the world in the summer of 1995. It was the cornerstone of a $300 million ad blitz.
How did this “collaboration” come about? This in-depth post at The Post History Dig explores the subject in depth. A teaser:
Nearly 15 year after the song’s initial popularity, Bill Gates hit upon the idea of using “Start Me Up” for the Windows 95 launch. Gates happened to meet Mick Jagger at some point and asked him how much it would cost to use the song in advertising. Reportedly, Jagger replied with some amount in the millions — $10 million by one account — a sum, in any case, that Jagger thought would be outrageously high. Microsoft’s “Start Me Up” campaign was aimed at key groups of Rolling Stones followers — from baby boomers to twenty- somethings… But Gates, undeterred, didn’t flinch and agreed to the amount.
It’s a great read, especially when one considers how much this influenced Apple’s product rollouts in the last decade. Gates influencing Jobs. Who’d have thought that?
The iconic 30-second advertisement for Windows 95:
Fisher Communications Centennial Interactive Flash Timeline
Upon their 100th anniversary, Fisher Communications—owners of Portland ABC affiliate KATU—has created a microsite with an interactive Flash timeline highlighting the company’s accomplishments.
It’s an interesting design, similar to the Oregon Baseball History piece that we created several years ago. Two notes: one, there is way too much copy in the Events column. Either cutting down on the content or including a scrollbar would’ve been good for the user interface (UI).
And second, the anniversary logo could be improved by omitting the years. Given the black background, the dates become imbued with funereal significance, as if to mourn the passing of a beloved public figure. Subtracting 100 from 2010 is pretty easy math for most people to do. The word “century”—instantly impressive—is sandwiched and buried. Make it bigger and give it room to breathe.
“Celebrating a Century” might be a better tagline: “service” and “innovation” are buzzwords that many, many businesses try to co-opt as their own distinguishing characteristics. These terms have lost any value they once held. Push them down into body copy or drop them altogether.
Rite Aid: With Us, It’s Personal… and Fattening
Yes, that’s actually their horrible tagline (sans the “fattening”), dreamt up by a creative director who watches too many procedurals on CBS. Nobody considered that this tagline comes across as threatening rather than reassuring? It conjures up Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood more than it does a matronly pharmacist who knows your name before inspecting your driver’s license.
In any event, it seems that Rite Aid’s personal commitment is to making or keeping you overweight. Why else would they offer Wellness+ Rewards card deals like these:
We spotted this over Labor Day Weekend at the Rite Aid at North Lombard and Denver. We didn’t check to see if there were similar discounts on marshmallow peeps or cases of Coors.
Pan Am: Messing with an Iconic Logo Design
Interesting piece written by Patrick Smith in his “Ask the Pilot” column at Salon about the bastardization of the classic Pan-Am logo for the sake of merchandising. A small sample:
As discussed in this space before, the current fixation in airline livery design is something I call the GMST, or Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing (Cosmonaut comment: Amen). (Actually, this was a term concocted by Ask the Pilot reader Amanda Collier several years ago.) Take a look around the tarmac. There are enough streaks, swishes, arcs, twists, swirls and curls out there to make anybody dizzy. The idea, we think, is to suggest a company that is “in motion,” or “moving forward.” In the process, sadly, they have become indistinguishable from one other.
Really nice insight on branding, especially from an airline pilot who clearly has had a lot of time to consider such things.
If you’re over the age of 30, you doubtlessly can conjure a mental image of the iconic blue-and-white globe logo. If not, here it is:
As Smith wrote, it represents a much more glamorous time in airline travel, an era long forgotten in the post-9/11 world of TSA muggings and joyless, amenity-free flights. You might also recall that, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the beginning of the film Dr. Heywood Floyd traveled to the space station via Pan Am:
It is part of how the future of space travel was envisioned through a prism of hope and faith in progress. Now it seems unlikely that such space vehicles will be in use before the mid-21st century.
Illustration Appears as Cover Art for Semiconductor International Magazine
From June 15, 2006. This illustration is part of Cosmonaut’s identity design portfolio (it is one of a series of ten):
An illustration by Daniel Deitschel was featured on the July 2006 cover of Semiconductor International magazine. The abstract composition was originally created in 2004 as a series of ten illustrations depicting Mentor Graphics design areas. The cover story is entitled “Litho Simulation Enables the Leading Edge.”
Semiconductor International is was a publication of Reed Business Information.
Mentor Graphics (based in Wilsonville, Oregon) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world’s most successful electronics and semiconductor companies.
Update: Semiconductor International published its last issue on April 29, 2010, one of several publications discontinued by Reed Elsevier.
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