Gone are the days of having to fall back on web-safe typefaces. Cutting edge web design is now typographically sophisticated, powered by web-served typefaces. This seminar gives a good overview of what is now possible, and easily accessible to those who are not elite designers. It touches on type selection, readability, editing and other issues.
The pen manufacturer BIC has constructed a website that invites people to submit samples of their own handwriting. An algorithm adds then adds their sample to a massive collective dataset and identifies the 'average' of all those handwritten marks for each letter of the alphabet. Users of the site can drill down to datasets organised by gender, or country or handedness, or profession. The 'average' typeface, as might be expected, is fairly anodyne. It is a clever marketing exercise, but whether it has anything signicant to say about the way we write around the world is rather less certain. The eventual uber-average typeface will no doubt eventually find its way into designer toolkits.
Somewhere, people are reaching blindly for their alarm clock or phone. Somewhere, people are wishing for another hour's sleep. Somewhere, it is always morning. Global Breakfast Radio allows listeners to experience this eternal morning as dawn sweeps tirelessly across the world. Listen to disc jockeys in Moscow, or London or Rio, on Global Breakfast Radio. A strange, yet compelling offering...
Have you ever wondered where some of the more obscure keyboard symbols or UI elements got their start? @ goes back to late antiquity, but others (power on, sleep, firewire, etc are decidedly more contemporary. A modest little site-let here has the low-down. If you have a taste for punctuation rather than icons, try Keith Houston's Shady Characters, the secret life of punctuation.
Watch your favourite types of music duke it out in the ring of public taste. Google has made a brave attempt to quantify the relative popularity of various strands of music since 1950 using objective criteria/data. Witness the massive displacement of previously dominant jazz by pop, rock and others. Watch the slow relative decline of rock as music contines to diversify and fragment. This article has some doubts about the methodology, but even if the results are not 100 percent reliable, imagine how many other axes/areas of human endeavour might fruitfully be subjected to this kind of approach.
What the web is best at: marshalling complex data on interesting topics and making it accessible to everyone. A 'live' map depicting the cost of forgoing vaccination for diseases of childhood. Published by the US based Council on Foreign Relations.
Younity offers an unusual twist on file synchronisation/cloud computing -- the service allows you to bring all of your online file and image storage accounts under the one umbrella. While not storing files online, it means you can access any of your files on any of your devices -- mobile, PC or tablet. Great for accessing music libraries, movies, all of your documents, etc. If a particular file resides only a PC, users will need to take care that the PC in question is on, or the file will be unavailable.