Course Overview

[00:00:02]
>> Jason Pamental: I'm Jason Pamental. We were talking a little bit right before we got started about why I didn't know anything about a raccoon scaling a building. And part of that is because I get a little bit obsessed with this stuff. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a second.

[00:00:21]
Just a quick look ahead. These are as close as possible to kind of the things that we're gonna talk about and roughly the time that we're gonna spend on them. I am gonna be covering some of the similar concepts that I did in the first edition of this workshop because a lot of that stuff is still very relevant.

[00:00:42]
It's the application of it and some of the new technologies that we're gonna get into that will help us take it a lot further. But we're gonna go over some basics of typography. So for the people who are watching, or are in the room that have never studied type, I'm gonna try and give you some basics about what to look for.

[00:01:01]
How to look at type, how to see some of the differences and what kinda choices you might make when you're working with it. I'm gonna talk a little about what I mean when I say responsive typography. I actually wrote a book about it. About the time that I gave this workshop the last time it was just out.

[00:01:20]
And there's a new wrinkle to that. It's not just responsive typography, we also have responsive type, which is really pretty fascinating stuff and I'm really super excited about it. So I'm looking forward to showing that to you. We'll have a break for lunch and then we're gonna get into implementing web fonts.

[00:01:37]
And we're gonna talk about how to do that for the best performance and best user experience and different things and techniques that you can try there. And also talk a little bit about what the W3C and a couple other companies are working on, because there's some interesting developments that are just starting to become a thing.

[00:01:56]
And then we're gonna talk a little bit more about some different aspects of typography and how we can use these technologies to improve overall reading experience. Finessing things with some of the finer details, and then look at some newer ideas in editorial design where we can look at how we could take web design a little further than what you might typically see.

[00:02:20]
And use some of this new technology to create a much more Interesting and dynamic impact on the web. And have it all, of course, work across any device that you could think of. And then we're going to try to finish up with enough time so that we can go and look at some real world examples.

[00:02:38]
And if anybody has a particular project that they're working on, or they're curious about, we can pull a couple things up, and we'll just kind of take that as it goes.
>> Jason Pamental: Questions are welcome at any point during the day. This will go back and forth between looking at some slides and looking at some code and working through stuff.

[00:02:57]
You have the exact same repository that I'm gonna be working with here. It's up on GitHub. You are welcome to do whatever you wanna do with that. And code along if you want to, or just know that you have all the answers there and you can always come back to it.

[00:03:15]
It's totally up to you.
>> Jason Pamental: And then by the time we're really exhausted, by around five, then we'll just go away.
>> Jason Pamental: As I mentioned, my name's Jason. I tend to refer to myself as a web typographer. And I do that at type conferences, in order to differentiate myself from people that I feel totally outclassed by, because they know a lot more about traditional type than I do.

[00:03:45]
But I know a lot more about how to implement it well on the web, and what's why I think there's an important distinction. So while I'm many things, I'm a teacher, an author, a writer, a developer, a designer, a strategist. I really kinda like this label because I think it actually encapsulates an awful lot of that.

[00:04:07]
>> Jason Pamental: The best thing I can say about a four year old web book is that at least it's still somewhat or maybe mostly relevant. So I'm happy about that, but it could certainly use an update. Although given the state of things right now, between now and the end of the year, it's gonna be so different yet again that it's probably not worth starting on that just yet.

[00:04:29]
I mentioned that I kind of missed out on a lot of pop culture stuff because I tend to go around and speak about these sorts of things quite a lot. And so last week I was out at Adobe at San Francisco giving a talk at their internal conference about variable fonts.

[00:04:46]
And how that might fit into teaching typography to people who really don't know anything about it, whether it's online or in print, because it can remove some of the choices that you have to make. If anybody's ever installed a typeface before, it's a whole bunch of files. Every different width, weight, italic, they're all separate files.

[00:05:09]
And all have to be imported, managed, and if you're missing one or two, then the job doesn't go right. And I think that's where variable fonts can actually start to make a difference there. So it was really interesting getting a chance to see where Adobe's going with that.

[00:05:24]
I've talked to a lot of other teams at GoDaddy, at Audible, Conde Nast, a few other places about what they're doing with type and how this might fit into their needs. Whether it's about branding or if it's about just increasing overall performance or creating greater flexibility for the content management process.

[00:05:44]
That's the kinda thing I spend a lot of time doing. And I was interested enough in trying to focus on that, that about two weeks ago I quit the agency job that I had running a development team at a Drupal shop to focus on this stuff full time.

[00:05:58]
So you have my full attention.
>> Jason Pamental: To set things off on the right note, that's Tristan on the left and Tilly on the right. I've had Tristan since he was a puppy. He's about to turn ten, and Tilly, his cousin, is just turning eight. And we've had her for about a year and a half.

[00:06:18]
I will definitely be leaning on them to help me explain some type terms as we go, but that's also our calming touchpoint. We'll probably see them coming back into the scene a few times here and there.