Relaxing with some fonts
Hey everyone. I'm on vacation in FL, it's night time, I sat down for some aimless websurfing / massaging the rough edges of some of my projects. After getting a couple of timely things done, I followed the path of least resistance and found myself surfing for typesets and fonts. I like to think of myself as an all around web guy who is strongly skewed toward the tech angle, but my little experience in design has lead to me a tremendous respect and fascination with those who can pull off what is impossible for me with seeming ease and grace. Fonts and typesets are dead center on this. I have a special love for exploring the vast landscapes of typesets and reading what font bloggers have to say about them because they are a tool I don't know how to use. Their examples are like walking into a woodshop and watching the carpenter use a dove-tail guide for the first time. Here are a bunch of fonts that look nice but kind of similar. Apply this one the the heading in this size, this one to the body text at this opacity and BAM. Emminently readable and beautiful prose.
I found the most interesting personality here: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
He works part time for typekit (http://typekit.com/), which seems to be a great typesetting product. One line of code on your pages allows you to use a dashboard to control your fonts. The actual fonts themselves are stored on Typekit's servers, for which they guarantee 100% uptime.
Stack Overflow
The link of the day is Stack Overflow. It is a forward looking democratization of the forum concept, populated by some of the more exceptional programmers and tech mangers out there and driven by one of the more sticky and innovative initiative systems out there. Aside from the valuable information and the catharsis of grokking with the old piers, users can gain extra cred through earning 'badges' based on participation and the community's reaction to that participation. This is a great crossover from the gaming world, challenging participants to explore dimensions of community that they may otherwise overlook or not engage by enticing them to achieve quantifiable performance goals. Love it.
Derek Sivers of CDBaby and MuckWork on Startup Success
Even in this age of fear based news, war and famine, contentious politics and avian flu, it is difficult to be a pessimist with people like Derek Sivers in this world.
Derek Sivers is the man behind CDBaby and now MuckWork who parlayed the simple need to publish his own CDs into a company to sell his friends albums as well into a scalable web business into a massive payday, which he parlayed into a tremendous charitable organization designed to aid independent musicians in a much more comprehensive way.
In this interview Derek speaks candidly about his journey from a musician into the big business of music showing that tremendous success can come from following natural, compassionate intentions and be fed back into scaling those intentions to a tremendous degree.
http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/show-40-derek-sivers-cdbaby-and-muckwork/
If you're into the business site of the web, I highly recommend subscribing to this podcast. It's worth going back and listening to the entire season.