The small web is beautiful An Essay by Ben Hoyt benhoyt.com I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Why aim small?Features and complexitySolving the problem of software bloatRaw size isn't enough Rediscovering the Small Web wwwmicrosites
The pernicious issue with pangrams The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform. Jonathan Hoefler, Text for Proofing Fonts www.typography.com Embracing Asymmetrical Design typographylanguagedesign