Lately, I’ve been tinkering with a new site build and expanding my overall knowledge of web design. Over the last two days I have been learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and delving deeper into the endless world of HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language). It’s very interesting how CSS can intermingle with HTML
I have always thought of code as a different way of expressing yourself; a very precise, largely over-thought, and in a round-about manner way of showing one’s colors.
Well, anyways, I have been using this tutorial service called TutsPlus.com to learn my ninja HTML and CSS ways. Here is a link to the free (holy jeepers!) 30 day tutorial series: 30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS. It’s a great video tutorial series even for those that may already know some HTML and CSS because the teaching style covers things that may have been glanced over for the Do-It-Yourself enthusiast turned professional (like me). I found that I was able to get through the first two weeks of the course in a day and a half. I know this is starting to sound like a shameless plug, and it may put your mind at ease to hear that I am not receiving money from TutsPlus.com. I just think it’s always good to share the non-debt-inducing wealth!
Learning these new things and applying them to my daily postings and such, I have come to enjoy the art of typography and typefaces. Although, the two are separate beasts in my opinion:
- Typefaces deal with the way letters, numbers and symbols look as individuals, as a set, and grouped together.
- Typography is the arrangement of these letters, numbers and symbols.
Growing up I was always into viewing graffiti, and I used to have a graffiti sketchbook. I wonder if it’s still laying around in my parents’ house; it would be fun to look through it again.
Some of the elements of graffiti I enjoy carry over to typography. The weight and stroke of lines never gets dull. I recently came across this very interesting and very well designed website that only uses fonts from Google Web Fonts, which I believe is open source, so anyone can submit a font (naturally, there are many bad ones). The site is called Beautiful Web Type, and displays a hand-picked variety of well placed font and typeface. I will have to install the Google Web Fonts here on my site and test some of them out soon. Click on the image below to be redirected to the Beautiful Web Type site.
And then I almost added some pictures to this post because it felt like I was rambling; Rambling about art, and how I think that fonts are really cool and that art can be applied in many ways to the subconscious when we read things. But then I thought to myself, a picture would disrupt this thing that I had been building. It slowly turned into a text-babble-typography-lovefest. I started losing control.
