Jacob Gube offers a splendid appreciation of this splendid character covering history, styling, encoding, and what not to do:

(Apologies to our Facebook fans, who are getting this twice.)

Nice UI as well.

Can you tell Arial from Helvetica?

Take the quiz.

Given multiple documents, readers will make more judgments based on typography as they find it harder to make judgments based on substance.

On one level this is pretty reductive. A situation where all other considerations are equal except typography (or design, for that matter) never exists. But just because a reader starts reading an article or brief doesn’t mean the reader will finish it. Butterick writes:

I believe that most readers are looking for reasons to stop reading. Not because they’re malicious or aloof. They’re just being rational. If readers have other demands on their time, why should they pay any more attention than they absolutely must? Readers are always looking for the exit.

It’s an information design problem: How do you move a reader along in the flow?

Next question: Is legal size really necessary?

This demo page shows the Meta Web version we have purchased for the site redesign. Internally we have tested it on Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, and current versions of Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome (such incremental browser testing is part of our process). It also works on the iPhone’s Safari browser.

If the fonts on the demo page don’t resemble the image below on your browser, let us know!

A sample of Meta

UPDATE (December 9, 2010): As Andy mentions in the comments, the lower-case y in Meta Web Medium renders with a flaw. This appears on all Windows-based browsers. We’ve reprocessed the fonts and uploaded a new demo.

Map drawn using only typography

Detail of the Chicago map

The Boston map

Each map was hand-made, with type carefully overlaid on the existing cartographic structures.  Clearly these were a labor of love and the resulting work shows it.  See more at http://www.axismaps.com/typographic.php

(Thanks to Smashing Magazine for the tweet pointer to this great material)

It has been a week since an update on the redesign of the Dynamic Diagrams website, but work has been progressing steadily behind the scenes.  Kirsten, the lead information architect on the project, has worked with the team to develop a solid set of functional and business requirements which have gone through several reviews.  With requirements now final, some slight changes have been made to the information architecture of the site itself, although the emphasis remains on the overall design.

One of the steps in creating an information architecture. Our site did not require this many Post-Its!

Wireframes are also complete and so the work has been turned over to Matt, who is the design lead.  It is not an enviable job, designing for a group who spend their days fully focused on all things visual.  Matt’s first decision was to use “web fonts“, an emerging standard that allows us to employ our company standard, Meta, without having to use (or maintain) image files.  This provides us with a tremendous degree of flexibility while still allowing us to create a consistent look and feel for Dynamic Diagrams.

A sample of Meta

Matt has produced a first draft of a design style and has received feedback from the working group.  This will result in a second version that will be presented to the entire Dynamic Diagrams staff sometime next week.  Despite the tough audience he will be facing, Matt can be assured that we will provide him with useful feedback (as opposed to the “I’ll know it when I see it” or “looks good, but can you make it blue?” nightmares that haunt all design professionals).  As reported earlier, the biggest change will be in providing a far wider and deeper range of work from our portfolio and Matt and Kirsten seem to have that well in hand.

A large format diagram from 1999.

Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.” He continues:

Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author (my emphasis).

However, the flip side of easy equals true — or “an instinctive preference for the familiar” as Bennett defines the concept — is that to generate reflection or curiosity, you may need to make things less familiar. It’s a good thing we know how to do both.

These lipstick ads feature Fenice (1980) with Balmoral (1978) for the script caps. Amazone (1958) for the script lowercase is fine here, but the outline looks too much like a modern computer graphics effect (which is what it is).