Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the font-water.
On September 14th, representatives from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google made a joint font announcement in Warsaw: OpenType 1.8 was unveiled, featuring variable fonts, a.k.a. OpenType Font Variations, based on an all-but forgotten Apple technology, GX Variations.
Variable fonts enable type designers to create fonts that have one or more design axes, such as weight or width. Use of a design axis frees designers; for example, if there is a weight axis, a designer is free to choose any arbitrary weight within the font's design space, not just a few pre-set weights.
Many type designers have long used such technology for font design, so there is a backlog of existing typefaces that could be adapted to this technology. But two previous axis-fonts technologies did not take off: Apple's GX/AAT Typography allowed it, and Adobe's Multiple Master did as well. Why should this be different?
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Thomas Phinney is President of FontLab, the font software tools company. Previously he was product manager for fonts and global typography at Adobe, and then senior product manager for Extensis. In the 2000s he was instrumental in driving the adoption of OpenType, both within Adobe and in the marketplace.
Nate Clinton, "Conversations with Machines"WebVisions
While drones deliver our purchases and cars drive themselves, there’s something special about the personal touch that only a one-on-one interaction with a human assistant can provide. It’s special because humans have expertise, empathy, and insight that robots lack. Unfortunately, the “concierge experience” is expensive to offer, and scales slowly. In this session, we’ll discuss how technology can help businesses leverage their experts to scale the concierge experience cheaply and effectively, without losing the human qualities that make it great.
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Nate is the Director of Strategy at Cooper. In his role, he blends the decisiveness and collaborative skills of a Product Manager with the acumen of an Economist to build bridges with people and organizations. Equal parts teacher and student, Nate leads initiatives in content creation, business development, and creative leadership.
Anthropology is the study of humans past and present. Design is the skill of solving complex problems to create a better future. But can a discipline focused on the past/present merge with a discipline focused on the future? The answer is yes. Welcome to Design Anthropology 101.
Design anthropology converges two powerful fields that can push design beyond just “innovation”. In this talk, you’ll learn what design anthropology is and what it means for the future of design. Most importantly, you’ll walk away with a basic understanding of how to use ethnographic methodologies and collaboration to make products that push humanity forward.
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Amélie is a product designer at a small startup who combines her love for user experience and design anthropology to make great products. She made her first foray into design and development making Sailor Moon and DBZ websites. Don't be afraid to say hello (especially if you have food).
Slides from my talk at WebVisions Chicago 2016. Exploring the state of prototyping in the design field today. How rapid prototyping can help us think faster than traditional brainstorming meetings. And how, when we accept what we don't know, we start to know more.
Designing for Sustainability - WebVisions 2016Tim Frick
Presentation regarding sustainable web design given during WebVisions Chicago 2016 conference on September 23rd at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It covers a range of topics involving making the web more sustainable and points out issues that we need to solve in order to improve our digital ecosystem to keep our natural ecosystem green and thriving.
Nate Clinton, "Conversations with Machines"WebVisions
While drones deliver our purchases and cars drive themselves, there’s something special about the personal touch that only a one-on-one interaction with a human assistant can provide. It’s special because humans have expertise, empathy, and insight that robots lack. Unfortunately, the “concierge experience” is expensive to offer, and scales slowly. In this session, we’ll discuss how technology can help businesses leverage their experts to scale the concierge experience cheaply and effectively, without losing the human qualities that make it great.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nate is the Director of Strategy at Cooper. In his role, he blends the decisiveness and collaborative skills of a Product Manager with the acumen of an Economist to build bridges with people and organizations. Equal parts teacher and student, Nate leads initiatives in content creation, business development, and creative leadership.
Anthropology is the study of humans past and present. Design is the skill of solving complex problems to create a better future. But can a discipline focused on the past/present merge with a discipline focused on the future? The answer is yes. Welcome to Design Anthropology 101.
Design anthropology converges two powerful fields that can push design beyond just “innovation”. In this talk, you’ll learn what design anthropology is and what it means for the future of design. Most importantly, you’ll walk away with a basic understanding of how to use ethnographic methodologies and collaboration to make products that push humanity forward.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Amélie is a product designer at a small startup who combines her love for user experience and design anthropology to make great products. She made her first foray into design and development making Sailor Moon and DBZ websites. Don't be afraid to say hello (especially if you have food).
Slides from my talk at WebVisions Chicago 2016. Exploring the state of prototyping in the design field today. How rapid prototyping can help us think faster than traditional brainstorming meetings. And how, when we accept what we don't know, we start to know more.
Designing for Sustainability - WebVisions 2016Tim Frick
Presentation regarding sustainable web design given during WebVisions Chicago 2016 conference on September 23rd at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It covers a range of topics involving making the web more sustainable and points out issues that we need to solve in order to improve our digital ecosystem to keep our natural ecosystem green and thriving.
Christian Titze, "Hello From the Other Side: Adapting the Agile Agency to Cli...WebVisions
Many agencies have become frustrated with over-specced sequential waterfall projects. Their inflexible methodologies have too often led to outcomes that didn’t realize their full potential. In contrast, agile methods like Scrum and Kanban have proven successful ways to build and run software. But how do you apply agile methods to the reality of an agency’s project based work? There are many challenges and the most crucial question is: what if our ideal work method and our clients’ realities don’t match?
Edenspiekermann have been working agile since 2009. They’ve since achieved terrific results and have never looked back. They now employ about as many developers as designers, creating meaningful digital products and services for global clients like Red Bull, Cisco Systems, The Economist and the German and Dutch Railways.
Christian will talk about the often challenging contrast between wanting to deliver the best possible product and making sure you’re satisfying the client’s internal project needs. How to deliver excellent customer satisfaction while working as agile as possible?
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Christian is the guy designers are ambivalent about. He’s not a font guy. He’s the business guy—the one who works the odd hours creating and maintaining relationships with some of the largest companies in the world. Over the past decade, he has led business development efforts for numerous agencies on three continents.
What happens when the digital tools and platforms we make and use for communication and entertainment are hijacked for terrorism, violence against the vulnerable and nefarious transactions? What role do designers and developers play? Are we complicit as creators of these technologies and products? Should we police them or fight back? As Portfolio Lead for Northern Lab, Northern Trust's internal innovation startup focused on client and partner experience, Antonio will share a mix of provocative scenarios torn from today's headlines and compelling stories where activism and technology facilitated peace—and war.
As a call-to-action for designers and developers to engage in projects capable of transformational change, he'll explore the question: How might technology foster new experiences to better accelerate social activism and make the world a smarter, safer place?
Presented at Hofstra University on 3/9/12 in the Leo Guthart Cultural Center Theater. Topics discussed included the evolution of marketing, advertising, and how to best use social media for personal branding use.
Start-up Chile Marketing & Advertising Tribe session on Data Analysis tools for startups. Written by Pedro Villalobos (Lagiar.com), Felipe del Sol (Admetricks.com), Liane Siebenhaar (Mewe.co). This is a selection of tools you can use to shape your pitch and product. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.
10 Steps of Project Management in Digital Agencies Alemsah Ozturk
This is part of our ( 41? 29! ) agency's culture series. Basicly this series of documents helps our teams learn the foundation of agency culture, basic rules to do their work. We are all about sharing the data & know how, so here we are ;)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, promising self-driving cars, medical breakthroughs, and new ways of working. But how do you separate hype from reality? How can your company apply AI to solve real business problems?
Here’s what AI learnings your business should keep in mind for 2017.
The technologies and people we are designing experiences for are constantly changing, in most cases they are changing at a rate that is difficult keep up with. When we think about how our teams are structured and the design processes we use in light of this challenge, a new design problem (or problem space) emerges, one that requires us to focus inward. How do we structure our teams and processes to be resilient? What would happen if we looked at our teams and design process as IA’s, Designers, Researchers? What strategies would we put in place to help them be successful? This talk will look at challenges we face leading, supporting, or simply being a part of design teams creating experiences for user groups with changing technological needs.
An immersive workshop at General Assembly, SF. I typically teach this workshop at General Assembly, San Francisco. To see a list of my upcoming classes, visit https://generalassemb.ly/instructors/seth-familian/4813
I also teach this workshop as a private lunch-and-learn or half-day immersive session for corporate clients. To learn more about pricing and availability, please contact me at http://familian1.com
Font file formats: TrueType (TTF), PostScript y OpenType (OTF)David Fimia Zapata
Characteristics, history and definition of different file formats of the different fonts files types for operating systems like Windows, Mac OS and Linux. TrueType fonts (TTF) and OpenType PostScript (OTF) that can be found on the websites of free fonts to download like www.ultimatefonts.com and they have special characteristics and peculiarities to know that file format is used for each thing we can serve.
Christian Titze, "Hello From the Other Side: Adapting the Agile Agency to Cli...WebVisions
Many agencies have become frustrated with over-specced sequential waterfall projects. Their inflexible methodologies have too often led to outcomes that didn’t realize their full potential. In contrast, agile methods like Scrum and Kanban have proven successful ways to build and run software. But how do you apply agile methods to the reality of an agency’s project based work? There are many challenges and the most crucial question is: what if our ideal work method and our clients’ realities don’t match?
Edenspiekermann have been working agile since 2009. They’ve since achieved terrific results and have never looked back. They now employ about as many developers as designers, creating meaningful digital products and services for global clients like Red Bull, Cisco Systems, The Economist and the German and Dutch Railways.
Christian will talk about the often challenging contrast between wanting to deliver the best possible product and making sure you’re satisfying the client’s internal project needs. How to deliver excellent customer satisfaction while working as agile as possible?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Christian is the guy designers are ambivalent about. He’s not a font guy. He’s the business guy—the one who works the odd hours creating and maintaining relationships with some of the largest companies in the world. Over the past decade, he has led business development efforts for numerous agencies on three continents.
What happens when the digital tools and platforms we make and use for communication and entertainment are hijacked for terrorism, violence against the vulnerable and nefarious transactions? What role do designers and developers play? Are we complicit as creators of these technologies and products? Should we police them or fight back? As Portfolio Lead for Northern Lab, Northern Trust's internal innovation startup focused on client and partner experience, Antonio will share a mix of provocative scenarios torn from today's headlines and compelling stories where activism and technology facilitated peace—and war.
As a call-to-action for designers and developers to engage in projects capable of transformational change, he'll explore the question: How might technology foster new experiences to better accelerate social activism and make the world a smarter, safer place?
Presented at Hofstra University on 3/9/12 in the Leo Guthart Cultural Center Theater. Topics discussed included the evolution of marketing, advertising, and how to best use social media for personal branding use.
Start-up Chile Marketing & Advertising Tribe session on Data Analysis tools for startups. Written by Pedro Villalobos (Lagiar.com), Felipe del Sol (Admetricks.com), Liane Siebenhaar (Mewe.co). This is a selection of tools you can use to shape your pitch and product. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.
10 Steps of Project Management in Digital Agencies Alemsah Ozturk
This is part of our ( 41? 29! ) agency's culture series. Basicly this series of documents helps our teams learn the foundation of agency culture, basic rules to do their work. We are all about sharing the data & know how, so here we are ;)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, promising self-driving cars, medical breakthroughs, and new ways of working. But how do you separate hype from reality? How can your company apply AI to solve real business problems?
Here’s what AI learnings your business should keep in mind for 2017.
The technologies and people we are designing experiences for are constantly changing, in most cases they are changing at a rate that is difficult keep up with. When we think about how our teams are structured and the design processes we use in light of this challenge, a new design problem (or problem space) emerges, one that requires us to focus inward. How do we structure our teams and processes to be resilient? What would happen if we looked at our teams and design process as IA’s, Designers, Researchers? What strategies would we put in place to help them be successful? This talk will look at challenges we face leading, supporting, or simply being a part of design teams creating experiences for user groups with changing technological needs.
An immersive workshop at General Assembly, SF. I typically teach this workshop at General Assembly, San Francisco. To see a list of my upcoming classes, visit https://generalassemb.ly/instructors/seth-familian/4813
I also teach this workshop as a private lunch-and-learn or half-day immersive session for corporate clients. To learn more about pricing and availability, please contact me at http://familian1.com
Font file formats: TrueType (TTF), PostScript y OpenType (OTF)David Fimia Zapata
Characteristics, history and definition of different file formats of the different fonts files types for operating systems like Windows, Mac OS and Linux. TrueType fonts (TTF) and OpenType PostScript (OTF) that can be found on the websites of free fonts to download like www.ultimatefonts.com and they have special characteristics and peculiarities to know that file format is used for each thing we can serve.
Whether you are writing an article, research paper, essay, blog, and dissertation or PhD thesis, it is important to choose an appropriate writing software tool for your work. The choice of writing software comes down to your personal taste.
For novice programmers, it is difficult to decide on which programming language to learn first, or which one to try out next? The choice is vast and the complexities many. The author analyses various programming languages, and suggests making a choice based on the programmers’ interests and current software trends.
Here is a presentation I created quite a few years back when giving a presentation to students on programming languages. I have updated it with some recent trends.
Envisioning the Future of Language WorkbenchesMarkus Voelter
Over the last couple of years, I have used MPS successfully to build interesting (modeling and programming) languages in a wide variety of domains, targeting both business users and engineers. I’ve used MPS because it is currently the most powerful language workbench, lots of things are good about iz, in particular, its support for a multitude of notations and language modularity. But it is also obvious that MPS is not going to be viable for the medium to long term future; the most obvious reason for this statement is that it is not web/cloud-based. In this keynote, I will quickly recap why and how we have been successful with MPS, and point out how language workbenches could look like in the future; I will outline challenges, opportunities and research problems. I hope to spawn discussions for the remainder of the workshop.
The lowly side project—you know that thing you do for fun when you have some downtime? The history of the Internet is rife with stories of side projects starting as innocent little ways to kill some time or scratch an itch only to turn into something much larger.
From Blogger to Flickr to Twitter to Slack, a lot of very popular services started out as small side projects before eclipsing the very thing they grew from. And they’re not just important for startups, they’re also vital to anyone working on the web today. Thanks to a plethora of self-directed learning sites, there’s not much stopping you from building anything you can dream as your next side project. In the end, they’re great ways for anyone to expand their skill set, build on their hobbies, and impress future employers.
It’s time for side projects to take center stage.
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Matt Haughey is a veteran of the Internet, starting from the first days of blogging when he created MetaFilter and later with his work on Blogger. He helped launch and design Creative Commons and most recently has helped Slack share their vision for making everyone's working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
Kate Bingaman-Burt explores harnessing the power of accumulation and consumption through a system of rules to structure creative chaos. Commit to being a vigilant "Art Soldier" - keep making, keep moving.
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Kate Bingaman-Burt makes piles of work about the things that we buy (and want) and the emotions attached to our stuff. She also happily thinks and draws for good people and companies. She have been making work about consumption since 2002, teaching since 2004
“I don’t know” is certainly the most common answer I give to my clients’ questions. That may sound crazy, but I actually think it’s the smartest thing you can say as a freelancer. BUT I know how to find out, and when I do, I'll deliver them the most informed and creative answer they have ever heard. User surveys, forms, interviews, A/B testing, big shift and even street events, "I will explain how to combine the power of intuition with logic and reasoning to reach very significant results. Because after all, the biggest barriers to great work and creativity is not money, time or technical limitations but MENTAL obstacles.
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Adrien is a digital expert helping startups & advertising agencies to reach the highest summit focusing on UI & UX design, digital and marketing strategy. He's the Founder of Creatives Without Borders, design teacher, startups mentor & investor, he also writes articles about entrepreneurship, freelance and self development. He is currently based in New York City.
The Web is the largest public big data repository that humankind has created. In this overwhelming data ocean, we need to be aware of the quality and, in particular, of the biases that exist in this data. In the Web, biases also come from redundancy and spam, as well as from algorithms that we design to improve the user experience. This problem is further exacerbated by biases that are added by these algorithms, specially in the context of search and recommendation systems. They include selection and presentation bias in many forms, interaction bias, social bias, etc. We give several examples and their relation to sparsity and privacy, stressing the importance of the user context to avoid these biases.
Mike Monteiro, "This is the Golden Age of Design...and We're Screwed"WebVisions
Everywhere I look companies are hiring designers! Two hundred over here! A thousand over here! We need a lot of them and we need them fast. Finally! Companies have come to understand the importance of design in building successful products and services. Isn’t that great?
Mike gave his awesome keynote at WebVisions Portland on Thurs., May 19, 2016.
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Mike runs Mule Design Studio. It’s a nice place. They do good, quality work. He makes paintings with words on them. He picks fights with the Tea Party on Twitter. He lives in San Francisco with Erika Hall, his son Henry, and his dog Rupert.
Mark Wyner, "A New Dawn of the Human Experience"WebVisions
In what is being called the “third era of computing,” cognitive computing is revolutionizing the relationship between humans and computers. Internet of Things is only the beginning. Artificial Intelligence is finally sprouting out of science fiction and blossoming into palpable technology. Cognitive systems are able to learn independently, build upon pre-programmed knowledge, understand natural language, and interact with human beings with reasoning and logic.
In this session Mark will explore how, through the anthropomorphizing of machines, we are creating an environment of fabricated empathy that will change the human experience, and how we are asking machines to make ethical decisions that they’re grossly unprepared to do. He will also discuss why Artificial Intelligence won’t create an apocalypse of robots who take over the world. Maybe.
Mark's keynote was given at WebVisions Portland on Fri., May 20, 2016.
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Mark has been working as a creative professional and technologist for nearly twenty years, partnering with Fortune 100/500 companies and non-profits to craft meaningful experiences for digital UIs and ecosystems in new technologies. He shares his thoughts as an international speaker and writer.
Kevin Hoyt, "On the Verge of Genius: Smart Cities Workshop"WebVisions
(Kevin's workshop was given at WebVisions Portland on May 18, 2016)
Cross a WebVisions workshop with Bill Nye the Science Guy (or Mr. Wizard depending on your generation), and you will get IBM's Kevin Hoyt, leading you through an interactive, hands-on, exploration of the increasingly connected world of cities, farms, and you.
On this three-hour tour, the weather may just get rough, but smart cities with vast arrays of connected sensors will keep us on course and on time. Leaving the city behind, we will discover that data is the new fertilizer for the green acres of smart agriculture. The next stop on this fantastic voyage is inner space as we seek to leverage smart healthcare to unlock the secrets of heart disease and asthma.
This workshop is packed with live demonstrations of a large number of scientific sensors in action. The PH of your drinking water. The air quality of the conference center. The galvanic skin response (sweating) of the presenter. And many more. Having established the possibilities, you will have the option to spend an hour with your very own Internet-connected hardware. Solving the world's problems is hard work, but together we can achieve genius.
What You'll Learn:
How crowdsourcing social change and overcoming human bias in decision making, is leading to the rise of the machines;
How cities like Amsterdam and London are using the Internet of Things to protect personal property and save lives;
How companies like Harman and John Deere discovered the best user experience to keep up with population growth;
How the science of you may just be able to eradicate the world biggest health problems - if you let it;
Basic electronics, and how to connect a device of your own to an Internet of Things platform using Arduino.
Who Should Attend
If you think products like the Google Nest are cool, but are not sure what value they play in society, this workshop is for you. If you look at the emergence of self-driving cars, and wonder about the economic impact, this workshop is for you. If you enjoy gardening or farm-to-table food, and want to find out how to make that scale to a societal level, this workshop is for you. If you fear Skynet, this workshop is for you. If you picked up on any of the 60s, 70s, and 80s references in the overview, this workshop is for you. Or, if you just want to geek out with Internet-connected hardware, this workshop is for you.
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Kevin Hoyt is a Developer Advocate at IBM where he has been actively involved in furthering web technologies. He focuses on mobile application development, cloud services, and the Internet of Things.
Art has always had an uncomfortable relationship with commerce. Never more so than now that the bulk of the "creative class" is employed by the business sector in the service of selling products and increasing their bottom line. This has created a new, and often uncomfortable dynamic, where our work is now evaluated primarily for it's ability to affect consumers and sell a product and secondarily for its creative merit. These pressures have also made it difficult for our "art" to fulfill one of its essential functions -- provoke essential conversations/debates in society. This has in turn left many of us frequently feeling frustrated and unsatisfied by the work itself.
It wasn't always like this, but since we can't go back, we have to find the right way to move forward. Is there an alternative pathway where we can create for business, but still advocate for principles and ideals that we believe in through our work? How do we re-establish ourselves as an artist and assert our creative/cultural authority?
This session will explore all of the above, with a particular focus on the NYC market from a present day and historical perspective. As well as look at tactical ways to begin to advocate for this shift in your own work/business.
Too often we create brands, experiences, and content that sacrifice humanity on the altar of conversion optimization. In this session, we’ll explore how to make our products feel less like a business transaction and more like a conversation through human-oriented brand, marketing, and experience design.
Don’t worry, this won’t be a stern sermon about user personas or focus groups – Meagan knows that conference attendees are people too. Instead she’ll share some of the practical hows and whys of designing for people, not customers.
“Perhaps all interaction is about wanting and getting.” –David Mitchell
Drawing on her experience as Creative Director at SproutVideo, Meagan will share techniques that you can bring to your work to honor the humanity of users through happiness-driven design and content.
If the Design Process were a boy band, Feature Prioritization would never be the fan favorite with a breakout solo career. Prioritization isn’t sexy. It hurts to let go of the beloved features created during brainstorming. The decision-making design phase often involves negotiation and compromise in an uncomfortable social environment. Prioritization can be downright painful!
If only you could recapture the enthusiasm and creative glow of brainstorming. Well, wish no longer! Design fairy godmothers Carolyn Chandler and Anna van Slee are here to transform this pumpkin into a stage coach. Strap in!
Taming Context in the Internet of ThingsWebVisions
As we continue to stitch our physical world together with digital information, context is becoming harder to manage and understand. Everything we do or buy is potentially connected to everything else, complicating the meaning of our everyday actions. How do we insure that the networked "things" we put into the world make sense as part a human environment? The answers have less to do with the devices we make than with the way people perceive and comprehend their surroundings.
Using everyday examples and practical models, this talk shows how we can figure out the contextual angles underlying the experiences of your product's or service's users and customers.
Mind Melds and BattleBots: Creating the Right Kind of Designer/Developer DynamicWebVisions
Improving the designer/developer relationship is an ardent wish on a lot of project teams. And yet, a lot of excuses seem to be made for bad relationships between designers and developers… several of which are tied to when and how each are involved.
Do these sound familiar?
“There’s not enough budget to involve all members of the team from beginning to end.”
“We don’t want to limit designer creativity too soon by bringing tech into the process.”
“We don’t want to waste developer time at the beginning when there’s nothing fully defined yet.”
“If we design a detailed enough style guide, development should be able to implement without retaining a designer through implementation.”
How do you find the right balance of involvement without breaking the budget - and make the most of the skills that each team member can bring to the table?
In this presentation, Carolyn Chandler (Experience Designer and instructor) and Don Bora (Developer and iconic tech mentor) will take you on a journey through the main stages of a project from both sides of the divide.
Poetry for Robots: A Digital Humanities ExperimentWebVisions
In 1989, scholar Norman Cousins published a piece called The Poet and the Computer. Anticipating the computer revolution at his doorstep Cousins makes a plea: do not allow our machines to dehumanize us. And he offers a specific prescription against the potential malady - poetry.
"The danger," he explains, is "not so much that man will be controlled by the computer as that he may imitate it.” Intimate and repeated communication with the robots may require us to too conform our minds to their limited logics and cold calculations.
To preserve and reinforce humanness, Cousins hypothesizes that “…it might be fruitful to effect some sort of junction between the computer technologist and the poet.” And I agree. I propose we write poetry for the robots. What would happen if we created metaphorical metadata for an image bank? Would a search for ‘stars' return image of ‘eyes'?
At Poetry4Robots.com, we’ve made the experiment live. This ‘digital humanities experiment’ is being conducted by Neologic Labs, Webvisions, and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination.
This talk is about how we may further turn to the arts and humanities to ensure human-centric UX.
Kent Nichols, "Downshifting Your Life to Rev Up Your Creativity"WebVisions
Life is not a linear journey from point A to B, there are bumps, detours, and failures that we must endure and persevere to achieve our goals and get to the next level. Kent Nichols talks about his journey from College dropout to New Media darling to overcoming being a one-hit wonder in this humorous look at his life since dropping out of the LA rat race.
He tackles sensible irrationality, building a strong foundation, networking, picking the right place to escape to, and taking your time while being decisive. And you'll discover the pains and joys of moving to a "lifestyle" city, including no one caring about your Lexus Hybrid, realizing you're the fattest person in a 50 mile radius, and trading a 2 hour daily commute for a lot more time on an airplane.
Robert Stulle, "Stories From the Agile Agency"WebVisions
In his talk, Robert shows some recent projects and shares the methods and tools that he and his colleagues at Edenspiekermann have found to be useful in their daily work. His agency works with multidisciplinary teams and agile methods in a user centric way. Robert will share some insights and anecdotes and talk about all the good things and the bad things that can be.
As one of the integral parts of the What If Technique™, Mona Patel, Founder/CEO of Motivate Design, will ask you to reflect on and question your behaviors and attitudes when it comes to ideating and thinking in a creative space. Do you hesitate to strive for the impossible? Is that hesitation rooted in fact or belief? Are you just creating excuses?
Mona will walk you through the six Excuse Personas that are preventing you from getting what you really want in not only your personal life but in business and beyond. She will cover how we all have personality barriers and that each can be overcome through self-reflection and a commitment to action. Expect to leave the session with a sense of self-realization that will motivate you to embrace the white space and start training your creativity muscle.
"Burn Down the Blocks! Sparking Collaboration Through Creative Play"WebVisions
There’s no shortage of inspirational mantras, but these sayings offer little advice to surmounting departmental silos, generational gulfs, intimidating power distances and other communication roadblocks that stymie creative collaboration in the workplace.
These barriers exist because the roles we play in a team environment provide us with a set of rules for interacting with each other. Ironically, these rules often prevent us from doing the very thing we’ve come together as a team to do: Collaborate!
In this session, Carolyn and Anna will discuss how to break the rules and transform those roadblocks into building blocks… freeing you and your team to live up to the mantra of your choice.
1/ Learn about common communication barriers; why they exist and how they hinder team innovation.
2/ Understand the value of design synthesis as a group activity, and how play is a central component to the co-creation dynamic.
3/ Explore a type of creative team play called a Spark-a-Thon. You’ve probably heard of the hack-a-thon, a fun and popular way to immerse yourself into a problem and solve it with code. What would happen if this format of time-limited, team-oriented creation was applied to design concepting? The answer: The Spark-a-Thon, which leads to bigger ideas and a stronger team problem-solving dynamic.
4/ Gain tips, tricks, and resources, so that you can go run your own Spark-a-Thon. You'll leave armed with some benefits and results you’ll glean from it, too - just in case you need to build an internal business case for it.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father. Join us to learn some serious play!
Jesse Lozano, "The Future of Manufacturing – a Desktop Sized Revolution?"WebVisions
Massive industrial machines and processes are currently being scaled down so they can easily sit on your desktop. You can have anything 3D printed at the click of a mouse button and soon we will see desktop sized machines that print much more than just plastic.
Rapid prototyping has dramatically reduced the cost barriers to creating a new hardware device and access to open source software has enabled more people than ever to actually design and bring their ideas to life. The rate at which innovation occurs today is faster than ever before and the growing ability to innovate in your living room and crowd fund your idea into existence means that we are now seeing a wave of innovation that actually started in a living room, it's all very 70's and it's pretty exciting.
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Thomas Phinney, “Fonts. Everything is Changing. Again.”
1. Variable Fonts
What just happened?
23 September 2016 ·
Thomas Phinney · fontlab.com · @FontLab ·
thomasphinney.com · @ThomasPhinney ·
Hi, I’m Thomas Phinney.
My story in brief is, I’m a font geek. My background:
Adobe (product manager for fonts & global typography) … Extensis (PM
for web fonts and font mgmt) … FontLab (President)
By way of background, let me briefly mention what has happened over
the last couple of years with color fonts: several different vendors
thought we needed a way of doing multi-color fonts for things like
emoji.
So we got four different solutions.
All four of them are in the latest OpenType spec. Adoption just may not
have been the fastest, although the latest version of Windows 10
supports all four formats.
I don’t think this background is entirely coincidental to last week’s
announcement:
2. photo by
Thomas Phinney
Obviously this was not a good outcome. So, since last January, a quiet
cabal of font geeks and engineers, first from the four companies began
meeting and plotting the next big thing.
photo by
Thomas Phinney
These are photos I took at the next-to-last meeting, which took place
during TypeCon in Seattle last month.
3. Behdad Esfahbod
GOOGLE
Peter Constable
MICROSOFT
Ned Hadley
APPLE
David Lemon
ADOBE
photo by
Alessia Mazzarella
Here is the Q&A from the announcement, with the speakers all hanging
out as friendly colleagues. Which, by the way, is how they acted in the
behind the scenes meetings leading up to the announcement. Just a
bunch of font geeks and engineers working together.
No more fragmentation. Now, I need to help you understand this: in the
font world, we’d never had a major new development involving more
than two big companies.
Pretty amazing stuff to me. On a hunch, I checked the weather for that
day.
4. (OT Font Variations)
Variable Fonts
OK, so that was interesting. What is this all about, anyway?
The formal label for the tech is OpenType font variations, or variable
fonts for short. Variable fonts are essentially an updating of Apple’s GX
Variations tech from the early 90s, which is functionally a superset of
Adobe’s multiple master technology of the same vintage.
5. Two Key Things
Compression for the whole family (70%?)
Design axes (hence the “variable” / “variaYons”)
Design Axes
The idea is that you can have different font designs and interpolate or
blend between them to get a near-infinite range of gradations, called
“instances.”
Each area of variation is called an AXIS. A variable font may have just one
axis, or several. Weight and width are the most common axes.
From a design perspective, what’s exciting is that you can get not just
some small number of specific values, but any degree in between.
6. Design Space
2
Figure 1 A multiple master design matrix
is established by the design axes integrated
into the typeface. Shown here is Myriad’s
two-dimensional matrix comprised of weight
and width axes, and a small sampling of the
possible font variations that can be custom-
generated within it.
For furth er tech n ical in form ation , please refer to Adobe’s tech n ical n ote
#5015 Adobe Type 1 Font Format Supplement.
Definition of Terms
Defin ition s for several key term s used in th is docum en t are listed below.
For a com plete glossary of defin ition s, see Appen dix B.
Multiple master technology
An en h an cem en t of Type 1 fon t tech n ology in corporatin g on -dem an d
in terpolation in to a fon t program .
Multiple master typeface
A super-typeface—a very large fam ily of related styles with in a sin gle Type 1
fon t program . Each m ultiple m aster typeface con tain s all th e in form ation
n ecessary to gen erate h un dreds of style variation s as in dividual fon ts, or
instances.
NOTE: In this document, the term typeface is not interchangeable with fon t.
Extended
Condensed
Light BlackW eight
Width
The range of possible designs is called a “design space”
So with a single axis font, you can visualize the design space or range of
possible instances as a simple line.
7. For a two-axis font, it’s a flat space, perhaps a square.
With three axes you get a 3-d space such as a cube.
8. This is an attempt to visualize a 4-axis design space, which would make
a hypercube.
But there is no real limit, you can have as many axes as you want!
Well, OK, I think maybe there would be a 64K limit. But 64K should be
enough for anyone.
9. DEMO
OpenType History
1996: Format announced by Adobe & Microso^
1998: Dropped MulYple Master (was only OT-CFF)
2000: First significant numbers of fonts
by 2006: Replaced PS Type 1 for new fonts
Now in sync with open ISO standard, OFF
Here’s some OpenType history.
Basically it’s been at least a decade since most vendors started making
their new fonts primarily in OpenType.
I think the other key thing is that OpenType is now an open standard. Or
technically, there is an open font standard, the Open Font Format or
O.F.F., that OpenType is kept in sync with. So now many aspects of
OpenType development are done in public.
This doesn’t mean backroom discussions are unimportant, nor does it
stop vendors from going off and doing their own things privately—as
we’ve seen in the past couple of years, with four competing ways of
doing color fonts—all of which are now enshrined in the OpenType spec.
The latest version of Windows 10 actually supports all four. It’s kinda
cray-cray.
10. Multiple Master fonts
Adobe extension to PostScript Type 1 format (1991)
Special flavor of PS Type 1 font files (Mac & Win)
Allowed axis-based designs
Briefly allowed for OpenType CFF (only)
• Dropped from OpenType spec in 1998
Adobe converted old MM fonts to OT by 2002–03
Gradually deprecated and reduced support
Apple’s GX/AAT
GX Typography (1991)
Rebranded Apple Advanced Typography (OS X)
Smart font format (like OpenType)
• Smart fonts almost enYrely Apple system fonts
Offers opYonal axis-based fonts (like MM)
• Lijle tracYon / 3rd-party support
11. OpenType
Microso^ + Adobe (later open as Open Font Format)
Compare vs PostScript Type 1 & TrueType
Single-file, cross-pla6orm fonts
OpYonal more language support
OpYonal “smart font” features
• typographic
• language related
So, what is OpenType?
Okay, I’m going to go all old geezer on you for a minute.
You kids today have no freakin’ idea how easy you have it with fonts.
Back in the ’90s, Mac fonts only worked on a Mac, and Windows fonts only
worked on Windows. If they were PostScript fonts, you had two files to make up a
complete font, and had to remember to copy both of them and keep them
together. If you wanted extended language support in a PostScript font, you’d
have to switch fonts, because even eastern European accented characters, like
say Turkish, couldn’t fit in the same font file as Western European accented
characters… the PostScript fonts were limited to 256 encoded characters. There
were even different standard character sets for Mac fonts and Windows fonts, so
moving documents across plaoorms was especially dangerous.
Oh, and did I menYon that you had to install a system extension to even get your
operaYng system to scale the PostScript fonts on screen?
It was crazy.
OpenType took us away from all that.
Variable Fonts
Single file for a family (two for upright plus italic)
Base font style plus other master designs
“Deltas” to specify the other masters compactly
Can switch glyphs in design space
So, back to our topic of the day, variable fonts. These now use a single
file for a family of fonts, or two files if the family includes italic styles.
Each variable font involves two or more master designs. Now, just to be
clear, those master designs don’t have to be in the corners of the design
space. There just has to be one master somewhere on each side.
Besides advanced typographic superfamilies, variable fonts are simply a
lot smaller. We will have to get further down the implementation road to
know just how much smaller, and it will vary wildly by family and
depending on how many fonts you would have otherwise installed
separately. But as a totally ballpark figure, 70% is what the allies are
using.
12. What do we see?
Non-savvy environment?
• single default style? (.p)
• nothing? (.oo)
Savvy OS + regular app: default instances
Savvy OS + savvy app, or savvy browser:
• arbitrary instances
• UI? sliders or other access method
CSS 3
Can map some CSS features to VF axes
Weight: 9 values (100–900)
Width: 9 values (1–9)
13. CSS 4
Access full range of variable font values?
Support standard pre-named axes + arbitrary axes?
Will variable fonts
succeed?
So, will variable fonts succeed?
Yes, I think they will. Back in the early 90s there were more pressing
problems of language support that hadn’t been solved yet. That was
more pressing. Moreover, both GX and MM were backed primarily by just
one company, Apple and Adobe respectively. One tech was Mac-only,
and the other had no system-level support and almost no app support.
Now we have the relaunch of some old ideas, carefully integrated with
the existing OpenType standard. It’s been done by a consortium of major
players. Microsoft, Apple and Google represent all the major operating
systems. Adobe, Microsoft and Apple represent the biggest sources of
apps—and you could add Google on the mobile side. Google, Microsoft
and Apple give you an overwhelming majority of web browser share,
both mobile and desktop. It’s simply a matter of critical mass of support.
Part of this is motivation as well. I’ve already mentioned how 20 years
ago there were more pressing issues, that have been solved.
14. Articles/Resources
Introducing OpenType Variable Fonts
by John Hudson
Variable fonts, a new kind of font for flexible design
by Tim Brown, Adobe
Introducing OpenType font variaHons
by Behdad Esfahbod & Sascha Brawer, Google
Lesson of color fonts for variable fonts
by Thomas Phinney
OpenType 1.8 specificaHon
FontLab announces support for variable fonts
Questions?