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Matthias Ott

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Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 9: Commercial Type

Commercial Type is a custom type design studio founded in 2007 by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, based in New York City and London. They have worked to build a growing library of excellent quality with “a balance between highly versatile ‘vanilla’ typefaces that can do ...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 7: Lineto

Founded in 1993 by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller, Lineto is Switzerland’s first digital type foundry. Over the last three decades, Lineto has collaborated with type designers from all around the world and shaped one of the most impressive and high-quality libraries avail...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 6: Ohno Type Company

Sometimes, it can take quite a while for a foundry to finally become sustainable. Sometimes, like in the case of James Edmondson, it can take 17 type families. James Edmondson started Ohno in 2015, “born from a love of expressive typography and craft.” And, as he shares in a...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 5: Milieu Grotesque

Milieu Grotesque was founded in 2010 by graphic and type designers Timo Gaessner and Alexander Colby in Zurich. Today, the foundry is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Milieu Grotesque’s typefaces are versatile and system-oriented but also have a distinctive and often slightly quir...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 4: TypeMates

TypeMates is a comparatively young foundry from Germany, founded in 2015 by Lisa Fischbach, Jakob Runge, and Nils Thomsen. Despite its young age, the foundry has already worked with large clients on custom typefaces and has managed to grow its catalogue of typefaces into an ...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 3: Klim Type Foundry

For day three, we travel to New Zealand, where Klim Type Foundry was founded in 2005 by type designer Kris Sowersby. After having worked a while as a graphic designer, Kris was contacted by Chester Jenkins from Vllg who wanted to release Kris’ first typeface Feijoa. It was p...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 2: Dinamo

Dinamo is another type foundry from Switzerland, founded by Fabian Harb and Johannes Breyer in Basel. After moving to Berlin for a few years, they now operate from different cities and via a network of satellite members across the globe. They don’t see themselves as a foundr...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 1: Grilli Type

We’ll start the advent calendar with one of the most successful foundries of the last decade. Grilli Type is a Swiss type foundry that was founded in 2009 by Noël Leu and Thierry Blancpain. Today, the studio numbers eight people dispersed all across the globe. The foundry is...

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The Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022

The independent type design community has grown tremendously over the last couple of years and the quality and variety of fonts is truly breathtaking. A little while ago, I started jotting down a few type foundries to have a list that I could come back to whenever I was in n...

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A Conversation With ChatGPT

I just had a casual chat with ChatGPT that I wanted to share with you. Many of the things I asked and the answers I received are related to a talk I gave last week at CSS Café. I wanted to know what an algorithm might think about all of this. Decide for yourself where this ...

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ChatGPT, please explain websites in the words of William Shakespeare

Websites, oh websites!

Thou art a vast and wondrous realm, filled with knowledge and information to be explored.

Thou art a tool for communication and connection, allowing us to share our thoughts and ideas with others across the globe.

Thou art a source of entertainment and delight, providing us with endless hours of distraction and enjoyment.

Websites, thou art a marvel of modern technology, a gift to humanity.

Long may thou reign!

★

Generated with ChatGPT, which you can currently test for free during the research preview.

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Transient Frameworks

Since the first days of the Web, people have been thinking and debating hard about the best ways forward. The network, the protocols, the browsers, the documents, HTML, CSS, and Javascript – all those things are the result of years of countless discussions, fights, mistakes,...

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Leaving Twitter Behind

Twitter is not well. Many of us were worried that Elon Musk might rapidly change the face of the platform. But only very few expected things to go down so rapidly. After the latest deadline to respond whether they want to stay, it looks like about 75 % of the remaining workf...

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Converting Your Twitter Archive to Markdown

The bird is not well. So it is time to request and download an archive of your Twitter data now, if you haven’t done this recently. After you have requested your archive, it can take a while until you receive it. I requested my archive on the day Elon walked in and got an em...

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The Wrong Question

When author Jim Collins first met his hero Peter Drucker, whom many regard as the greatest management thinker of all time, the two men where at very different points in their lives. Here, a man in his thirties, eager to start a new endeavor, a new self-directed path, but equ...

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It Wasn’t Written

It takes years to become good at it. So we read books, take classes, and visit workshops to become better. And still, it may take a lifetime to master it. But more than anything, it is one of the things that makes us human: Writing. But now, the algorithms are coming for us....

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Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon

The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop. Cross-posting – or not? One of the first questions that comes to mind...

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Suspension

It could happen out of the blue, without any warning. It could happen without you knowing what you did wrong. It could happen today. Twitter could just suspend you. Gone. Your Tweets, your followers, your thoughts, your jokes, your conversations. They’re just gone. Gone, not...

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None of Your Business

I bet you know this: You’ve created something – a drawing, a layout, a video, a piece of code, or a blog post – and after you’re more or less done, you pause and you look at it. And you don’t like it. Maybe it is a little detail that is not right, or maybe you don’t like the...

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Shitty Code Prototypes

I love building prototypes. They allow me to explore and sketch ideas, test my assumptions, and try out things at an early stage to make better design decisions. Prototyping is the single best tool we have in our toolbox as designers and developers. And because anything can...

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Better Bridges

I couldn’t agree more to what Dave wrote in his recent blog post about the increasing demands of the front-end web: the job of a front-end developer is getting ever more complex. From writing well-structured, semantic HTML to the latest (fantastic) new CSS features, to acces...

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Foundations

Please use whatever tool gets the job done and makes sense for you.

But then again, I’ve seen so many frameworks and tools come and go that it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. You know what really is time well spent and a worthy investment into your future, your career, and your team? Learning the basics and becoming really good at them.

Therefore, don’t let tools cover up weak spots in your or your team’s knowledge. Because what looks like a flaw at first glance is actually an opportunity to learn and improve.

And don’t let any tool make you believe that it isn’t worthwhile to learn the foundations of web technology or let it stop you from participating in the vital dialogue that pushes the platform and its standards forward.

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Detecting CSS Selector Support with JavaScript

p code { font-size: 80%; } There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using ...

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Doing Our Part

I’m right with Dave on this one! 💚 I’m tired of envi­ron­men­tal respon­si­bil­i­ty always falling on the con­sumer. I know con­sumer demand bub­bles up into soci­etal change, I’m will­ing to do my...

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Patch That Package

p code { font-size: 80%; } You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first ...

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Brain Dump

You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site?

You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.

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Level Up Your Headings Game

Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a semantic, tree-like stru...