01.26.10
Notes on Evolving
Sparing a long and convoluted entry yesterday, I thought I’d follow up with some design and technical notes on the redesign and new branding.
Type
Perhaps one of the most beautiful things about the internet is the speed at which things happen. An idea is thought of, announced, discussed and in a relatively short period of time, a variety of solutions come to light.
With the recent advances in dealing with more than a steady handful of reliable typefaces available to most, if not all, we’ve been thoughtfully given options that are much easier to implement and configure. While sIFR pioneered the ability to use custom type on the web, it was ultimately a stopgap. What we’ve seen is wonderful folks such as those behind Typekit, the sIFR heir Cufon and a variety of others provide easy to use solutions. And, not to forget, the foundries themselves are finally getting behind these solutions — in the form of revised End User License Agreements and their own solutions. A great thing. These too may end up being stopgaps but for the here and now, this is the best we’ve got and they’re pretty damn good.
Weightshift uses two of those methods and services. When I started in on the branding and identity, I picked two typefaces for both screen and web. Primarily, the official typefaces are Plantin and Proxima Nova. Their fallbacks and alternates for the web are Georgia and Helvetica (and for IE, Arial — Helvetica just looks awful at lower point sizes on Windows) respectively.
You can thank Monocle for bringing Plantin to designer font management systems everywhere and while I’ve always loved Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova, it was the availability from Typekit that sold me on using it.
Plantin has elements of serifs I gravitate to (Mrs. Eaves, Hoefler Text) but also a pseudo-roundedness at smaller sizes that in an odd way reminds me of Cooper Black. For a while, Weightshift employed Cooper Black as its logotype. Plantin reminded me of that. Proxima Nova is a sharp, less wide, clean typeface that’s a lovely choice to sit alongside perennial favourites Gotham and Avenir.
So Typekit takes care of Proxima Nova. Plantin, used in section headers — sparingly on the website, plenty in print collateral — is rendered with Cufon.
Letters to You
A mailing list has long been a favourite medium of mine. I enjoy most mailing lists I subscribe to. A perfect example of this is Coudal Partners’ Infrequent Mailings, a concise, enjoyable read that also happens to have plenty of secret updates, codes, anecdotes and miscellany from the folks at 400 N. May.
With that, I’ve been waiting to get this new branding and evolved website done, so we could finally get a mailing list up. If you peek down there at the bottom, you’ll see a place to enter your email address.
You should join our mailing list. We’ll make it worth your while.
Chirps, Tweets and Hoots
All four of us are on Twitter. I happen to hold the main @weightshift account but Andrew is @me3dia, Jen is @treesquirrel and Scott is @srobbin. I can’t promise that the other three will always be relevant to this here endeavour, so follow Weightshift if you prefer but otherwise, we provide a Twitter list if you’d like to take a peek at the collective hive mind.
Notes from the Field
MEMO has been reorganized a bit. We’ve added tags, slimmed down that main MEMO page to just the recent five entries but we’ve added a small Recommended Entries section if you’d like to get a taste for what we like that we’ve written or how we think. We’ll revise this section in the future, adding and subtracting. Oh, and the tags and the archives are now directly accessible.
Shop
We’ve added a Shop. It goes where Odds N’ Ends was before it. Goods and sundries are in movement. They are here or are being printed and shipped. Envelopes, tags, cards, tape, labels, a scale and more form the artillery from which we will send these items to you, if you choose to purchase and support us. We’re excited about these and we hope you’ll like them when they are released.
Speaking of which, join that mailing list to know when the Shop officially opens.
