Graphic designer Frank Chimero is raising funding for a book called The Shape of Design via crowdsourcing service Kickstarter.

In a little over 24 hours the project has raised almost $50,000 in pledges, well exceeding the $27,000 target. Wow.

Check out the video of Frank’s lecture of the same title, given at the Build conference.

In his presentation Frank discusses graphic design in the context of history, philosophy and anthropology, and draws interesting conclusions regarding the purpose and function of design. Apparently The Shape of Design book will expand on the themes of the lecture, so it should be a goodie.

If you’ve ever wanted to display your latest Twitter tweets on a website, here is method to do that using PHP. My approach has the following features:

• Tweets are cached to avoid exceeding Twitter’s limit of 150 requests for a user’s RSS feed per hour
• A fallback is provided in case the twitter feed fails to load
• Replies (tweets beginning with @) can optionally be ignored
• A configuration parameter allows you to specify how many tweets are displayed
• Dates can optionally be displayed in “Twitter style”, e.g. “12 minutes ago”
• You can edit the HTML that wraps your tweets, tweet status and meta information
• The username which prepends each tweet in Twitter RSS feeds is automatically stripped

My weapon of choice for code editing is the excellent program phpDesigner, but every so often I like to test drive a different editor to see what I might be missing out on. Recently I spent some time playing with Notepad++, and one feature that jumped out at me was the ability to choose from a large number of pre-installed syntax highlighting themes.

When I switched back to phpDesigner, the default blue-on-white color scheme seemed a tad boring, so I decided it was time to pimp my IDE! Unfortunately user created themes for phpDesigner are thin on the ground, which left me no option but to make my own.

PHP example:

In the final article of the series I will talk about configuring a local Apache webserver to integrate smoothly with your development working copy, and how to deploy a version controlled website to a live webserver.

In the second article of the series I will give specific detail about establishing a Subversion workflow.

In this three part series of articles I will explain my approach to using Subversion, the open-source version control software, for web development.

For a long time I steered clear of version control, dismissing it as too complex, or something that was only useful for large development teams. I took Subversion for a test drive, but didn’t really “get it”, and decided version control wasn’t for me.

I changed my tune earlier this year when I was employed to work on a project that was already under version control. I had no choice but to get up to speed with Subversion, and once I got the hang of it I was excited to discover that version control streamlined my entire workflow. I now use Subversion for all of my web projects and consider it an integral part of my development process.

If you want to create your own @font-face kits, you absolutely must check out Font Squirrel’s new @font-face generator tool. All you have to do is upload a TrueType or OpenType format font, and the generator spits out a zip file containing:

• The original typeface for Safari and Firefox 3.5
• A WOFF font for Firefox 3.6+
• An SVG font for Opera, Chrome, and iPhone
• An EOT font for Internet Explorer
• A sample HTML page
• A sample CSS stylesheet

The generator also features options to reduce file size by subsetting the font, cleanup font outlines, and auto-hint glyphs to improve rendering.

Sweet!

Now that all major web browsers finally support the CSS @font-face declaration, embedding fonts in a web page is possible with just a few lines of CSS. In theory this means that web designers no longer need to limit their font choices to a handful of system fonts, and are free to use any typeface they please. In practice that freedom comes with a caveat: we are only allowed to use fonts with a license agreement that allows web embedding.

The trouble is that digital fonts have no provision for DRM, and pirating a copy of an embedded web font is a trivial exercise for anyone with the mind to do so. That’s obviously not a prospect type foundries are too keen on, and consequently no major foundry offers a licensing option for embedding their fonts in a web page. If you link to a commercial font from your CSS stylesheet the chances are that you are breaking your license agreement. Even the number of free fonts with an EULA that condones @font-face embedding is pitifully small.

That’s where Typekit comes into the picture. Typekit is a new font delivery service devised by Jeffrey Veen that promises to take the pain out of licensing fonts for web embedding. In their own words:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

I have always been slightly wary of CSS frameworks, put off by non-semantic class names, and a nagging feeling that CSS simply isn’t complex enough to require the hand-holding a framework offers.

But today I came across Scaffold, a CSS framework that made me rethink my position.

My friend John Gillespie recently wrote about the inauspicious origins of the Arial typeface, namely that it is a blatant copy of Helvetica. While I agree with the general thrust of John’s argument (I’m a self confessed Helvetica fanboy) I do think that Arial has one redeeming feature that deserves mention, especially in the context of web design: Arial renders better at small point sizes on Windows systems than Helvetica does.