

Show HN: Making Tumblr Work vs. Medium & Svbtle - jfornear
http://jfornear.com/post/29674628044/making-tumblr-work-vs-medium-svbtle

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tptacek
You probably can't buy Minion Pro and use it via @font-face; most professional
fonts are sold with licenses that forbid that, because it makes a perfect-
fidelity instantly-usable copy of the font available to anyone who visits your
site.

For a similar reason, most of the HF+J fonts either require sIFR or image
replacement, or for you to be cool enough (like Kottke) to get to use their
beta web font service.

~~~
saurik
Typekit, which this author is supposedly already using to get Minion Pro on
his websites, is equivalent: in the end it uses @font-face to download the
font (at least, according to TechCrunch).

> Typekit lets users choose the fonts they want to use (the number of fonts
> per site depends on the price plan chosen) and embed them using the web
> standards compliant @font-face CSS declaration and a bit of Javascript.

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/typekit-launches-hopes-
to-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/typekit-launches-hopes-to-save-
typography-on-the-web/)

I was under the impression that they simply wanted to be able to charge a
yearly subscription to use the font like this, which is apparently how
Typekit's model works.

Adobe thereby doesn't directly license you this font for web font usage:
instead it works through a couple partners, including Typekit, to distribute
it.

> With help from one of our trusted web font partners you'll be able to
> deliver type to your website that is searchable, editable and viewable
> without compromising the high performance and selection that you demand for
> your viewers.

<http://store1.adobe.com/type/webfont/info.html>

Adobe is working with another partner, however: WebINK. In Adobe's Web Font
FAQ, there is a question "what if I hand code my website", which seems to
indicate WebINK lets you just work with @font-face directly.

> With WebINK, web fonts are integrated using the standard CSS @font-face
> rules. If you are familiar with the basics of CSS, you can easily integrate
> Adobe Web Fonts into your website with Extensis WebINK.

<http://www.adobe.com/type/webfont/faq.html>

The answer, thereby, to how expensive it would be to license this font for
@font-face use seems to either be "exactly what you already are paying
Typekit" (as/if they use @font-face) or whatever WebINK charges.

From WebINK's website, they seem to charge by the number of unique visitors
per month; their tiers are $20/20k, $50/80k, and $120/200k, with a "contact
us" if you are expecting to get many more users than that.

<http://www.webink.com/pricing>

(I know about some of this, because the small college I went to uses Minion as
the official font for its title, and I was helping them out with a website
redesign a while back.)

<http://store1.adobe.com/type/webfont/index.html>

~~~
jfornear
Thanks for clearing this up.

------
bpatrianakos
I'm down with the exhaustion with the startup cool kids too. Creating a Svbtle
alternative isn't all that hard so I don't have much to say about that but I
just want to say I like the sentiment and I agree that someone will come out
of nowhere to win the post-Tumblr era.

Also, I'm one of your first few paragraphs you called Georgia a sans-serif
font. That's wrong. Georgia is a serif. Serif fonts have the little stylized
decoration dealies on the ends of the lines (man that is a really inarticulate
but you know what I mean) kind of like, well, Georgia and Times New Roman and
such. The sans-serifs are the ones like Helvetica and Arial. You seem to be a
bright guy but among a lot of web savvy people, especially designers and
developers, a rookie mistake like that can tota Ly discredit you. Just edit
that real quick and you're good to go.

~~~
tptacek
Anyone who ever tries to build any kind of collaborative publication online
with any kind of _voice_ is going to have to be selective about who writes for
them, and is going to run into this "cool kids" stuff. You need to get over
it. The very notion that you'd be embittered about not being able to _blog_
with someone else betrays a naivete about what's important and what's not.

What, you're not one of Dustin Curtis' cool kids? Well, neither is Paul
Graham, or, for that matter, William Vollman. I'm guessing neither is fuming
about it.

Stop acting like it's a personal slight that Curtis doesn't have you writing
for his project. It's not. Not writing at Svbtle says nothing about you at
all. The only thing that does: complaining about not writing at Svbtle.

------
mikedouglas
There is something extremely tasteless about ripping off another site's
design, right down to meaningless stylistic choices like the color of anchor
links, and the use of circular avatars beside post titles. Instead of
approaching the design from the perspective of wanting to look like one of the
"startup-cool kids" (which is beyond me why that would matter), why not create
something original that suits your needs?

To put it another way, if all Svbtle and Medium end up being is "minimalist"
blog templates, they'll be abject failures. Why take inspiration from their
least meaningful aspect?

~~~
slantyyz
>> ...approaching the design from the perspective of wanting to look like one
of the "startup-cool kids" (which is beyond me why that would matter)..

You're right. Don't people realize that once everyone's doing it, it's not
cool any more?

~~~
kmfrk
When content and substance is not important to the observer, the only way
thing you see in other popular blogs is the design.

It's easier to copy someone's design than their writing, research, and
analytical skills.

I see the same thing in bloggers themselves. They want to change things up,
and short of broadening their horizon and immersing themselves in some
literature and material that could help them pursue what they like to write
about, they ... redesign the website. Because that's the only parameter to a
good blog in their equation.

It's like re-arranging the furniture on the Titanic.

------
viraptor
Sorry, there's something blinking in the top-left corner, annoying enough that
I won't finish reading the post.

~~~
sp332
It's an animated GIF. Press the escape key and it will stop. edit: I guess
this only works in FF?

~~~
_delirium
It's been a requested feature in WebKit forever, and afaict nobody is really
opposed to it, but nobody has stepped up to code it either.

WebKit bug: <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23945>

Chrome bug: <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3690>

------
kmfrk
I totally disagree with the "never go black" sentiment. For non-Retina iOS
devices, legibility is going to be directly harmed by non-black characters.

With Retina, you can go with whatever you want for decorative reasons, but
devices with poor DPI suffer for it.

~~~
connortomas
I think you'll find that a lot of websites don't use "hard black" (#000000).
There's a perception that hard black text on a hard white background is the
most legible combo, but in practice this can actually appear a bit harsh to
some.

Even on non-Retina devices, as long as contrast isn't weakened too much,
lightening the text can result in a softer, more appealing reading experience.
(See most the way most "read later/readability" services format articles).

------
mbell
FTA: "Try not to make the column too wide on desktop or it will be too hard to
read because your eyes have to travel too far horizontally."

Personally I found this page incredibly annoying to read. I have to scan down
with my eyes constantly due to the crazy font size, the large spacing between
lines, and the limited width.

I actually feel my eyes moving, processing every word as a result of the large
size limiting my ability to process the content. The outcome is mental breaks
between reading words which destroys the fluidity of the content.

In short: terrible typography in my opinion. Granted its a single opinion and
I may be an outlier but between the flashing gifs and the typesetting I would
never have read all the way through this unless I had the intention of
commenting about it's poorness.

~~~
jfornear
Some of that choppiness could be due to my writing. Readability turns posts
into a similar layout so the readability should be close. I will continue to
make tweaks so hopefully it will get better.

------
temuze
My blog (<http://rmenez.es>) uses a variant of Syte
(<https://github.com/rigoneri/syte>) hosted on Heroku. It looks great and uses
Tumblr as a CMS. I highly recommend it.

------
vacipr
So are there any similar alternatives ? I really like this one but apparently
the author deleted it.

------
sull
vnknown.com

