

Kottke.org redesigns using private beta of Hoefler & Frere-Jones webfont service - dpkendal
http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-redesign-2012-version

======
jbrkr
Good to see Kottke still churning out top posts after so many years.

But... a little disappointed that an announced redesign like this does not
include support for responsive/liquid/mobile-first viewport width.

>> I made the reading column wider (640px) ...

Hard-coded pixel widths are not friendly to the proliferation of mobile
devices and screen sizes these days.

~~~
smackfu
It's not too bad on an iPhone viewpoint wise, but the fancy font rendering
seems to be rendering blank spaces before it downloads the font or whatever it
is doing, which is a bit odd.

~~~
ugh
That’s not fancy, that’s standard Safari behavior. Safari waits until the font
is downloaded until it displays text. Some other browsers display text
immediately and switch the font later. There are good arguments for both
approaches.

------
spacesuit
Has anyone on HN used the H&F-J webfont service? There are probably NDAs
involved with the private beta, but I'd love to hear more about it, in terms
of performance, rendering, available fonts, etc.

------
praxeologist
How can I sign up for their beta, or when is it expected to launch?

It's so weird to see this when I was just thinking to roll my own webfont of
Whitney and test it out. I've done this before for another HF&J font before
and it was not fun (besides probably violating some TOS). You have to hack the
font file to get fontsquirrel to spit it out, and even then some letters
rendered improperly on Windows. I'd be happy to just pay for the service..

------
smackfu
Rather poor performance on going to the front page, <http://kottke.org/> The
initial viewport comes up fast, but it takes over 10 seconds to finish loading
and be able to scroll. Wonder what is causing that?

Maybe hanging while it is filling in the Facebook and Twitter buttons on each
post?

~~~
bradleyland
Jason embeds content from all over the place. If you load the page while
running Chrome's developer tools open to the network tab, you can see the wild
variety of hosts being touched. Many of these will involve separate DNS
lookups and TCP/IP connection overhead. I've always viewed it as a consequence
of his format, and well worth the wait.

~~~
smackfu
He doesn't mirror the images? That seems... risky.

~~~
bradleyland
He doesn't need to. The content he embeds is designed to be embedded.

------
brianwillis
Really looking forward to being able to use Archer and Ideal Sans on the web.
My work is about to become a whole lot prettier.

------
techblock
Love Kottke. Glad he kept the original look with updated fonts.

