In mid February, I undertook a tutorial about changing fonts on a web page*(see footnote at the end of this post for details). I had tried other solutions but this one called FaceLift was better. I am using it here on this blog. Notice that all of the headlines are in a slab serif font? See also Pages, Categories, etc. in the sidebar? This is Gold to a web designer. This enables me to give my clients unique design (aka “branding”), my raison d’etre.
I like to learn more about these authors. Many are engineers in school or just out. Always interesting to see what other projects they have done and what kind of work is in their portfolio. http://facelift.mawhorter.net/ was the homepage. Odd thing here was that the author, Cory Mawhorter, was not very forthcoming. No portfolio. Just one other project which looked like a precursor to FaceLift.
I started digging in his personal blog and found a post from October that he was finalizing plans to take his van on a quest to see America. 50 states in 52 weeks. He had a number of delays, but by the time I was reading his blog in mid February, he was three weeks into his trip. It was the Monday before Mardi Gras and Cory was in New Orleans….
I was facinated. I couldn’t believe the borderhopping.com site. In his side bar you will find webcam photos, meters that show real time van direction and speed plus a Google map showing his present location. He has to be an engineer, doesn’t he? But he also has a great sense of design. The gauges are retro. There is an overall grunge look that conveys the feeling of living in a van. If you follow him on Twitter, you get GPS readouts as he passes from town to town. Recently, he added a drop down state poll where readers can vote on which sites he should visit. I have never seen this before. Is it Ajax? Did I mention time-lapse videos? One, “Almost Dying in the Mountains of Colorado” (set to the song “This Year” by the Mountain Goats) is followed a day later by another titled “A Drive Through the Navajo Nation.” All this is done with primary power for his laptop from a solar panel on the van roof!!
—————
9.5.11 UPDATE: My blog Brokenlinks plugin says www.mawhorter.net is not working but Cory is still tweeting on Tweeter and list that as his URL.
*See this excellent post about the limits of specifying fonts for web pages:
Web Design & Development blog of Clay McIlrath: Cufon vs SIFR vs FLIR
Cory Mawhorter’s Web Portfolio
This Wikipedia entry Web-Safe-Fonts explains the limitations of web page type.
When I find it, I will add a link that explains the history of the limitation of fonts in web browsers. In my opinion, it comes from the battle between Microsoft and everybody else (primarily Apple and Netscape) for browser control. Wasn’t that the early 1990’s? Or does that go back even earlier?