Yesterday, I received a strange e-mail to my typeoff.de address from someone named Jason. The sender’s email address was so long and cryptic that I assumed it was just another piece of spam. However, the subject matter of the e-mail was somewhat topical. Here is what Jason had to say:
You have a very tiny font site layout. Ouch, my eyes!
Will you consider cheering up the place with some font creating tutorials for the average guy? Those people with some graphics skills who use the free software like gimp and inkscape who could possibly squeeze low end highlogic or fontlab software into an annual budget to turn out fonts under GPL or similar… but more likely fight the good fight against FontForge
As far as I can deduce, Jason is either a spambot whose message seems to have hit someone who knows what fonts are, or Jason is a TypeOff. reader with a request! I really can’t tell. To Jason’s credit, there was no link in his e-mail. So if he is a spammer, he is not of the malicious variety.
For the record, I find the content here on TypeOff.de to quite cheery. I do have several articles in the pipeline, but font-making tutorials are not currently on the horizon. I find tutorials to be very difficult to write, and I prefer to blog about other topics. However, if Jason happens to live in the UK, he may be pleased to learn that I recently wrote a short FontLab tutorial for Computer Arts Projects [“Create a text font in FontLab.” Computer Arts Projects, issue 137. Bath, UK (June 2010). Link to the issue’s table of contents online]. While I did not mention FontForge in the text, most of the points touched on in the article are applicable to any piece of font creation software.
Comments
2 responses to “Strange e-mail received”
I don’t think he’s a spambot. Spammers aren’t THAT smart yet, and there’d be at least some non-topical elements to the e-mail sent.
However, I find the font size IS small. 11px is hard to read on high-resolution screens (my specs: iMac running at 2560×1440, on the latest public version of Snow Leopard) – this article takes up about 1/3rd of my screen’s height in the browser. So if Jason came here to read tutorials, obviously he’d expect a higher legibility than that.
My suggestion: Add one of those “Make text larger/smaller” widgets/plugins/addons that are available for WordPress.
PS: There seems to be an error in the quoting, I doubt the “As far as I can deduce” paragraph is part of Jason’s e-mail.
Thanks for the comments, Mark! I hope that my blockquote tag is where it sound be now.
Your point about font size sounds like a good one. There are quite a lot of changes to the site that I would like to make. At the moment, I am still using the out-of-the-box Hemingway white theme that I’ve had for years. The only change I made to it was the addition of the side notes category on the right-hand side of the index page. I’ve always relied on the legibility of Lucida Grande to hold things up on the Mac side.
Regarding an increase/decrease feature, can I build this in easily via a plug-in of some sort? While I would love to design a whole new site, I know that this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. A small change like this could be a stop-gap measure…
The majority of my readers seem to be reading my content via the RSS-feed, which is also how I follow most design blogs. Unless the RSS feed is truncated, or I comment, I only tend to arrive at blogs anymore by following Twitter links!