Default Windows Fonts

You've just finished a killer page setup for your website. You're sitting back, feeling pretty damn smug with yourself, being all super creative and original and whatever. You cruise on down to TAFE to show everyone your awesomeness transferred to the web. You type in the address, and wait for jaws to hit the floor.

Wait a minute... WHAT THE HELL?

All those fancy fonts you put in there didn't show up. All that effort wasted, all your hopes - dashed to the winds. Your humiliation is intense, and you go home and cry into your pillow like a baby. If only you had checked to see if those fonts were web safe...

Well fear not wannabes, I'm here to help. Right here on Microsoft's own website should be all the information you need on Microsoft typefaces. If you don't really feel like wading through all those different web pages, here is a list of standard fonts on various Windows platforms.

I didn't bother check for fonts on other operating systems, but if you own a Mac it's really your own fault.

Some Useful Links

Here's a few links to some potentially useful sites to us fancy graphic design students.

Adobe Design Center
Here you'll find tutorials and helpful information for every product in Adobe's arsenal. If there isn't something here that interests you, you are not a graphic designer.

Australian Graphic Design Association
Your guide to everything graphic design in Australia, from events to competitions to locating a graphic designer.

CSS Zen Garden
A site to showcase the things you can accomplish by using CSS, something apparently overlooked by far too many web designers.

Lissa Explains It All
A site for children or morons, Lissa will explain everything about HTML in that sickening "Play School" kind of way.

LogoPond
Logopond features hundreds of logos to draw inspiration from, or you could just go here and buy some.

What the Hell is Em?

According to our good friends at Wikipedia;

"An em is a unit of measurement in the field of typography. This unit defines the proportion of the letter width and height with respect to the point size of the current font."

Understand?

Nope? Neither did I until I had someone simplify it for me. Basically, an em is a little box of space that a font is allowed to occupy. The height of the typeface determines the size of the box... I think. So if the typeface - by default - is 16 points high, it equals 1 em for that typeface. So 2 em would be twice that height, or 32 points high. It is NOT measured by the size of the capital 'M' in the typeface, as some people think.

Anyway, I think that's how it works. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Webpages that Suck! (a whole lot)

Here's a few examples of truly terrible web design.

Thanks to Web Pages that Suck.

American Beauty Border Collies

Judging by how long this page takes to load, you must be thinking 'Damn, this must be a freakin' awesome website!'. A half hour later when it finishes, you realise... no, no it isn't. This is so awful I don't know where to begin. I'll start with the homepage, which - after literally seconds of skimming - I discover contains absolutely zero content. It's just a pit for every animated GIF on the web to fall into. I should also mention the home page has absolutely no relevance to the site.

Take one guess what the site is about after looking at the home page.

A picture gallery dedicated to the closest holiday?

WRONG!

It's about dogs, I think. I didn't actually read anything for fear my skull would collapse from all the stupid. Navigating around the site is a nightmare; links are placed at random down the side of the page for several mouse scrolls. Although you can't read them half the time, because they're hidden against the insane background. And if you click on one, don't think you'll get any reprieve from the horror of the home page. Every page on the site is just crazy as the index.

DPGraph: Dynamic Photorealistic 3D Graphing Softwarefor Math and Physics Visualization

That's a mouthful. You'd think a website about such a smart and scientific program would have been smart and scientifically designed. And maybe it is, if it's designed to give a siezure.

It's hard to find a single square centimetre that isn't filled with some rainbow covered graphic. And they spin! Hope you don't have motion sickness. I'm not sure what the purpose of all those graphics on the side are for, certainly not for navigation. No, that honour is reserved for the unpsychedlic and utterly boring text links on the top page.

Luckily, most of the other pages won't send you crashing to the floor in convulsions. They are, however, pages that scroll for hours with countless links to God knows what. Kudos DPGraph, for proving even smart people are idiots.

New Zealand Chess Supplies Ltd.

Well, this is a change, just not a welcome one. Says right there on the home page it was established in 1983, and it looks like it hasn't been updated since. This is single most un-entertaining website I've ever visited. Watching "Murder, She Wrote" is more exciting than this.

It takes skill to make a website as boring as the game itself, but it's somehow worse because there's no competition. There are no winners, everyone who comes to this site is a loser. Navigation is simple enough, but who cares? Each page is just as boring as the next. And the only graphics are links to pictures of chessboards.

I'm so tired, I think this site has sapped all my energy. It's a void where life and vigour get sucked into a black hole of boredom. Better make sure your keyboard has drool resistance.

Logo development

Here's a screen capture of a logo I've been working on. Not finished yet, but getting there.

It supposed to simple and memorable, and who can forget a what a Redback looks like?

Online!

Alright, so I just created this blog for my graphic design course. It really wasn't that hard, I just procrastinate like a politician enacting the Kyoto Protocol. Anyway, will get around to updates soon.