Category Archives: Design

Learning Colemak

After see­ing that Ian’s learn­ing Cole­mak, I decid­ed to go for it too. Cole­mak is eas­i­er to switch to than Dvo­rak, and pos­si­bly even more effi­cient to boot. How­ev­er, I could­n’t find a key­board lay­out that I want­ed to print and look at every day. I found a Mac Key­board Vec­tor with a CC license and […]

Improve Windows Type Rendering With ttfautohint

In a stroke of genius, Wern­er Lem­berg has start­ed the ttfau­to­hint project, which repur­pos­es FreeType’s auto­hint­ing sys­tem to auto­mat­i­cal­ly hint True­Type fonts for improved Win­dows ren­der­ing. While no auto­hin­ter will be able to match the eye and skills of a man­u­al hin­ter, ttfau­to­hint pro­vides real world improve­ments, some­times dra­mat­i­cal­ly. For exam­ple, I’m work­ing as a […]

Better Google Fonts

Google Web Fonts is an awe­some source of free, open source fonts hooked up to a world-class CDN. It’s also, sad­ly, filled with one-off nov­el­ty fonts vying for the title of “the new Com­ic Sans.” I quick­ly dis­cov­ered that a good met­ric for high­­er-qual­i­­ty fonts was the pres­ence of at least one alter­nate. The Google […]

Environment Canada Mobile

The state of mobile weath­er apps isn’t awe­some. I find that it’s even worse in Cana­da, where weath­er data is sourced through non-Cana­di­an providers such as Yahoo (iOS’s built-in weath­er app) or AccuWeath­er, nei­ther of which I find tend to pro­vide very good Cana­di­an fore­cast data. Envi­ron­ment Cana­da is my go-to fore­cast provider, but their site […]

Redesign of mattwie.be

I just launched my redesign of my per­son­al blog mattwie.be (for­mer­ly mattwiebe.com) and I could­n’t be hap­pi­er to final­ly have it live. This is a full-cir­­cle moment for me, as tweak­ing my blog (first on Blog­ger, lat­er on Word­Press) was what launched me into web devel­op­ment. After see­ing that I could pro­duce bet­ter code and […]