Category Archives: Design

Learning Colemak

January 16, 2012 – 12:24 pm

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 […]

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Improve Windows Type Rendering With ttfautohint

August 22, 2011 – 11:48 am

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 […]

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Better Google Fonts

July 18, 2011 – 9:46 pm

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 […]

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Environment Canada Mobile

June 13, 2011 – 9:56 am

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 […]

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Redesign of mattwie.be

March 16, 2011 – 3:07 pm

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 […]

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