1. Hello Jason, would you please tell us shortly about yourself? What’s your background?

  I was always interested in designing stuff with computers. When I was a in high school I did a Doctor Who newsletter which my buddy David and I printed out on a dot-matrix printer attached to an Apple II computer. We then literally cut & pasted it together using scissors and glue stick, running down to Kinkos to photo copy it. I was a designer in quest for a medium.
  I studied english and visual arts when I was in college (that was PW or Pre-Web), but my first job out of college was back on campus managing a writing lab with 25 Macs running OS 6 and 25 PCs running Windows 3.1. Keeping that place running was where I developed my love of the Mac and loathing for all things Windows. It was also where I first started using Hypercard which changed my entire perspective on how to tell a story, and that was still PW. I used it to create an entire adventure module for the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu with a pa that you could click on to get room description pop-ups and a random number generator for dice. Did I mention I'm a big geek too?
  After that, I went to grad school in the early 1990's and lucked out. I was Rensselaer Polytech, which was an early hotbed of World Wide Web activity.

2. Was that where you worked on the “Computer Mediated Communications” magazine in 1994?

  Yeah, as I say, I got lucky. The guy who wrote The World Wide Web Unleashed (the first book about the Web) was studying for his Phd at RPI and he had started the CMC Magazine the year before I got there. He wanted to grow the magazine, and so brought several students on board, including myself as designer. It was an exciting time because no one knew how to design for the Web. We were just making it up as we went along, and our tools were amazingly primitive. Forget CSS! Background images had only just been introduced and even those could only be applied to the page background.
   At the same time I was designing CMC, I was also reading Bringhurst, Tufte, and McLuhan and trying to turn all of their design theories and cultural theories into practice.

3. How would you comment Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “The medium is the message” within the bounds of web design?

You mean like this:
/* The medium is the message * /
Sorry bad Web geek joke. 
I actually keep a copy of Understanding Media on my desk (the real one desk, not the virtual one), and like to flip through it for inspiration. McLuhan was either a) clairvoyant, b) insane, or c) brilliant beyond his time. His analysis of how technology was changing and would change communication when he wrote back in the 1960's seems like he was watching a documentary made in 2010. But he's not the only one. 
I'm re-reading Snow Crash after about 15 years away from it (about the same time I've been a Web designer) and Stephenson's predictions are frighteningly accurate. Ok, so some of the exact details are wrong, but the general direction of technology, communication and society are spot on. The police and military haven't been privatized—yet—as in Snow Crash, but the more I listen to C-Span the less I know whether I'm listening to the news or an audio book version of Snow Crash.

4. Tell us about your new book Speaking in Styles. What was an incitement to writing this book?

I'm always surprised by how little most Web designers know about the medium they are creating for. I think it's because designers are, by definition, visual people and they learn by seeing. Almost all of the books on CSS, even the ones for designers, are very text heavy and illustration light, or they just show a bunch of code and the finished product and expect the reader to piece together what goes where.
My goal with Speaking In Styles was to treat CSS just like a language that you happened to use to describe designs.

5. Do the methods described in Speaking in Styles help to express perceive and understand the messages of visual communication between designer and the world beyond the blue screen?

 Very much so. I'm a designer by training, but I've done enough development to know where the pain points are. Howevder, CSS, at it's best, is really just another way of describing a visual design. So, my idea to teach designers how to "speak" CSS was to show them how similar it is to how they might already verbally describe their designs. For example, I compare how you might describe a link color in english:
"The link's color is red."
and how you say the same thing in CSS:
a { color: red }
To show designers that how you describe something in CSS is really not any harder than you would in english. I also diagramed everything showing cause and effect to  explain how the CSS code changes the appearance of content in HTML code to get the desired visual effect.
And to get the best results, I not only wrote the entire book, but did all of the illustrations and laid the entire thing out myself. I even got the rare treat of getting to design the cover.

6. Any designer can learn by rote the theoretical part of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language. Does your book explain the best way of using CSS in practice?

Yes, in fact, there is a section on common CSS misconceptions (myths) , Part 3 of the book goes through the process of Web design with CSS in mind, and another section at the end of the book details best practices.
I wanted to avoid maximum verbosity, so I Tried to limit myself to one topic per page with a corresponding illustration on the next page. This worked out really well, and I've had several reader compliment me on how easy this book is to just flip through and find something.

7. Can we compare Speaking in Styles with learning to dance salsa? As you know in salsa like in any dance there is a limited number of basic movements and steps. The good dancer is the one who makes the best combinations to interpret the rhythm of any composition. Is CSS all about the right combination of tags to build up the proper visual communication?

Great comparison! I don't know that there are really a limited number of CSS properties (there are hundreds really), but you are right in that there are really a handful styles that designers mostly use, and those are the ones that I talk about in my book. I don't cover (or even mention) many of the more esoteric styles, but concentrate on those basic ones that designers need to master so that they can strut their stuff.

8. Would you please spread some light on your new book Fluid Web Typography

My mantra right now is that 2010 will be the year of Web Typography. I wrote Fluid Web Typography starting last spring and on into the fall, and in that short period everything about Web typography changed. Fortunately, I was able to capture those changes in this book.

9. How do you evaluate the current state of Web typography?

I like to say that a font is to text as a voice is to speech. For the last 12 years, Web design has been saddled with using—effectively—5 different font voices: Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet MS. There are also Courier and Comic Sans, of course, but those are like talking with a robot voice or talking with a clown voice.
Imagine a world where everybody spoke with the same voice. That's what Web design has been like since its inception. However, it turns out that this  limitation was partially self imposed—there are actually 59 fonts that are commonly installed on most computers (www.fluidwebtype.info/web-safe-fonts)—and, within the last 8 months, all major browsers now support font downloading, similar to image downloading.
The problem with font downloading, though was not technical, but mostly that none of the font foundries would legally allow their fonts to be downloaded out of a fear that the font files could be stolen by the end user.

10. What's new in Webfont download technology world?

From late spring to late fall in 2009, an amazing series of events took place that we will feel the impact of this year:

1. All of the major Web Browsers (Internet Explorer included) now all support Webfont linking of some kind. Amazingly, it was Internet Explorer that was the first to support Webfont linking back in the late 1990's, but no one used it because Microsoft choose the proprietary EOT font format which no one else could use. Firefox, Safari, and Opera now all support OpenType and TrueType font downloading, and Firefox also just added WOFF support (see below).
2. Webfont bureaus like Typekit, Kernest, and Typoteque came online offering easy to use services for licensing and deploying Web fonts. More of these services are coming online all the time such as the very promising Fontdeck. These sites all allow you to purchase a legal license for the font use, and many of the fonts are free. The fonts are then streamed from the services servers, saving you bandwidth.
3. A new Webfont standard—The Web Open Font Format or WOFF—has been established that will help appease the font foundries by giving their font files some protection from illegal copying. This standard happened extremely rapidly, but Firefox has already started supporting it as of version 3.6, and I have little doubt that Safari, Chrome, and Opera will add support soon.
4. The Web site Font Squirrel not only provides a wide assortment of free Web fonts for download in OTF, TTF, SVG, EOT, and even WOFF format, it has a service allows you to translate any font on your desktop computer to any of those formats as well for use with Webfont downloading. I LOVE Font Squirrel.

10 years of nothing and then all of that in less than 6 months. 2009 was a good year for Webfonts and 2010 is going to be an incredible year for Web typography.

11. Do new possibilities in web typography open the new horizons for the web designers?

Without a doubt. I think a lot of Web designers are typographically lazy, used to just accepting the browser defaults, especially those who never did any print design where they could actually choose from over a hundred thousand fonts rather than just 10. I'm already seeing sites that are relying heavily on typography for their design impact and I think that will be the big trend we see this year.
If you don't learn Web typography this year, be prepared to be left in the dust by those designers that do.

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Buy Speaking in Styles: The Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers or Fluid Web Typography from Amazon.

Arthur Johnson

archer@designinterviews.com

Get in touch with Arthur: archer@designinterviews.com