TypeDrawers Updates

James Hultquist-Todd

@Christian Thalmann I’ll bring it up with the font’s designer. The unread thread was mistakenly changed to Medium, it’s back at Bold and should, hopefully, be enough of a contrast. The names are tiny, that’s on the list of things to look into.

@Georg Seifert I’ll pass that along.

John Butler

de gustibus And All That.
I love the Oculi, both Roman and italic, for the body text, and the Oculi Display and Elfreth for the masthead. Oculi reminds me of both F. H. Ernst Schneidler’s and Bram de Does’ designs, somehow simultaneously. I’m not a fan of any sans serif designs (which is the main reason I don’t design type for a living) and would be content to see the whole site in Oculi. Sans serifs are the reinforced concrete of type. But I acknowledge I’m the odd man out here. I think it’s reasonable, though, that any site about fonts should have body copy with serifs. At the time of this posting, my “Disagree” count is at 15; I guess I can kiss that goodbye.
You could probably get away with Minion for fallback glyphs if you need to stick with Adobe Type fonts.

Matthew Smith

If you have too much time on your hands, you can write a local stylesheet to override the CSS to your liking

(Not intended as a slight towards your redesign, James Hultquist-Todd. Have just always wanted to try this. But am also a believer that everyone should customize the web to their liking.)

Jens Kutilek

@James Hultquist-Todd the mobile font size is fine now. I just realized that my screenshot still showed Alright Sans, and now the mobile view also uses Oculi for the main post text. Don't know if that was a caching issue on my side, or if you changed something.

Thank you very much for your dedication to keeping TypeDrawers up to date!

Christian Thalmann

Yay, legible names! The unholy mix of sans and serif in the navigation column is also gone. Big improvement!

Stephen Coles

Congrats, @James Hultquist-Todd! I think it looks great overall. 

If I had my druthers I’d drop Parabolica for all but the small label stuff. The homepage feels so different from the discussion pages because it’s almost all Parabolica instead of Occuli. I’d also drop Transducer which feels out of place in the mix.

A small thing (which was also a problem in our old design) is that the input field CSS doesn’t match what you see when you post. This especially affects paragraph spacing because folks don’t see that space between paragraphs is already built into the style sheet, so they add another line break, resulting in huge spaces between paragraphs.

Thomas Phinney

I see it has been getting many tweaks and refinements! It keeps improving.

Thanks for all your work.

James Hultquist-Todd

@Stephen Coles That makes sense. It’s tricky to edit this site because I’m working within Vanilla’s theme and most of the edits require changing a JSON file and there’s no guide to tell me what value affects what asset.
It’s slowly getting better as I figure it all out.

James Hultquist-Todd

I should also add, the rules for editing a post have changed; you can now edit your posts at any time without the need for a moderator.

J_Tillman

Before the update I could view Typedrawers (from my iPhone) while blocking cookies. But now I have to allow cookies to view Typedrawers. Is this by design? 

James Hultquist-Todd

@J_Tillman it's not by my design; whether Vanilla, whose software we use, designed it that way, don’t know. 

I don't run any analytics or collect any data on who comes here (though I do have the option to setup such things).

Eris Alar

@James Hultquist-Todd you may have addressed this elsewhere, just point me to the thread if you have. 

I mostly use TD from either an 11-inch or 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and the new theme seems to have lost the categories on the left hand size. I can see the categories link at the top. Is this styling just how the iPad is being served the page, or is it that way for all screen types? 

Thomas Phinney

On a big monitor, I see the categories on the right.

Eris Alar

Thomas Phinney said:

On a big monitor, I see the categories on the right.

Ah, ok, on my 11-inch iPad Pro nothing is showing up, but on the 12.9-inch the column on the right is showing up. This seems to be a common issue where websites serve the mobile version of a site to the 11-inch and the desktop to the 12.9. I’m pretty sure the old theme displayed the categories column on the 11-inch as that is the device I check TD from the most.