In this article, I’m going to examine the science behind making successful UI icons before teaching you how to make your own embeddable icon font.

From designing the individual icons to converting them for @font-face embedding, and even licensing them for distribution, we shall be using only free software and online services. How about that? You will not need to rely on any of the esoteric knowledge required to make successful alphanumeric typefaces; just an eye for designing things that may appear very, very small.

Ultimately, you should go away with a process for making design elements that extends far beyond the manufacture of simple icons.

Before we continue, something should be said about what exactly we are trying to achieve by using icons in our designs in the first place, and what makes one icon more successful than the next. Theory before application. In order to do this, we must consider the icon’s role as part of semiology. Read more

Throughout his illustrious career as a designer and typographer, Erik Spiekermann has created dozens of commercial typefaces (FF Meta, FF MetaSerif, ITC Officina, FF Govan, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk) and many custom typefaces for world-renowned corporations.

Erik and his wife Joan, revolutionized the world of digital fonts twenty-two years ago when they started FontShop—the first mail-order distributor for digital fonts.

This year, he was awarded the Federal Republic of Germany’s 2011 Design Prize for Lifetime Achievements— a most noble accomplishment. The exhibition, Erik Spiekermann, The Face of Type recently took place at the Bauhaus-Archive Museum of Design in Berlin.

Spiekermann is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen, the author of the Adobe Press title, Stop Stealing Sheep, and the originator of the colorful map for the Berlin metro system.

He recently took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Webdesigner Depot about typeface design and what he sees next in his future. We thank Mr. Spiekermann for speaking with us and invite WDD readers to comment on how his contributions to typeface design have helped shape your work. Read more

We’ve got a lot to thank Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the computing world’s other leaders for. They’re responsible for some of the greatest leaps forward in communications and business in the last 30 years-and many of the biggest innovations in design, too.

Without them, our industry wouldn’t be what it is today, and many of the world’s top designers wouldn’t have a platform for their work.

However, there is one reason to resent these giants: their choice of fonts. In releasing mega-popular suites and catering to a broad, design-illiterate audience, leading business applications such as Microsoft Word shocked us with the overused fonts that they include standard in their latest releases.

This isn’t a riff on the world’s worst fonts, but rather an invitation for amateur designers and business users to stop abusing some of the world’s best fonts.

Nothing is particularly wrong with Impact or Comic Sans as fonts per se, but there is a huge deal wrong with using them in every situation. The 10 fonts below are overused and patently annoying, and we give 10 good reasons to stop using all of them. Read more

Who knew that a college graphic design project could turn into an overnight viral sensation?

On Tuesday, December 22nd, UK-based graphic design student Matt Dempsey, 21, launched a cute primer called Comic Sans Criminal.

The elegant site instructs amateur designers how to use the most juvenile-looking typeface in a designer’s toolbox.

His cheeky project caught on, causing “Comic Sans” to trend on Twitter on Wednesday and gaining nearly 200,000 unique viewers in the first 30 hours of its launch.

Grace Bello interviewed Dempsey on behalf of WDD, about his design background, the popularity of Comic Sans Criminal, and the typeface personalities with which he’d like to go out for a beer. Read more

It seems there are two camps among web designers: those who embrace web typography, experiment with it, and try new things in virtually all of their designs; and those who avoid it like the plague, opting to use standard, web-safe font stacks with little variation.

It also seems like a lot of the designers who fall into the second group wish they were more like the first.

The resources below can help you improve your web typography, regardless of which camp you fall into.

There are tools for creating unique typography, references and articles that can teach you typographic principles, and plenty of inspiration and news to keep you updated on the state of web typography. Read more

If you frequent design and CSS galleries, you may have stumbled time and time again upon an excellent typeface released last year that took the design world by storm. I’m talking about Jos Buivenga’s font ‘Museo’.

I’ve never seen a font being adopted so quickly and fondly by web designers across the world. It’s been listed as one of the top 10 fonts of 2008 by MyFonts.com

Museo is being used everywhere, web and print, including our own logo here at Webdesigner Depot. Museo Sans, its sans serif companion, was recently introduced and another style is in the works.

In this article, I’m interviewing Jos Buivenga, the author of the popular Museo font and find out more about his influential typeface, his design process and what the future holds. Read more