Bruno Abrantes

I thought it would be fun to show you the latest round of Microsoft ads, this time designed to pimp out the most recent version of Internet Explorer  (dubbed 8, by the way) to the masses.

Some of these are funny and well done, while others… not so much. However, considering these are currently Internet only, I kind of see the market segment they’re targeting. Microsoft obviously hopes these will become viral and spread like funny kittens. A Microsoft product being viral… isn’t that ironic?

S.H.Y.N.E.S.S

G.R.I.P.E.S

O.M.G.I.G.P (Not Safe For Stomach)

F.O.M.S

TypeKit is probably going to radically change Web Design. Yesterday, Jeffrey Veen announced it on the TypeKit blog.

Using Jeffrey’s own words:

Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. This is a massive upgrade for the web. But there’s a problem. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. Almost all fonts are protected by copyright — even those available for free — and very few of them allow for linking via CSS or redistribution on the web.

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

When CSS3 comes around, designers will once again have (almost) full control over their typography, and this time without having to resort to Flash. TypeKit’s easy one-line hosting solution is setting itself up to be as game-changing for the typography industry as iTunes was to the music industry.

To keep a close eye on the development of TypeKit, you can subscribe to their blog or follow them on Twitter.

Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the fathers of the Web Standards movement. When everyone was using Flash, he soldiered on and shouted for everyone to hear: “Hey, write it in HTML instead!”. Now, according to himself, HTML, CSS and Javascript are the de facto standard the Web is built on. During this year’s SXSW Festival, Zeldman gave an interview to .net magazine where he discusses these and other issues of interest to the Web industry.

Download the article in PDF format (4.2 MB)

The concept of fiddling with and tweaking your design project on the final stages of development is probably not foreign to you, but the idea of doing it after your project is done might be.

If you work as a freelancer, you probably live on a project-by-project basis, and you realize that you just can’t spare the time to gradually refine each and every one of your projects. However, if you’re an in-house designer or developer (or if you’re just a freelancer who runs his/her own blog), you can probably appreciate the merits of a product-oriented mindset which is concentrated on getting a product out and then refining it continuously through it’s lifespan. (…) more after the jump ›

No, I don’t mean to say existing Internet Explorer 6 users shouldn’t upgrade to one of the countless newer, faster and safer browsers out there. What I’m talking about is a little gimmick which surfaced a week or so ago called IE6 Update.

The authors came up with the brilliant idea of mimicking the standard Internet Explorer information bar, urging users to update to a newer version of Internet Explorer. You can include the bar on your site or web application using a small code snippet available on the project’s website. It automatically checks if your users are running IE6, only showing the bar to those who are. So why is this such a bad idea? (…) more after the jump ›