The orphaned boy is closeted as a gesture of subjugation. Where are his kin? His double condemnation is only bested by the extension of Hogwarts’ hand when they require him. Harry is scolded from one side and scorned by the other, yet he chooses the magical world because he is programmed to do so, under a thinly-veiled cover of adolescence, his impulsive behavior mixed with middle-England mediocrity is too much. And who could blame the poor mite?

Harry as the perennial victim is an easy reading. His compulsions are more telling than his needlessly bland personality.

Where is the humility is his story? In the final moments we see the ghastly recoursion as Harry’s son is being shipped off to Hogwarts, installed with the same tedious self-doubt (you’re magical, ffs!). Without the literary richness of Voldermort the whole thing flattens, as Eddie Izzard would say, “like a flan in a cupboard”.

Quiet design is the extension of HTML’s natural hierarchy into a new direction which becomes obvious when one beholds it. Notice how many of the features of the design (in it’s full) have their opacity lowered and how they seem to peek through a semi-opaque fog when you interact with them. Hover over the social icons.

Of course this isn’t a new feature but it was the beginning of this kind of design. It was the suggestion which lead us to the conclusion which is about to become commonplace. Quiet design is about designing a full featureset of elements which can sit patiently as guides in our experience without devaluing their existence. A common beginning to this is making the type in the main content darker than that of the footer or other secondary modules (In Jonathan Snook’s parlence). A step further would have the designer increasing the font-size of the content to increase the emphasis.

Few have gone as far as bridging the gap between quiet and responsive design and Stocks has brought it to my attention just how alike they can be. Removing, amending or adding content — and indeed redefining it — based on the browser width, irrespective of device, is a form of quiet design. It is the framework around which great design (the conversation between user and application) is built.

Typography is something I love. Letterforms speak to me, their delicate, considered curves, their angular, jutting serifs constructing a message in every stroke. Garfield is obviously someone who shares the intimacy of the medium. His writing is neither prosaic or procedural. The book is not a history of type and does not pander to the hobbyist mentality of being spoon fed half-truths.

Gill Sans

Typography is the culmination of language and culture. It’s inception is one of the single most important innovations and Garfield does it justice without ever seeming bogged down with the weight of the breakthrough.

Several notable typefaces are considered in their own mini chapters:

• Gill Sans
• • One of the classiest faces I have ever seen. The weight variants personify just how versatile Gill is.
• Albertus
• • A new face to me but one which is an interesting projection back to the humanist strain. London’s streets are posted in Albertus and it’s just this quality which bridges the gap between retaining the anachronism whilst looking to the future.
• Futura vs. Verdana
• • It’s hard to sympathise with Verdana as a web designer. Default system faces are the scourge of every designer chomping at the bit to find alternative ways of delivering a message in a medium which has fast become homogenous. Futura is luxuriant. I can’t help but feel it’s form is a little queasy when used in bulk. It’s almost too good. I can’t help but see the face when I should be seeing the message. It is undeniably brilliant and if it were a friend of mine I would tell it, reassuringly, that it can do better than Ikea.
• Doves
• • The, thrilling, story behind Doves is more notable to me than the actual face and I wonder if it would have it’s own chapter in the book had it not lived – and died – through such a wonderful narrative.

  • As the weeks went on, he would take as many blocks as he could manage, wrap them in paper tied with string, walk about half a mile from his press to the best spot, and then drop them into the water after nightfall, often waiting for heavy traffic to obscure the sound of the splash.

  • Although this sounds like a recipe for madness, it’s a remarkable tale of the destruction of a handcrafted artifact.
• Mrs Eaves & Mr Eaves
• • Two retrospective, complementary faces which retain some of the great Baskerville face from whence they came.
• Frutiger
• • Respect is due to any face which is universally accepted as one which does a great service to conveying information. Sometimes we all accept that utilitarianism is good. Finding your way with Frutiger is easy. (I’m in this for more drama though, aren’t you?)
• Optima
• • Make perfume? Use Optima. Fast class.
• Sabon

• • One of the most readable of all book fonts

  • Nothing to scoff at there. Just My Type is set in Sabon and I’m relieved to have been told. I had wondered on several occasions.
• Vendome
• Vendome is probably a face we’ll see regurgitated back into circulation once many of the ubiquitous faces we see become known by name, at which point their use will cease to be appropriate. It certainly has some charm.

At the present moment, my font would be Trade Gothic. Jason Santa Maria puts it well.

• Wave, an ultimately doomed project that gambled on not specifying a single use. This free, collaborative tool would have surely never made it off a drawing board inside Microsoft HQ.
• Chrome, the most innovative, fast and fun web browser around today. It’s as pleasurable to use as it is to see it’s market share increase, albeit steadily.
• +1. OK so it’s largely for their benefit but does it really warrant the outburst which I overhead in my office?

Paraphrased, the argument was that Google was overstepping the mark by sheer dominance, that they had a monopoly on information itself, that the creep from search engine to onsite tool was overstepping the line. We must remember that Google basically runs a large chunk of our business, through search and now with its own browser and other software (let’s not forget the Operating System also), but we have to give it the freedom to fail. By permanently fixating such pessimism on a company that revolutionised much of the web for the better were really missing out on the pace and spirit of our platform.

Google are dropping support for our bug bear, Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft will wait another three years to follow suit, therefore giving us five versions of clumsy browsers to support. Admittedly version 9 is light-years ahead of its predecessors but Google gave Microsoft the fright of its life by producing a browser, on it’s first attempt, that was lightweight, had fantastic developer tools, and innovated the paradigm of the web browser.

If the modern web company were a film, Google would be Inception and Microsoft would be straight to DVD.