I like being left handed, it means I might have a gene that makes me left handed, but they aren’t sure about that yet. I also notice quite a bit when other people around me are left handed. It makes me feel special. I’m an oddity (I’m sure most people would agree with that). Being left handed also makes me adept at using my right hand better then right handed folks can use their left hand. Some call this ambidextrous, but truly, I am not. I’m not equally dexterous on both sides of my body which is why I’m more mixed handed. I can’t throw things with my left arm and I play baseball (as well as most sports) with my right arm. I am also right footed and right eyed. There are few things that I can only do well with my left arm/hand.

What I don’t like is when people don’t consider the left handed folks when designing things.

Spurring on this rant was a recent discussion on a well known and widely read interaction design mailing list. The discussion was around mouse clicks on a web app/site. More to the point they were talking about the use of contextual menus being accessed via a “right click”. I’m sure you might be thinking this is a little nit-picky and perhaps it is. However the problem persists, people do not think out side their own means. They tend to think of what they can do and not what others do or can’t do. For crying out loud these guys design interfaces and interactions. What happens if they design something strictly for their means not considering how others may use it and someone dies?

Taking this a little further, there has been research on the effects of left handed people using right handed mice. It can cause some issues with posture. Which makes you wonder if ~10% of the worlds population is cared about by the other 90%. It seems that the 80/20 rule shouldn’t apply for handedness. But alas it does and designers, business people and right handed folks don’t see the value in accommodating the southpaws of this world.

We might be an edge case in some people’s minds but wouldn’t people with disabilities considered edge cases? It basically the same thing, people with psychical disabilities could have a hard time doing things that people without disabilities do with ease. People who are left hand dominate could have difficulties with things that are designed for the right handed world.

Equality for all? No. Not until the right handed world stops being selfish.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

I started playing about with it and was quite impressed. I put in the RSS feed for this site and my delicious bookmarks.

andrewjaswa.com

ajaswa’s delicious

They way Wordle displays the collected words is rather interesting. More so then just a straight tag cloud. Now to create something like this on the fly and embed it on a site…

I guess it started back in March of 2008 when I attended An Event Apart New Orleans. Jason Santa Maria gave an excellent talk about web design or rather a talk about how current web design all looks the same in the form of blogs and content management systems. The example he used that stuck in my head was that of Wired Magazine. In their print publication they have very captivating designs but when the article is taken online it loses its design and just becomes another article. This actually inspired me in two ways. The first was to learn more about design (as my background is in development) and the other was to create a website that was essentially what Wired was to print. With my lack of design skills and time, I filed it away almost to the point of being forgotten. Seeing as how 2008 was a very busy year for me it should come as no surprise.

In late October of 2008, after I had gotten settled here in Denver, I wanted to build a website. I played around with a few ideas and then remembered that 24ways would be starting up soon. 24ways is an awesome website run by Drew McLellan and Brian Suda that only publishes articles during advent. This gave me the idea to create a website that had a restricted publishing schedule.

In the end I settled on building a site that published articles in a very set fashion, highlighting various parts of website development each with a unique design reflecting the content. 13 articles a year once a month with a yearly review.

Well… after much work, it happened. The first article of 13things is now published.

The reason

A while ago I got the idea to do some research on font and their usage across the internet. I was trying to figure out what font or typefaces people use and why. To me this is rather interesting because if you have any background in design or typography you’ll know that type conveys meaning and emotion. Would this not be true about the web? Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message they are trying to get across? Maybe something they were feeling when they had it designed? Or maybe there is a corporate style guide that the designer had to follow when building the site? Or maybe that style guide was made with the idea of conveying emotion?

Whew… that’s a lot of questions I have. I’m not got to even try to answer them because, frankly, I can’t. I don’t know what was going through the designers heads. What I can do is survey websites and present the results.

The start

My initial survey was completed in early 2008 with about 100 sites. The sites I first selected were gleaned from the Alexa top 100 sites for the month of January 2008. Since I am from the US, speak English and am interested in western typefaces, I was only interested in English sites. It would be rather hard for me try to figure out different character sets other then Western/Latin. The rest of the sites I pulled were from sites I visit often.

This gave me a wide range of websites from categories of news and social network to retail and design. I figure that 100 sites or so of the whole internet would a fair sample to kick things off. Also I need some very highly and low trafficked sites to get a better idea of how people use type on the web.

The process

I began by going into the CSS and pulling out the *, html and body selectors and seeing what those were set to. In a lot of cases one of those three selectors set the font for the entire site. Great! Job done! Well… sort of. Some sites didn’t have one of those selectors setting the font. So I had to dig some more. Some sites had it set on the p selector, some just had IDs and classes. I ended up going through lots of CSS, some of it nicely organized and some of it downright disgusting.

As anyone who has been working with CSS and browsers for a bit, you would know that for the best results you want to set more then one font in your CSS declarations. So seeing something like this was far from uncommon:
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
I collected all the font information I could because who knows it could be useful at some point. Most of the font stats in this post and in the survey are based on the first font.

The odd bits

While going through the sites I noticed was that some sites would use one type for headings and another type for body text and yet another for their footer. In the case of Coudal Partners out of Chicago, they use Gill Sans for their H1, Times for the rest of their headings and Verdana for most of everything else. Now this puts me in a tight spot. All three faces are in the site, but I can’t then lump a site into a category or group. It got me thinking about what people “would/should/could” be reading the most.

I settled on going with what a majority of the text was set to. In the case of Coudal I settled on Verdana. Why? Because my thought was thus: If I (the user) is going to read, I’m going to read the majority of the text, so I’m going to see that face the most. In turn Verdana was used for a majority of the text in this case. I followed this same thinking for all the other sites I collected data on.

So why did Coudal use three typefaces on their site? I’m not sure but I bet it has something to do with a question I asked before: Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message the are trying to get across?

The interesting bits

Some of the more interesting bits I found were the unbalanced serif to sans-serif ratio. In a sample of 112 sites 8.93% or 10 sites used serif fonts. Of the sites that used sans-serif fonts Arial came out on top with 46 sites. 35 sites had 1 primary font and 2 secondary fonts. 27 had 4 total fonts set. This one amazed me: 1 site (reference.com) had 8 total fonts set. "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
This blew me away. Why would anyone want to set 8 fonts?

Check out the survey