Lately the debate over fonts on the web has flared up again, and I find myself reading the same arguments over and over again. In particular, a lot of people seem convinced that widespread font embedding on the web would kill font foundries instantly. As a child of the internets, I respectfully disagree.

Think about it: we find ourselves in a world where, somehow, web designers are still making a living. They produce a product which consists entirely of unencrypted HTML, CSS and images, made available via a simple HTTP request. Ripping and hotlinking of design is frowned upon, and mostly limited to amateur users who use free services like Blogger and MySpace. Plus, we all know that often pirates are the kind of people who would not pay if the ripped material was not available for free, so there is very little actual revenue being lost here.

In fact, if we look at the actual professionals, we find that generally they treat each other's work with the utmost respect, and actively inform their colleagues of blatant abuse and stealing. We have a perfect example of a thriving industry which revolves around free distribution of copyrighted-but-DRM-free assets and which polices itself.

We're not that far from having something similar for fonts. Part of the problem is that the foundries are trying to protect their fonts by bringing out the lawyers. But so far, they've only managed to inconvenience and annoy their legitimate customers, for example with embedding restrictions on PDFs for screen vs print.

After 4 years of LeuvenSpeelt.be aka the Interfacultair Theaterfestival at my old university, the organisers are calling it quits. I was their resident web monkey, and designed a new site and poster every year. I always saw these designs as an opportunity to explore unconventional web design, as the sites were low on content and high on marketing — essentially being fancy brochures with a news feed.

With a track record of originality, I figured we should end it in style, so I whipped up a new page which explains the reasons for quitting (i.e. the politics) and highlights the work done with a timeline and some photos.

(with apologies to Matt Groening)

After about two years, it's time for another make-over of my site.

My last design had a relatively quirky look, with a bold red/yellow theme built from various irregular vector shapes. The idea was to step away from the typical mold of rectangular aligned frames on a page. I tried to incorporate some elements of perspective into the page composition, but it ended up being a relatively flat, geometrical theme.

This time I wanted to work on the depth aspect and try to create something that feels spacious. To do this, I based the entire redesign on a two-point perspective. While the content itself is normal 2D markup, it sits in a 3D frame.

The design is meant to look like the cover of a board game box and accompanies the web site's design.

I finished designing and building this year's edition of LeuvenSpeelt.be, a site that promotes student theater at my old university. You can read about the background in my previous blog posts.

The site is a simple Drupal installation with heavy content and theme work. The design is heavy on graphics and built as an experimental semi-fluid layout that adapts to different screen resolutions. Peripheral design elements are shifted in or out of the browser frame to make more space for content as needed.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, TextMate. Uses the beautiful Fontin font available freely from Jos Buivenga's exljbris foundry.

And no, no easter eggs this year.

I did my OSCMS talk Designer eye for the geek guy today. My main plan for this talk was to blast as much basic graphical design concepts into people's heads as possible and sort of teach some of the principles, vocabulary and methods that a lot of designers take for granted.

The response was great as far as I could tell. I also got the inevitable "How do we deal with Internet Explorer?" spin-off discussion in the questions round at the end ;).

Steven Peck recorded my session on video.

You can download the slides as PDF (36.5 MB), though because of all the graphics it's quite large. I think some sections will not be clear at all without the spoken explanation to go along with it though.