Worth reading the details over at FontShop.

TypeKit will still provide you access to a wide range of fonts for a low subscription fee, and will also go a long way to serving up the most appropriate format to different user agents.

Nice to see things moving forward and the industry starting to address the massive market that has been pretty much ignored to date.

Designing a magazine for print is much more a labour of love than dynamic content injected into a CMS template – each feature is specifically put together with the design working in harmony with content. Generally publishing on the web is very different – there will be a single generic design and set of templates that present any article in exactly the same way. One of the few examples I can think of that breaks this trend is alistapart, where each article is uniquely illustrated prior to publication.

I’m interested to see where the balance will lie when publishing content for a tablet. It could range from having a dedicated production team within a publication to hand craft a unique design for each issue, to basic templated content within a standard framework.

In any case there is now a very definite case for sorting out workflow and access to content so that a publisher can easily target multiple platforms.

I like the consideration for some of the less obvious ways that we use physical magazines and how these might be replicated – like leaving something lying around on a coffee table to make some kind of statement about your taste and attitudes.

Thanks to Dave for sending me the link.

Also check out how they are animating the position of the balloons and clouds using javascript to respond to scroll behaviour. Very nice, subtle touch.

I think the major things I’m looking forward to are…

• Ability to specify multiple background images on the same element – so no need to add superfluous elements as styling hooks
• Multi-column layout – allowing text from a single element to visually flow into multiple columns, much like a newspaper layout
• Decent support for RGBA – so being able to specify the alpha channel when setting a background colour. This avoids having to cut PNG images in order to achieve a semi-transparent background.
• Support for specifying colours in terms of Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Although I’m not quite sure how I’ll use this yet, I can imagine this would make animation of colours more intuitive – for example, using javascript to animate the amount of light applied to an element.

The live examples are really worth looking at, and give a much better feel for what is coming up compared with reading a specification.

A really good example of this done well is BellamyStudio. I ended up looking at the site after a friend mentioned it. Each template has a very clear hierarchy of information, and the type design makes it extremely simple to scan a page and pick up the key messages. The overall visual design is simple enough to let the detail in typography and content come across without interference.

I love how stunning the overall design is, but also how simple. Little details show just how much thought has been put into this – I love the subtle use of colour to pick out the heading from the main content paragraph on each page.

The main issue that I’ve hit is that Typekit is geared around web licensing and delivery of font files – so a subscription will give you access to a wide range of fonts that can then be downloaded from your site and used to render text. However the earlier stage in the workflow is working on page designs in Photoshop, and a Typekit subscription won’t give you any access or rights around downloading a font definition file to use for design work.

This means that theoretically I have much more freedom around typography, but only when I come to the build stage of the site. I wouldn’t necessarily mind paying for a font separately from the Typekit subscription, but I can’t actually find the same font I would like to use on the foundry site (admittedly this may just be my own stupidity).

I think this is just a teething issue with a new service – it’s being discussed on the support forum…

• Send a font list/library to a designer
• Use a font in Photoshop
• Downloadable versions