Hey, did ya hear we’re giving away a free iPad at Chank.com this week? Yeah, we are! The drawing is this THURSDAY, MAY 20 at 8pm. We’ll be drawing the winner’s name live at the Clockwork springtime jam in Minneapolis. So please put your name in the drawing if you’d like to win it. Only about 500 people have entered so far, so everybody’s odds are looking pretty good.
The iPad is an amazing new device that connects to a wi-fi network and lets you browse the internet, read eBooks, watch videos, listen to music and play games. And if that’s not enough entertainment and information for you, there’s thousands of other apps to choose from at the Apple app store. It’s a truely revolutionary, magical device, and I’m glad we’ve got the chance to give one away to some lucky fontlover.
Best of all, Chank Fonts look great on iPads! Which is such a relief considering my font frustration with both the iPod (only one stupid font on ’em) and the iPhone (my fonts aren’t optimized for 8 pt, grrr.) Fonts can go BIG on an iPad, and they look great in websites using Typekit. I’m really excited about people using my fonts on iPad apps and websites, and want to do my part to get an iPad in the hands of at least one lucky person.
All I ask for is that you join my mailing list to receive the Chank Fonts e-mail newsletter, so I can send you announcement when I’ve got new font releases. I only send out about 10 newsletters a year, so I try to make ’em helpful and include other font-related insights. You can opt out anytime, and if you’re already receiving it, I promise you won’t be double-subscribed. I’m just a simple font salesman trying to guide some more traffic to my website.
Please tell your friends who may like fonts they should come enter for a chance to win a free iPad. I’d sure appreciate it.
Such a thrill to see the new HTML5 “@font-face” standard being adopted so smoothly. The new web standards and webfont delivery techniques are just now starting to really change the way the www works. Websites are embedding fonts in viewer’s browsers, allowing them to see a broader selection of real fonts, displayed in the html of the web pages as selectable, scalable, searchable text. So smart and simple, once you learn how to do it, and so much more elegant than saving gif or jpg pictures of words for headlines and display type. That’s kinda silly.
Hundreds of websites are now using my fonts through the @font-face font call. The biggest proponent of the new webfonts is probably WordPress, which allows their 10 million users to easily implement Typekit fonts in their blogs. I’ve seen lots of WordPress sites using my fonts, and that’s just super. And just like my traditional print and desktop fonts, there are both free and commercial versions of the fonts that available for @font-face licensing through Typekit.
Different Chank Fonts are available for web embedding from a few different service providers. SF-based Typekit is the most popular, because they’ve got some of those smart people who worked with Twitter and Google previously. Plus they have the most attractive website (designed by Jason Santa Maria).
But there’s also MN-based Kernest who offers a thoughtful and extensive selection of opensource fonts. Another newcomer is Fontspring which offers the webfont service bundled with desktop (print) versions of the fonts for you to use in your offline designs. Different distributors offer different selections of Chank Fonts, but I hope you’ll find something you like from these new webfont service sites.
The new font-embedding services don’t work so well on mobile devices and the iPad just yet, but I have faith that they will some day soon. Until then, start using webfonts now! That’ll make your web site smarter looking. Here are my pages at some font-embedding service sites:
Typekit: http://typekit.com/foundries/chank-co
Kernest: http://chank.kernest.com/fonts
Fontspring: http://www.fontspring.com/foundry/chank-fonts
My brilliant new “Land Line” app for iPad, currently under development. I keep talking to my iPad, and it just pretends like it can’t hear me. Gotta fix that.
Filed under: iPad
Sorry to gush about the new iPad, but it is the most amazing little device I’ve ever held in my hand. It’s a radio, a web browser, a typewriter and a DVD/VCR. You can play thousands of video games, load up any of millions of songs, videos or movies, or use it as an encyclopedia. I bet you could even play frisbee golf with it. Plus, pretty soon it’ll give you access to almost every book ever printed. Holy cow!
I’m so glad my little boy will have such an amazing media and entertainment center to tuck in his backpack when I send him off to school in a few years.
The drawbacks? As with the rise in popularity of all computers, the iPad will further erode the amount of time young people will have to dedicate towards perfecting their handwriting. Surely typing will be more important. So I’m pretty sure we’ve passed the golden age of handwriting. Handwriting will just keep getting worse and worse in the years to come.
And since fonts are my business, it bums me out a bit that the Safari browser on iPad isn’t making use of the snazzy new webfont embedding capabilities. But I have faith that it’ll work soon.
I also keep getting the feeling that this thing should be a video phone. There really should be a camera in there. I guess they gotta save something for the next gen model.
Secret iPad superhelpful tip: a dry microfiber washcloth makes the smudges go away, easy shmeasy.
It’s the sound effects I’m most proud of. See if you can hear the hidden golf swing.
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