There seems to be a bit of resurgence in the design and web development UK market. This is a very good thing as it’s been pretty poor the last year or so. When I cleaned up my room a couple of weeks ago I kept looking at my old magazines like I do and there seriously is a great deal of inspiration to still be gleamed from them. For web development I highly recommend .net. The magazine had a makeover a couple of months ago (including their website, which has a lot of great stuff on there) and has a great deal of good people working for them.

Unfortunately for the more artwork/design inclined, the available mags out there are slightly more hit and miss. While I do love the class that emanates from Digit, it does lack a certain amount of fun in their features. It seems less made to showcase designers and their work, and more inclined to actually provide information on what’s going on. Now that Computer Arts has gotten rid of the previous editor-in-chief and promoted Paul Newman into that position the magazine is definitely more readable. The problem is that they still continue to make the majority of the magazine tutorial heavy. Yeah guys move on already. There is a lot more to talk about than how to use photoshop and illustrator to do stuff. You might think I’m just jaded because I don’t use either, however the fact remains that rather than providing tutorials about design and how to development your skills, and more interviews with design firms and creatives, it’s all about filters and put this layer here etc, which in my mind is a complete and utter waste of space that could be used for something more useful.

As a sidenote, the recent Jason Arber (a man whom I have a lot of respect for) article on typography and fonts was completely wrong, which I have no doubt is going to spawn some serious amounts of letters being sent to CA. Basically (and I’m completely paraphrasing, except where I’m going to be quoting the man), he said that he doesn’t understand why there is a need for font designers anymore. We’ve got enough fonts, and here’s the kicker, which is I guess meant tongue in cheek, but he still said it:

In time, and with enough re-training, these poor creatures could become normal members of society.

Oh, dear, he didn’t just say that did he? As if that wasn’t bad he then gives the following as well:

Do you think these sick font designers will be happy when they've created a million fonts? Two million? A billion?

Oh dear again. You might as well call all those writers and tell them we’ve got enough books in this world, all the directors we’ve got enough movies in this world, all the musicians that we’ve got enough music in this world and to all artists that we’ve got enough art in this world. This is what is known in the industry as letterbait (read it in the recent Wired). This has got letterbait written all over it.

We definitely need better font management systems (I’ve been using Character map for Gnome and absolutely loving it), but saying we don’t need any more fonts and then insulting the font designers is just plain wrong.