Month: January 2011

Copse’s first month

A really nice thing about Google’s web font project is the usage statistics that are visible for all the available fonts. For instance, let’s take a look at the numbers on Copse, the single-weight design I contributed last month:

copse_stats.png

I’m not entirely sure of all the factors that go into the font’s “trending” or “popularity” rankings (which I imagine strip out the unusual spike from a couple of weeks ago), but I’m pretty pleased with the big figure: over a million uses of Copse in the last 30 days! That’s pretty…well, wow. I would love to actually see some sites that are using it, because I know this one doesn’t get traffic like that. A big thanks to everyone in Brazil, by the way — whoever you are!

And now Google has added a new feature that changes my little experiment a bit: they’ve added the ability for users to donate a payment of their choice for using a font. (See the download link on any font’s page.) So now my free font might lead to some royalties, of a kind. That’s no a bad thing at all. Click away!

Advanced Food Science

Americans will always be fatter — and always have stoners better able to satisfy an onset of the munches — because of the advanced food science and the relentless marketing that brings out stuff like this:

Pizza & Cookies

England, you may have achieved an Honorable Mention in Mad Science for the dreaded lasagna sandwich, but you’re just not committed to shamelessly artificial food the way the US is. Kudos, DiGiorno, for making it easier than ever for us to make even more poor choices all at once.

[Via World of Wonder]

A Room with Angels

It’s a totally minor thing, but in the middle of a dull week it made me smile. After watching a really, really terrible made-for-TV version of A Room with a View (my exile from England has driven me to gorge on British period films) I decided to wipe the disappointment from my mind by watching the original again.

Room with a View

There is still plenty to love about the first version, even after all these years, but watching it again I caught something small but charming that I wouldn’t have noticed the first time around. In the book, the pivotal scene on the Fiesole hillside is quite brief, but it gets a little more time and attention in the film. There’s a film-only moment where cousin Charlotte and Miss Lavish are gossiping about an English woman who runs off to Italy and marries a much-younger Italian in a town called Monteriano. That, of course, is actually the scandal at the heart of an earlier novel of Forster’s (also turned into a film later on), Where Angels Fear to Tread. It’s a quick aside, but a cute detail to throw in, and it actually does a neat job of establishing that Charlotte and Miss Lavish develop the kind of friendship where they’d swap indiscreet stories.

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