Welcome to this week’s FreeFontFile.  We have a theme for this week.  I’ve been working on a circus-themed print project and there are a lot of really good free fonts that work for a circus design.  So we present a trio of Circus fonts, perfect for display headlines.  Enjoy!

Circus

What list of circus fonts can you have without a font actually called Circus? Well, it’s a traditional retro font. This one is just a display font. There aren’t any lowercase letters or numbers, so it can be a bit limiting, but if you just have letters and need a great Circus feeling to your text, you can’t go wrong here.

Online: http://www.abstractfonts.com/font/12384

Coney Island

Coney Island.  It’s tasty.  Like a coney dog.  Just a little bit of fun on the top.  Curvy and fun.  Again, display font without any lowercase letters.  We do, however, have numbers here.

Online: http://www.abstractfonts.com/font/10495

Carnivalee Freakshow

Welcome to the freakshow.  This is a great carnival font.  On a close inspection, you’ll see some nice distressing in the font, giving it a bit of a grungy feel.  Kind of like a rubber stamp.  ”Lowercase” letters are smaller versions of the uppercase letters.

Online: http://www.abstractfonts.com/font/10595

There’s our ode to the circus.  If you ever find a need for a trip back into the early 1900′s, this is a good place to start.  Have fun with these and we’ll see you all next week with a new set.

I’ve been following this week’s SiteoftheWeek for a while now.  While I was growing up, everyone wanted to be an astronaut at some point.  Everyone I knew wanted to take a summer and go to SpaceCamp.  Yeah, none of us could afford any of that at the time, but that didn’t change the dream.  Twenty years later, back in 2005, Burt Rutan had been working on the Ansari X Prize competition and became the first non-NASA based individual to fly into space and return to Earth twice.  Burt’s team won the X Prize and shortly afterward, Sir Richard Branson formed the space travel company, Virgin Galactic.  It’s been six years and there have been lot of great advances in the tech of the Virgin Galactic space fleet.  Beyond the space tech, there have been some great design tech that has evolved on the Virgin Galactic website.  The design is simple, yet epic.  The background for each page is a lovely shot of the Earth from space.  BIG.  Nice uses of, well, space.  The latest additions to the site is the use of some HTML 5 interactive pieces.  The Overview page is a very interactive scrolling timeline of some of the history of space flight and the specific milestones in the life of Virgin Galactic.  And for $200,000 (with a $20,000 deposit), you can join the elite in space.  Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s a start.

The design is great.  I wouldn’t expect any less from Branson and the Virgin Galactic team.  To see whats happening with everything from the ships to the New Mexico spaceport, it can all be found at http://www.virgingalactic.com/.

Hey everyone!  Welcome to a new feature for the designers out there.  We call it the FreeFontFile, where we’ll feature a couple of free fonts available for download on the web and yours to use for free.  For our first outing, we have a trio of fonts; two that I’ve used a bit in the past and one new one that I’ve recently found.

Bebas

Bebas is a simple display font that is great for headlines and titles.  There are no lowercase letters and the space character is really (and I do mean REALLY) thin, but for screaming’ headlines with a simple look, this one is great!

Online: http://www.dafont.com/bebas.font

Sansation

Sansation is a more futuristic typestyle.  Simplistic with a sci-fi edge to it, it’s got some versatility to it.  It comes in three weights; light, regular and bold.

Online: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Sansation

LLRubberGrotesque

Another display-style font.  This is a font based on rubber stamps of letters in a nice, bold san-serif style.  Great for big headlines.

Online: http://www.abstractfonts.com/font/13997

There you have it.  FreeFontFile #1.  We’ll have more free fonts next week.  Until then, enjoy these fonts!

It’s been a long time since we’ve done a SiteoftheWeek.  This week we have something rather simple from a content standpoint, but gotta be complex on the programming side.  It’s a site called April/Zero. The concept of the site is simple.  It’s a clock.  But you say, “what’s so cool about a clock on the web?”  Well, you have to see this one to believe it.  It’s a clock that is completely designed in HTML5.  It’s a gear-based clock, with tons of moving parts.  All the motion and movement is being animated in HTML5.  Until the advent of HTML5, this kind of thing could only have been done in Flash on the web. Seeing something as complex as a clock with all these moving parts being made in HTML5, it’s very exciting.  (And there’s little love lost between me and Flash, so this is a good thing.)  If you visit the site and like the clock, there is a Facebook and a Twitter button on the clock so you can share and subscribe to the April/Zero stuff online.

This is a cool use of HTML5.  Take a look at the site and the fun of the HTML5 clock, go to http://www.aprilzero.com/.

News came across the wire that Apple Inc.’s co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs has passed on after a long battle with cancer.

Exceptional brilliance has left us. No matter what you thought of Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, you have to admit that he was one of the most dynamic, passionate and brilliant people in technology, and dare I say, the world. He’s one of the most successful CEOs in the last century. His vision has changed the way we do a lit of things dealing with technology. True, Apple didn’t invent a lot of the things that makes Apple poplar today, but it was Steve’s vision that made things that were easy to use for “normal” people. He always looked at how to make things work easiest for the largest number of people. The lowest common denominator, if you will. Steve had a way of knowing what would appeal to people.

One of Steve’s best quotes was from his 2005 Stanford commencement address: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The tech world will never be the same. We will likely never see his like again.

Rest in peace, Steve. You’ll be missed.

For the record, I like the instant streaming on Netflix. I had no problem paying for the streaming and the DVD delivery that Netflix was going to force upon subscribers.

Until today.

By now, most people have heard the Netflix-Qwikster news. The second I read the news, I promptly brought up netflix.com and removed the DVD option from my account. I then found the Netflix DVD that I’ve had for like 4 months and sealed up the envelope. (For the curious, it was Disc 1 of the anime series, Gurren Lagann. Which, by the way, I didn’t need anymore cause it’s on the instant streaming list.) It’s on its merry way back to the nearest Netflix facility.

The concept of “Okay, we see that you all are rather pissed off about our price hike so we’ll help that by splitting up the company and still charging you the higher price, but we’ll split the price on you credit card since they companies will be different.” is a really bad position when your a consumer looking at this. Especially if you’re one that has been paying for both streaming and the DVD plan.

Split the company and still charge us the higher price. That makes everything better, right?

If that kind of a response was an apology, Netflix needs to look up the definition of “apology.” That’s a pretty sad conclusion that Netflix came to. The response Netfilx CEO Reed Hastings gave didn’t offer a solution to consumers. It’s just a backtracked, irrational justification for a big mistake that should have been handled better the first time around.

That said, in the end, this is probably going to be a good thing for Netflix. The DVD side of the business is falling. With more and more stuff going to to the streaming service, the DVD side of the Netflix business is going to keep declining.

According to a 2010 post by GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler, Netflix spent $66 million in the second quarter of 2010 to license streaming titles for its Watch Instantly service, compared with $9 million in the prior-year period. In comparison, Netflix spent $24 million on DVDs in Q2 of 2010, compared to $43 million during the second quarter of 2009. The numbers don’t lie. Not that it’s a very hard thing to fathom. The costs of streaming is much less than the DVD shipping.

We now will get to see another round of fallout from the Netflix price hikes. Will the users of both Netflix streaming and Qwikster DVD delivery be satisfied with the new direction? We’ll have to watch and see where this one goes.

The news came out today that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit in the Federal court in Washington, D.C., to attempt to block the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.

“Any way you look at this transaction, it is anticompetitive,” says Sharis Pozen, an acting assistant attorney general. “Our action today seeks to ensure that our nation enjoys the competitive wireless industry it deserves.”

This kind of stuff is always fun. The only problem I see with the Department of Justice trying to block the merger is that if AT&T doesn’t get T-Mobile, one of the other carriers will. As anyone that has been paying attention to this knows, Sprint wants it blocked so they can buy T-Mobile. If Sprint doesn’t get them, someone else will go after them. The argument can be good, but using the preservation of competition as the reason is rather flawed. If they deny AT&T the option to merge with T-Mobile, using their same argument, none of the other big wireless companies, Sprint or Verizon, should be able to merge with them. If they were to allow either of the other two, that, by the DoJ’s own definition, would be anticompetitive.

Of course, Sprint hailed this as the best decision ever. “The DOJ today delivered a decisive victory for consumers, competition and our country,” said Vonya McCann, Sprint’s senior vice president of government affairs. “By filing suit to block AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile, the DOJ has put consumers’ interests first… Contrary to AT&T’s assertions, today’s action will preserve American jobs, strengthen the American economy, and encourage innovation.”

I doubt that Sprint would be praising the DoJ if they said, “Yeah, AT&T merging with T-Mobile is anticompetitive. Oh, and if Sprint or Verizon try to do it, that would be anticompetitive too.” Sprint thinks that if they block AT&T, that they will have smooth sailing to picking up some of that T-Mobile pink. I just don’t see that happening.

The thing that makes this worse is that T-Mobile can’t compete if they keep going it alone. They need to be bought by someone, but it just ends up being potentially bad for the world if they do. It’s a sad thing to admit, but the only logical company to buy them is AT&T. Any of the other major players would have to spend a ton of time and funds to integrate GSM into their current technology.

I was with Nextel when Sprint bought them back in 2005. I stayed away from Sprint after my initial flirtation with them because all I ever had was bad billing situations. Great phone service, but horrible billing problems. As a customer, the Sprint-Nextel merger killed Nextel and the functionality that it had with its Push-To-Talk option. Then, forcing the Nextel customers off the iDEN network to Sprint’s CDMA network just created a mess. At least AT&T is on the same network and there would be less pain involved with a merging of technology.

Ultimately, I don’t think that anything here is going to stop the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. Even if the DoJ is successful in stopping it now, there’s nothing to say that the merger won’t be tweaked until it does go through. Really, all this does is spend more money on something that will end up being a money pit for the taxpayers and won’t create any real action beyond slowing things down.

Is it bad that the best and worst company to buy T-Mobile is AT&T? It’s hard to tell. Is Sprint a better option? Not likely, cause with past experience, we’ve all seen where that will go. All we can do now is see where this all leads. In the end though, I think we’ll be seeing the pink, blue and orange come together. Whether it’s good for us all or not.

As a designer, I have thousands of fonts floating around on my computers. It’s hard to keep track of them, let alone remember how each one looks. There are times when you see something and you KNOW you have the font, but you can’t place the name of the typeface.

I had one of these situations yesterday. A client gave me a text “logo” that we needed for a print piece, but as tends to happen sometimes, the client didn’t have the logo in any format that could be used for a print design. I know I had seen the fonts on the logo, but I didn’t know which ones they were. I looked through my standard set of fonts an couldn’t find them anywhere.

In comes a handy little iPhone app called WhatTheFont, from typeface foundry Bitstream. WhatTheFont is designed so you can see a font on something, in this case, it was from a low resolution JPEG file that was used on the client’s website, and have the app use Bitstream’s extensive font database to identify fonts that are similar to the text you are looking at. After doing a bit of clean-up work in Photoshop, I took a picture of the text I wanted identified with my iPhone’s camera. From there, you draw a box around the text you want the app to identify and the app will upload the image to Bitstream’s site and then spit back a set of possible fonts. It’s a pretty straight forward process. I had two unidentifiable fonts in this logo and WhatTheFont identified them both perfectly. If it’s an obscure font, it can be difficult to identify, but overall, it does a really good job making a match.

Right now, I’ve only been able to find an iPhone app for WhatTheFont. If you don’t have an iPhone, Bitstream does have a web-enabled version of the service on their MyFonts site. Of the two, I love the iPhone app since I find it to be much easier to use and it’s portable. With the ability to just take a photo with your phone’s camera wherever I am and process on the fly, it’s much simpler than having to save an image onto your hard drive of the font you want to identify. The web version does have the ability to identify an image on the Internet as well by just plugging in an image URL into the form and it can match off that as well. Either way, this can be a valuable tool in any designer’s toolbox.

The app is available for free on the iTunes App Store and can be accessed on the web for free as well.

More info about the iPhone app:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8

MyFont’s WhatTheFont for iPhone page:
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/iPhone/

MyFont’s WhatTheFont web page:
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

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442 King St., Charleston, South Carolina. That’s the location of what looks like some exceptionally tasty cuisine. That’s where you will find Fish. From their website: “Fish Restaurant showcases the finest local, sustainable ingredients with an always-changing menu and a French-Asian flair. Executive chef Nico Romo, the youngest chef to ever earn the distinction of Master Chef of France, blends his skills at creating classic French fare with a zesty Asian-inspired artisan touch, resulting in fresh and flavorful dishes that engage and inspire.” Excellent pedigree for a chef and some tasty food. But, this IS about the design of the site, so I digress.

The site is very clean and elegant. At first glance, it looks like the site could be made in Flash, but upon inspection, it’s all just HTML and some nice jQuery calls. The transitions and rollovers are slick and the design of the elements have an airy kind of feeling to them. Light colors, translucent whites, lots of overlayed items. Lots of transparent PNG files. It’s a great combination of jQuery transitions and simple design.

To check out the site (or learn how to find the restaurant if you’re in Charleston), head over to http://www.fishrestaurantcharleston.com/.

There are a few things that I really love in this world. Music is one of them. And so as I was roaming the halls of the Internet this week, I came across this week’s site, Atlantic Records.

To be honest, I haven’t thought about record companies really since I lived in southern California, so when I came across Atlantic’s site, it was interesting to see some things that I had forgotten. (Like the fact that Phil Collins is with Atlantic. Big Phil fan in the 80s and 90s. Just had forgotten which label he was on.) The site is set up like a magazine, with little snippets of things, lots of white space, and nice sized images that give it a simple, classy feeling. Kind of a throwback to the earlier days of Atlantic. There are the usual things that you’d expect on a record label’s site, artist information, tour dates, lots of photos. Then there are some of the retro things like a historical look back at the earlier days of Atlantic. Old school ads. Vintage photos. Quotes from some the music’s greats. There’s a treasure trove of information about some the best musical artists in history and it’s all over the site, tucked into nice little nooks all over the place.

The “footer” is nice too. It’s on most every page and gives you a way to get to the Atlantic Merchandising page and then will do some location grabbing and give you shows by Atlantic artists that will be coming to your area soon. Great stuff.

For those who like music or just want to see some good, clean design, take a trip over to the Atlantic Records and enjoy!